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Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I'm infatuated. Well, that's a strange word to use for WOLF HALL and Hilary Mantel, one of the sharpest, most thorough historical fiction writers I've ever encountered. But I AM infatuated--with her prose, which is absolutely the most brilliant writing I've read in years. I love the sentences in this book. And when every sentence you flow through is sheer delight, that adds up to a delightful book. Not to mention the faster-than-lighting pacing of dialogue and story, the complicated character which is Thomas Cromwell, the quirky, close third-person point of view which allows you into a stunning mind, the tension of knowing just enough about Henry VIII to anticipate disaster but not enough to know exactly how disaster unfolded...in other words, add to those gorgeous sentences a thrilling plot, and I can't put the book down.

If that's not enough, Mantel also explores the theological tensions of the day: The heresy of Martin Luther, the waning of the pope's influence in England, the Bible's translation into English, and the beginnings of the Church of England. The church's corruption becomes reason for the king to occupy church property. At first, Mantel makes these conflicts deeply personal; we see Cromwell as a faithful but smart, questioning reformer who acts from his faith. As he gets closer to the crown, Mantel neglects this aspect of his being. But this is my only criticism of an otherwise exceptional novel.

I could pull a paragraph from anywhere in the book and you'd be wowed. Here's one from the end, referring to the heresies of Thomas More:

They hurry in; the wind bangs a door behind them. Rafe takes his arm. He says, this silence of Moore's, it was never really silence, was it? It was loud with his treason; it was quibbling as far as quibbles would serve him, it was demurs and cavils, suave ambiguities. It was fear of plain words, or the assertion that plain words pervert themselves; More's dictionary, against our dictionary. You can have a silence full of words. A lute retains, in its bowl, the notes it has played. The viol, in its strings, holds a concord. A shriveled petal can hold its scent, a prayer can rattle with curses; an empty house, when the owners have gone out, can still be loud with ghosts.

AHHH.....



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Wolf Hall

What a gorgeous book! As someone who perpetually gripes about memoirists not doing thorough, emotional research, I have to give three cheers to Abigail Thomas. She has taken the mundane stuff of motherhood and marriage and a woman floundering through life and made an object of striking beauty. Her short pieces are tiny windows onto tiny moments that nonetheless illuminate human brokenness and the terrific force of love. I delight in trusting a narrator so completely. I'm also thrilled to now know a woman writer who is masterfully representing a mother's experience without complaint or sentimentality. Her form is refreshing and fun--I read this book in about two hours--but in no way self-consciously artsy, as many lyrical memoirs are. I'm wowed. On to THREE DOG LIFE...

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I didn't like WILD. Call me a curmudgeon, accuse me of deliberately resisting the latest fads in publishing, even think me a prude. I expect more self-awareness from authors.

Cheryl Strayed's story is great: Flattened by the death of her mother, she walks the Pacific Crest Trail as a way to move through her grief. She's 26 and completely unprepared for the hike, so her adventures along the way are gripping. So I can see why this book is popular now; it's a page-turner. Strayed reminds me a lot of Mary Karr in her hip voice and extraordinary narrative skills. Her opening pages describe one of her boots falling off a cliff mid-hike--what a brilliant beginning! (And also very much like Karr's opening to THE LIAR'S CLUB.)

So Strayed has a great plot, but books get their life-force from the connection between outer and inner events, and I found her inner story lacking. Yes, the death of a mother is wrenching, but most of people who lose mothers don't obsessively cheat on their spouse, spiral into addiction, and persevere on a sadistic and dangerous hike. What else made this loss so profound? How exactly did the hardships she encountered on the trail transform her grief? The links between the outer events and her inner transformation were never clear to me.

In part this is because Strayed highlights other titillating elements of the story (sex, drugs, alcohol) above her grief. The book's climax is a two-day sexual encounter with a stranger in Ashland, on break from hiking. These scenes get far more attention than Strayed's grief but they only illustrate how little she's been changed by her trials. Sure, they're a great read. But they don't work to support the character's central journey.

I also wished for more narrative distance throughout. Strayed 26-year-old-self has no perspective on her grief. I imagine the author does, now, or at least I hope so, and I want that insight to give me compassion for this young woman. As it reads, I just felt annoyed at her.

Okay, so I want emotional awareness from my authors and I don't want titillating material to obscure a book's heart. Hurrumph. Now go enjoy this book.



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A Testament of Devotion by Thomas R. Kelly

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Friends recommended this book when they heard my 2012 New Year's resolution was to not be overwhelmed by life. A good dose of Quakerism is a nice antidote. I can't say Thomas Kelly led me to calm and simplicity, but he did offer me understanding: "For, except for spells of sickness in the family and when the children are small, when terrific pressure comes upon us, we find time for what we really want to do." With a small child, yes, living a focused life of service can be hard.

While his language and theology are old fashioned, Kelly's faith nonetheless inspires me:

I am persuaded that religious people do not with sufficient seriousness count on God as an active factor in the affairs of the world. “Behold, I stand at the door and knock,� but too many well-intentioned people are so preoccupied with the clatter of effort to do something for God that they don’t hear Him asking that He might do something through them.
…For the Eternal is urgently, actively breaking into time, working through those who are willing to be laid hold upon, to surrender self-confidence and self-centered effort, that is, self-originated effort, and let the Eternal be the dynamic guide in recreating, through us, our time-world. 71-74.

I want to pray unceasingly, as Kelly describes. The joy of spiritual community he portrays seems impossible to me, but I want it nonetheless. Most of all, I want to face this complex world with profound trust. I'm grateful for the guides that help me on this journey.



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For the past few weeks I've been living in the South Bronx with Heidi Neumark--and loving it. BREATHING SPACE tells the story of personal transformation wrought by church on pastor and communal transformation wrought on a church by this extraordinary leader. Neumark's theology is solid, and inspirational. While at times I wearied of scriptural references, I appreciate what she accomplished with so many Bible passages: A translation of our foundational scriptural stories into a contemporary setting. Neumark breathes life into these old stories, and it's a life that's shockingly redemptive.

What challenges me most reading Neumark's stories is her profound compassion for all of humanity, especially those living in the depths of poverty. Poverty itself doesn't scare me, but many factors associated with it--drug and alcohol addiction, violence, abuse--terrify me. When I encounter people who suffer from them, I turn away. Neumark doesn't. Her faith in resurrection is extraordinary, and likely the key to her ministry's success.

I have two complaints about this book--first, that it needed a strong editing hand (75 fewer pages would have done wonders for strengthening Neumark's message), and second, the tiny typeface was ill-chosen. I almost put the book down because I couldn't read it. Woe to the designer who chooses an unreadable font!

Those of you who follow my reviews know I'm EXTREMELY unhappy about contemporary fiction. The vast majority of books published in the last twenty years seem... loveless, self-conscious, and lacking any moral exploration. So I'm thrilled when I'm proven wrong.

I was browsing the bookstore up at St. John's University and found this gem, a successful novel that had gone out of print and was resurrected by Jane Smiley. Thank you, Jane. THE MOONFLOWER VINE by Jetta Carleton is what publishers would call a "quiet" novel--and then not publish today. But it's gorgeous. It traces the ethical dilemmas of each member of the Soames, a Missouri farm family, especially as they try to reconcile their passions with their faith. The descriptions of the natural world are delightful. This is a book suffused with love--love for place, for family (however confining and confounding), and especially for a moral, heartfelt relationship with the world, hard as it is to find.

Here are a few of my favorite passages. They're all comments on Christianity, which provides the cultural and moral compass for the Soames, but is by no means left unchallenged by Carleton.

"We ate our supper in the yard that night. As we gathered at the table, my father said, "Bless this food, O Lord, to its intended use... Bless our loved ones, wherever they may be, and grant, O Lord, that we may follow in the paths of righteousness..." What he meant was that he was grateful for the good smells and sounds of the summer evening, for the star impaled on the lightning rod, for fresh tomatoes from his garden. But he would have felt it pagan to state his pleasure in such plain terms. He said it in his own way, and no doubt the Lord can translate; He must have a lot of it to do in a day's work." 31

"Nowadays, perfectly respectable people went to shows on Sunday, they went dancing and played cards; lots of girls even smoked--and it didn't mean they were going to hell. Hell had shifted its location; it was farther away than people used to think." 259

I was excited to find a book on writing as a spiritual practice written from a Jewish perspective. As it turns out, the book draws from a wide range of faith traditions for inspiration and reflection. The exercises are good and would facilitate both spiritual growth and improvements in your writing, although how the latter happens isn't spelled out. The overall emphasis of the book (moving beyond self to Self--relinquishing the ego) I found a bit strange. That's not to say I don't think it valuable; I just believe that spiritual growth always entails seeing the self in a broader human context--community, faith, history, tradition--and that writing necessarily connects us beyond the individual to others and the Other. So: Good exercises, odd theory.Writing-the sacred art Beyond the Page to Spiritual Practice

An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith by Barbara Brown Taylor

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Barbara Brown Taylor is our twenty-first century Henri Nouwen. I'm immensely grateful for AN ALTAR IN THE WORLD, for its elegant, lively prose, yes, but mostly for its practical application of a big-hearted faith. In the prologue, Taylor writes, "What is saving my life now is the conviction that there is no spiritual treasure to be found apart from the bodily experiences of human life on earth. My life depends on engaging the most ordinary physical activities with the most exquisite attention I can give them." This is a profoundly feminine perspective, and profoundly Christian. Later she writes that we don't want more ABOUT God, we want MORE GOD. I love how clearly she articulates the earthly practices by which more God comes into the world, staying rooted in exquisite theology and translating these beliefs for the mundane moments of our days.

This book models for me how powerful spiritual and theological reflections can become when they are grounded in personal narrative. Taylor's every abstract pronouncement about God has its origins in her own experience. The bridge she constructs between life and faith is then strong enough for me to cross as well.

I am happy for practices that bring me back to my body, where the operative categories are not “bad� and “good� but “dead� and “alive.�
--Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World, 47




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I've just reread THE LIAR'S CLUB as part of a creative nonfiction class--it stands up well to a second look. Karr is a deft, gritty narrator who milks drama from even the smallest moments and portrays true drama without sensationalizing it. For memoir writers looking for models, Karr is an excellent teacher. She doesn't shy from depicting the dark, even horrific, qualities of her parents and still manages to make us love them as much as she does. She explores the fickle nature of memory without letting her exploration detract from the story itself. Her structural choices--a beginning that flashes forward to the middle and then three chronological chunks in time--show writers how well-selected memories can function well together without any need for the author to account for missing years. Most of all, she shows us how a powerful personality can infuse every word and thus delight the reader.

Here's a sample:

Because it took so long for me to paste together what happened, I will leave that part of the story missing for a while. It went long unformed for me, and I want to keep it that way here. I don't mean to be coy. When the truth would be unbearable the mind often just blanks it out. But some ghost of an event may stay in your head. Then, like the smudge of a bad word quickly wiped off a school blackboard, this ghost can call undue attention to itself by its very vagueness. You keep studying the dim shape of it, as if the original form will magically emerge. This blank spot in my past, then, spoke most loudly to me by being blank. It was a hole in my life that I both feared and kept coming back to because I couldn't quite fill it in.

Oh--one last thing I admire about this book. Karr tells such a good story I often found myself wondering whether she was pushing memoir's boundaries by making up details. But her title, her great admiration for her father's capacity to lie, and the layers of behavioral lying she explores with her family make lying a unifying theme of the book. And so I'm willing to forgive her for stretching the truth. In fact, I suspect by stretching the truth she's written a truer story.

The Scent of God: A Memoir by Beryl Singleton Bissell

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Here is a beautiful read! Beryl Singleton Bissell manages to tell the story of leaving a contemplative order after many difficult years with great kindess. While her experiences are hard, especially her struggles with anorexia and the theology of self-deprivation that supported it, she weaves the stories with compassionate reflections. These and the present-tense, second-person interludes that invite the reader to experience the monastic hours with her create a container bigger than the monastery--a world-view able to find continuity in the sacred both in and outside monastery walls. And the outside world is no piece of cake; her relationship with a priest is fraught with conflict, great love, and eventually loss. So the reverence and love of life that frames this story is remarkable. This book feels like a witness to love's mysteries.



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