Deacon King Kong by James McBride

Source of book: I own this.

 This was this month’s selection for our “Literary Lush” book club. One of the things I enjoy about this club is that I end up reading interesting books that I never would have discovered on my own. I hadn’t heard of either this book (which just came out) and wasn’t familiar with James McBride, although a few of his other books sound familiar. However, I rather enjoyed it, as did other members of our club, making it one of the most universally loved selections since I joined the club. 

 James McBride has apparently written a number of other books, often with historical settings, and was awarded a National Humanities medal by President Obama. I dare say I will be putting his other books on my reading list.

 I’m not even sure what to call Deacon King Kong. It is literary fiction, in my opinion. But it is such a weird blend of pathos and humor that it defies categorization. It is a thoughtful book, but with elements of slapstick and magical realism. It makes a pair of suicides seem like a sacrament - a baptism. It makes a potential affair seem good for the characters. It has killer red ants, killer hooch, and mysterious cheese. And, more than anything, it has a bunch of memorable characters, any of which could be the center of their own story. 

 Set in the Brooklyn projects in 1969, the book starts and centers around a bizarre incident. “Sportcoat,” an old man who lost his wife a few years back and has spiraled into alcoholism, shoots the ear off the local drug dealer, a young man named Deems, who was once Sportcoat’s protege in the local baseball team. From there, the past and present swirl around the fallout from that incident, drawing in gangsters, cops, smugglers, an ancient artifact, and a few old secrets. Sportcoat is the deacon of the title - a deacon of Five Ends Baptist Church who prefers the illicit hooch King Kong to any commercial preparation. 

 As it turns out, there are connections to The Elephant, the last in a line of Italian smugglers. Why did his dad fund the construction of the church, including an epic mural of Christ on the side? Deems, in turn, is the pivot point of a drug war. And why did Sportcoat’s wife Hettie end up floating in the harbor? And what happened to the Christmas Fund money she kept but never told anyone where? 

 McBride brings in an honest Irish cop trying to make it alive to retirement, a dying gangster whose daughter runs a bagel shop, the delightful maintenance man for the building, Hot Sausage, and so many more. 

 I hesitate to describe the book more than that, because the plot is fun and full of surprises (although I figured out a few things ahead of time.) I recommend reading it for yourself. 

 McBride’s writing is outstanding - one of the comments in our club meeting was that from the first few pages, you really feel like you are there. The sights and sounds and smells and social dynamics really come alive. One person who had lived in New York City concurred with the reality of the area described - McBride grew up there, the son of an African American preacher and a Jewish-Polish mother - the daughter of a rabbi. The thing is, McBride doesn’t actually spend a whole lot of words on descriptions: he manages to create the picture without obviously doing so. Also a feature of his style is that he can take shootings and drugs and booze and gangsters and add the humor and slapstick without it feeling like a parody. It’s as much a part of the world he creates as the ghost of Hettie. 

 There are lots of good lines, a few of which I jotted down. 

 The first is an incident that is pretty hilarious, but has almost nothing to do with the rest of the plot: an explanation of how the red ants came to Brooklyn. Hector, the Colombian immigrant, gets too big for his britches, and dumps his wife and kids back home. She tearfully agrees to a divorce, and packs him lunch. When he opens it back in Brooklyn, he finds it full of the red ants, and a note saying “Adios motherfucker...we know you ain’t sending no pesos!” The ants establish themselves, and become part of the yearly life of the projects. This leads into a fantastic sentence in which the ants become

 

...a sole phenomenon in the Republic of Brooklyn, where cats hollered like people, dogs eat their own feces, aunties chain-smoked and died at age 102, a kid named Spike Lee saw God, the ghosts of the departed Dodgers soaked up all possibility of new hope, and penniless desperation ruled the lives of the suckers too black or too poor to leave, while in Manhattan the buses ran on time, the lights never went out, the death of a single white child in a traffic accident was a page one story, while phony versions of black and Latino life ruled the Broadway roost, making white writers rich — West Side Story, Porgy & Bess, Purlie Victorious — and on it went, the whole business of the white man's reality lumping together like a giant, lopsided snowball, the Great American Myth, the Big Apple, the Big Kahuna, the City That Never Sleeps, while the blacks and Latinos who cleaned the apartments and dragged out the trash and made the music and filled the jails with sorrows slept the sleep of the invisible and functioned as local color.

 

I’m not the only reviewer to have noticed that line. It’s arguably the most memorable line in the book.

 The missing Christmas Fund money is not only a big motivation for Sportcoat, it puzzles everyone in the church. Hettie never did disclose its location, and it never does appear. (Sorry about the spoiler.) Did she simply pocket the money herself? It seems possible. Is it hiding somewhere in the church? Also possible. What isn’t a mystery is why she kept it herself. 

 

“She ain’t supposed to walk around with the Christmas box.”

“She had to hide it someplace after she collected for it. Normally she hid it at church. But she didn’t always have time to wait for church to empty out. Sometimes folks would linger eating fish dinners or the pastor would preach overtime or some such thing and she had to go home, so she brung it home with her.”

“Why didn’t she lock it in the pastor’s office?”

“What fool would keep money ‘round a pastor?” Rufus asked. 

Sportcoat nodded knowingly.  

 

I have been a part of a number of churches in my lifetime, and one thing I can say is that I agree with Rufus. And, interestingly, one of the best ways to tell if a pastor is honorable about money is how careful he is to distance himself from the money. The honorable ones keep as far away as possible from it, delegating the financial stuff to someone independent. (Or at least as independent as possible in a small church.) It makes a difference. 

 Another interesting observation comes from the old, retired gangster, the Governor, talking about his deceased brother. (Who was also an artifact smuggler - he found a cave of stolen Nazi treasures including, in a fictional incident, the Venus of Willendorf. This artifact is in the book, although clearly the whole episode is fiction, not fact.) 

 

“He had an apartment in the Village the size of a rugby field. Full of fancy things. I never asked. He had no kids, so I figured it wasn’t anything. My poppa couldn’t stand Macy. He used to say, ‘Macy likes boys.’ I told Poppa, ‘There was a priest at Saint Andrews who’s said to like boys.’ But he didn’t want to hear it. I was a young man back then, fast on my feet and a bit of a wanker, but even then I knew the difference between a sick man who likes children and a man sweet on men.” 

 

This is a distinction lost on a lot of people in my Fundie former tribe, alas. 

 Another perceptive passage concerning sex is between the Irish cop and the wife of the pastor of Five Ends Baptist. She is in a loveless marriage, to an older man who she married before she understood what she was doing. As a divorce attorney, this rings true. 

 

She had been seventeen when she wed a man twelve years older than her. He had seemed to have purpose but turned out to have none, other than an affinity for football games and the ability to pretend to be what he was not, to pretend to feel things he did not feel, to make jokes out of things that did not work for him, and like too many men she knew, daydream about meeting some lovely young thing from the choir, preferably at three a.m., in the choir pew. She didn’t hate her husband. She just didn’t know him.

 

This one too was fascinating. Sister Gee (the pastor’s wife) is pressed for information by Potts, the Irish cop, after an incident in which the hapless Earl tries to put a hit on Sportcoat, but ends up bonked by a wayward bottle, then set on the subway back home by Sister Gee and a young gentle giant from the church. 

 

“You should have called us.”

“Why we got to have the police around every time we has a simple party? Y’all don’t watch out for us. Y’all watch over us. I don’t see y’all out there standing over the white folks in Park Slope when they has their block parties.” 

 

In recent years, as cell phone video has made it increasingly obvious even to this sheltered white guy that our experience with the police is vastly different from the experience of non-whites, McBride calls it straight. “To Protect and Serve,” as the LAPD motto goes, is directed at whites. The police protect “us” from “them.” And serve “us” at the expense of “them.” It’s a heartbreaking state of affairs. 

 

In a conversation later in the book, Potts can’t quite understand why the Five Ends folks are so obsessed with that Christmas Club money. 

 

“You were talking about the church money. It’s got nothing to do with this trouble.”

“It’s got everything to do with it. That Christmas Club money is all we can control. We can’t stop these drug dealers from selling poison in front of our houses. Or make the city stop sending our kids to lousy schools. We can’t stop folks from blaming us for everything gone wrong in New York, or stop the army from calling our suns to Vietnam after them Vietcong done cut the white soldiers’ toenails too short to walk. But the little nickels and dimes we saved up so we can give our kids ten minutes of love at Christmastime, that’s ours to control. What’s wrong with that?”

 

Although Potts isn’t quite getting it, he is falling in love with Sister Gee, and he flounders trying to express his concern for the danger she is in. After all, the drug bigwig wants to put the hit on Sportcoat; and, since the hapless Earl failed, is sending in his big gun: Harold Dean. 

 

He wanted to say, “He’s a killer and I don’t want him near you.” But he had no idea what her reaction would be. He didn’t even know what Harold Dean looked like. He had no information other than an FBI report with no photo, only the vaguest description that he was a negro who was “armed and extremely dangerous.” 

 

Dang, that’s some good satire. And it particularly hits home because “Harold Dean” is actually Haroldeen, a young woman. The whole “hey, he looked like the suspect” is problematic for the reason above. It seems the “all black people look alike” trope is alive and well in law enforcement, alas.

 [Side note: years ago, when I saw the Harlem Globetrotters, one of the jokes was that the big “clown prince” guy borrowed a purse from an older woman in the front row. When the referee told him to give it back, he said he couldn’t, because he wasn’t sure who he took it from. It was some woman. What woman? A white woman. Which one? He didn’t know, because they all looked alike…]

 Anyway, Potts keeps harping on “he’s dangerous.” Sister Gee is ready with a great response:

 

“Nothing in this world is dangerous unless white folks says it is,” she said flatly. “Danger here. Danger there. We don’t need you to tell us about danger in these projects. We don’t need you to say what the world is to us.”

 

Preach it. And Potts really is trying to get it, which makes him better than a whole lot of people in our country. 

 I have to end with a humorous bit. It would take too long to explain the characters and the situation, but suffice it to say that rumor has it that Hot Sausage was killed in a gun battle. (He was only injured, don’t worry.) 

 

Joaquin, several spots behind them, looked strangely sad. “I borrowed twelve dollars from Sausage,” he said. “I’m glad I didn’t pay it back.”

“God, you are cheap,” Miss Izi said. She was standing a good five people ahead of her ex-husband and stepped out of line to address him. “You’re so tight with money your ass squeaks when you walk.” 

 

This book was a lot of fun, thoughtful and perceptive, and packed with great characters. I’m definitely planning to add some more James McBride books to my list. 

 

***

 

Just for fun, here is the list of books that our book club has read. At least the ones I have read too. Most of these were read for the club, but a few were ones I read previously - those posts pre-date the club discussion - and some I read afterward, because I missed the discussion. 

 

Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente

Bad News by Edward St. Aubyn

Circe by Madeline Miller

Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Calypso by David Sedaris

The Air You Breathe by Frances de Pontes Peebles

The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

There There by Tommy Orange

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

Be Frank With Me by Julia Claiborne Johnson

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

Educated by Tara Westover

Stiff by Mary Roach

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

The Marsh King’s Daughter by Karen Dionne

Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin

Never Mind by Edward St. Aubyn

All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders

Artemis by Andy Weir

Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov 

The Radium Girls by Kate Moore

 

Annie (Musical)

There are some things that are in our culture that we kind of take for granted and collectively “know” without being aware of their genesis or history. One of these things is the mythology surrounding a little orphan girl with red hair named Annie. Or Anne, or some variant thereon. Key elements include the red hair, the age (11 or so), the shocking yet charming personality, and the older man whose heart is melted by the girl. 

While many cultural myths have their origins shrowded in misty obscurity, the “Annie” myth has a definite beginning. Poet James Whitcomb Riley’s 1885 poem “Little Orphant Annie” was actually based on a real person: Mary Alice “Allie” Smith, an orphan girl who came to work as a servant in the Riley household when the poet was a child. The girl probably wasn’t an “orphan” in the sense of having dead parents, but was, like many orphans of the Victorian Era, a child whose parents couldn’t care for her for a variety of reasons. As such, she was cared for until she could (at a rather young age) work as a servant for her keep. As in the poem, the real life “Annie” told fantastic tales of horror to the children of the household. In a weird twist of fate, the name “Annie” was entirely an accident. Riley intended that “Allie” be used - but the printer bolloxed it up, and it was too late to fix. And thus, we have “Annie” as the quintessential orphan girl name ever after. 

It isn’t too hard to trace the eventual family tree of Annie. The Raggedy Ann dolls and the stories that followed. Anne of Green Gables. And, of course, the whole “Annie” Industrial Complex which arose over time. It is why when most of us think about an orphan girl, the spunky red-headed Annie/Anne is the first character which comes to mind. 

The musical was inspired by the comic strip created by Harold Gray in the 1920s and 30s. The strip ran for decades, and followed the adventures of Annie and her benefactor, the immensely wealthy Oliver “Daddy” Warbucks. Looking back, the strip was rather on the reactionary side, taking political shots at the New Deal, unions, and other progressive ideas. It also was in the vein of the stories of Horatio Alger - who is both the best known purveyor of the central American myth, and one of the most misunderstood authors of all time. We Americans often think of Alger as writing stories where hard work and bootstrapping raise a worthy young man from poverty to respectability - or even wealth. This is the Great American Myth™, of course. A person, no matter what their background, can rise - if only they work hard enough. And it occasionally is true. But it is more true that white, middle class boys become...white middle class adults. And the United States actually has rather low social mobility compared to other developed countries. Your socioeconomic status - and your race - are the biggest factors in your destiny. So the great American myth is mostly that - a myth. 

But also, the Horatio Alger story is most decidedly NOT a story of bootstrapping and hard work. It is amazing to me that more people don’t know this. The Horatio Alger story is actually this: poor boy who has character gets an amazing chance to perform an extraordinary act of bravery or honesty for a...wait for it...VERY RICH MAN, who then rewards his character with benevolence which gives the boy a chance to make good. 

That’s a very different narrative than our national myth. It’s more a story of Karma - goodness rewarded by luck. And actually, it seems remarkably similar to the narrative that many white people like to tell about young African American boys who dream of sports stardom. 

So, the Annie myth, at its core, is the same idea. A young girl makes good despite her poverty by a combination of her character and personality and a stroke of luck. This is less central to Anne of Green Gables, of course. Her “chance” is just the chance of a normal life with eccentric but definitely not wealthy people. (Which is why Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert remain delightful and timeless characters, while Oliver Warbucks seems hopelessly dated.) 

If anything, the idea of the billionaire industrialist as a force for good, rather than an exploiter, hasn’t aged well at all. Time and observation have proven that the Gilded Age (and the Roaring 20s for that matter) was indeed a time when the powerful preyed on the impoverished - much like our current age, come to think of it. Only doctrinaire libertarians (well, and the current GOP) truly believe that the cure for starvation wages is to kill unions, or that the real cause of the Great Depression was that the government didn’t give enough money to billionaires. In reality, the major economic catastrophes of the last century have been caused by unregulated rich people playing games to chase high return rates. And we are still (for now…) reaping the dividends of the New Deal and the Great Society. The best chance for a good life for most of us has come, not by being adopted by a billionaire, but by such radical ideas as a living wage, socialized retirement and medical care, and a belief that the wealthy have a responsibility to further the common good. 

On that note, let me discuss the musical, which opened in 1977, a decade after Harold Gray’s death. The musical itself is related to the comic, but takes significant liberties with the story. Of most significant note, in the musical, Oliver Warbucks is the world’s most eligible bachelor. In the comic, he is married to a harridan of a wife, who hates Annie, and sends her back to the orphanage whenever Oliver is called away on an extended business trip. (Thus the decades-long run of the comic - the same basic plot could be extended endlessly. Think of Shakespeare and Prince Hal’s “relapse” that enabled Henry IV Part II…) Of necessity, the musical had to reduce a rather long narrative arc into a short episode. 

Despite the differences, the same rather dated plot ideas dominate: a spunky young girl catches the attention and affection of an obscenely wealthy industrialist, and lives the life of dreams. The female version of the Horatio Alger story and the Great American Myth. Just be good (and cute and white) and a rich person will rescue you. As I said, the plot seems dated as hell. 

The musical, though, depends not so much on the plot - which, as I noted, is practically a standard in the American cultural imagination - but on the memorable songs and the acting of Annie. As a kid, my dad would sing bits from “Tomorrow” - one of the few songs he consistently got the lyrics right for in those pre-internet days. 

So, about the local production. We saw it locally at Stars Theatre Restaurant, in part because my high schoolers have a friend in it. I loved that they still use live music, even though the venue doesn’t allow for a full orchestra like it did when I used to perform with them 25 years ago. The band sounded great this time, I must say. Likewise, the vocal quality of the ensemble was good - community theater is by definition a bit uneven on that. You work with what you have in any case. But this show attracted generally excellent singers. 

There were some other highlights. Bruce Saathoff was convincing as Oliver Warbucks. He is a regular of local theater, although he has directed more than acted as of late. He struck a nice balance of imposing and vulnerable in the role. Rosie Ayala was delightful as the nefarious Miss Hannigan. I was somewhat surprised at Randy Jelmini’s turn as Franklin Roosevelt. He never quite got the British accent right in Crazy for You (and has mostly been known in local theater for tireless support and deep pockets rather than acting), but he was hilarious as the President. The pacing and diction were spot on, with perfect comedic timing. I won’t mention all the rest of the ensemble (in part because I keep missing people), but I will mention that overall, the other parts were good. 

The title part went to Addison Cline, the daughter of local fixtures in the theater community here in Bakersfield. When we saw Matilda last year, she was one of the actors in the title role, but not on the night we were there. Addison is all of 10 years old but already has a tremendous stage presence - and some serious pipes. I will particularly note (with approval) that she pulled some difficult notes out of the air on entrances. One of the things that I love most about the local theater scene is that so many are devoting serious time and effort to training the next generation of thespians. (I know some of these people personally, and they deserve serious props.) Bakersfield tends to be the butt of jokes in national media, but we have a vibrant arts scene. It is easy to feel inferior living next door to a cultural Mecca like Los Angeles - but in many ways that competition has spurred us to a higher commitment to artistic values. 

Anyway, despite some eye-rolling at the dated plot, we had a good time. The music and acting carried the musical. And I’m still finding myself singing “Tomorrow.” 

 Stars publicity photo - unfortunately, they don't post enough of them. 

Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

Source of book: Audiobook from the library

I had a couple of cases down south this month, one in Los Angeles and one in Indio, and that meant a solid 14ish hours of driving. I keep a list of books I want to read (or listen to) - you really don’t want to know how long it has grown in the last few years despite my reading 50-60 books a year. This book was fairly close in length to my expected driving time, and my library had it in stock.

Colum McCann is originally from Ireland, but now lives in the United States. He has written a half dozen books or so, but it is this one which won a National Book Award for fiction. (So, if I was doing one of those “read a book in these arbitrary categories” challenge this year, put this one down in that category.)

Let the Great World Spin has both a framing story, and a unifying event that ties together the many - nine to be exact - related episodes. In addition, there are a prologue and two short sections relating the framing story, and an epilogue that ties up the loose ends. These episodes are each told from the point of view of a different character. If you count the three framing episodes and the epilogue, that equals eleven different narrators telling different parts of what is essentially the same story.

The framing story is a real life event. On August 7th, 1974, Philippe Petit broke into the nearly complete World Trade Center (remember that?) and walked a tightrope between the twin towers. This event helps shape the characters in the story, and also serves as a metaphor within the story itself. We are all on the brink of falling, and yet we must walk on.

This is a book with adult themes (in the true sense of the word.) It also has a good bit of realistic and brutal language, and its share of violence and unpleasantness. So, definitely not for the kids, but not gratuitous by any means. It is both a desperately sad book, and yet a very hopeful book. It is realistic yet idealistic, unflinching yet optimistic. The characters are fully human (and excellently written) and, except for a few minor characters which are caricatures, decent and likeable - something that is not always the case in modern fiction. You really want the best for the characters, and mourn when catastrophe strikes them.

And catastrophe is the central story of the book. The whole thing turns on a police raid on a group of prostitutes, the subsequent arraignment, and the death of one along with the radical priest (who is the central character, even though his point of view is never seen) in a traffic accident. The lives of the characters who tell the story are irrevocably changed by these events, for good and evil - and both together.

The story opens as told by Ciarin Corrigan, the brother of the priest. The boys were born in Ireland, and Ciarin follows John “Corrie” to New York City, where the events take place. Corrie has continued his ministry which was formerly to the drunks of Dublin with the prostitutes near his apartment in the projects. He brings them coffee, and lets them use his bathroom. He supports himself by driving a van for a nursing home. Corrie is a good man, it is clear, but he is deeply conflicted. He is, truth be told, following literally in the steps of Christ, making a life with those on the margins of society. But he is full of doubts. His faith is shaky, and his purpose not as true as he would wish. And then, he falls in love with a Guatemalan nurse and thus becomes torn between the halves of his heart. Between his vows and his desire.

Ciarin tells the story up until the accident, at which time the narrative switches completely to Claire, a wealthy Southern woman married to a Jewish judge. Their only son has been killed in Vietnam, and she is deeply grieving. (He is too, in his own quiet and awkward way.) She sees an ad in the Village Voice seeking other women who have lost children in the war, and ends up joining an informal support group of five women. The book tells primarily of the event she hosts at her apartment on Park Avenue, a delightful set piece of awkwardness, trauma, stress - and also decent people behaving decently despite grief. This section of the book could have been dull as heck, but instead is simply brilliant writing.

Midway through the breakfast, the narrative switches abruptly again, this time to Lara, a young artist who has been living life in the fast lane with her husband, also an artist and cocaine aficionado. Coming back from an all night bender in their classic 1927 Pontiac, they clip the rear of Corrie’s van, setting in motion the events of the fatal accident. She sees the young woman, Jazzlyn, ejected from the van and crushed on the pavement, and she is consumed with guilt. Her husband’s less than appropriate reaction leads them to break up, and her to seek out what happened to the priest. She ends up attending Jazzlyn’s funeral, meeting Ciarin, and becoming involved in the story as a result. 

 Because of course we need a picture of a 1927 Pontiac.

After a brief interlude from the point of view of Petit, the narration is taken up by Fernando, a young teen who ends up capturing a picture of the Petit on the wire with an airplane passing overhead. (The character is fictional, the picture is real.) We then hear briefly from a young hacker who, with his friends, dials a pay phone in Manhattan and talks the bystanders who answer into describing the walk as it happens. 

The next section goes back to the main narrative, and is told by Tillie, Jazzlyn’s mother, who is also a prostitute and a drug addict. This is a heartwrenching and exceedingly gritty tale, with a dark ending.

Next, the narrative switches to Claire’s husband, Solomon, who tells of both the arraignments of Tillie and Jazzlyn and a bit of Petit’s arraignment on the same day. (One of the nice things about this book is that the courtroom scene is actually done correctly. After all the ludicrous descriptions you can find in books and movies, it is nice to read one that captures the mundane nature of the ordinary arraignment, and the frustration of judges in dealing with recalcitrant defendants. My applause, Mr. McCann.)

The next narrator to take up the story is Adelita, Corrie’s flame, who describe falling in love with (and eventually making love to) Corrie, and her response to the tragedy.

Finally, we hear from Gloria. She is one of the mothers in Claire’s support group, and the only African American member. At the end of the breakfast, Claire makes a major faux pas and Gloria walks off rightly offended. However, she is mugged, and returns to Claire’s apartment, and the two end up becoming friends. Gloria will then end up (through another stroke of fate) taking on the care of Jazzlyn’s two daughters after her death.

The epilogue is told by one of the daughters thirty years later, and the loose ends are wrapped up. (While I appreciated that the epilogue existed, it is the weakest part of the book, with some trite characters and easy ways out. It might have been better if it had just told what happened, rather than trying to insert new characters and events.)

The character of Corrie is loosely based on the real life priest, Daniel Berrigan, best known (depending on your level of nerdiness) for his participation in the Vietnam protests and part of the Catonsville Nine - or from Paul Simon’s song. The characters do not share biographical details, however, but more a philosophical connection. Both are “radical” priests who struggle with faith and who minister to the rougher city denizens without judgment.

Corrie is the central character, as I noted, even though we only know what he is thinking from the words he says to others - and from his actions. Many of these observations were quite interesting.

“Corrigan told me once that Christ was quite easy to understand. He went where He was supposed to go. He stayed where He was needed. He took little or nothing along, a pair of sandals, a bit of a shirt, a few odds and ends to stave off the loneliness. He never rejected the world. If He had rejected it, He would have been rejecting mystery. And if He rejected mystery, He would have been rejecting faith.”

“What Corrigan wanted was a fully believable God, one you could find in the grime of the everyday...he consoled himself with the fact that, in the real world, when he looked closely into the darkness he might find the presence of a light, damaged and bruised, but a little light all the same. He wanted, quite simply, for the world to be a better place, and he was in the habit of hoping for it.”

These days, I find myself thinking these thoughts as well. How difficult it is to see Christ in the American church right now, and how little relevance their treasured doctrines seem to have to the people Christ spent his time with. How precious little any of it has to do with loving our neighbor.

Perhaps the quote that intrigued me the most was Adelita’s memory of Corrie’s statement that there was “no better faith than wounded faith.” I rather hope it is true. And I feel in many ways that my own faith is more real to me now than ever, maybe even because of the the challenges and the, yes, wounding it has undergone in the last few years. Corrie wrestles with God, as do the other characters - particularly Tillie, who would like to give Him a good talking to. Fate, God, chance, or however you look at it, isn’t fair, understandable, or benign. Crap happens, and we are left, like Job or Qohelet, to try to make sense of it all or go crazy.  

On a lighter note, I should mention one quote from Tilly, when she tries to seduce Ciarin. “You won’t seen anything this good until there are lawyers in heaven.” We can’t get no respect…

And one more, describing the aging judiciary: “Few folicles on the oracles.” 

Tilly has an interesting secret, though, that bears mentioning. An early client never slept with her (although he paid her), but preferred that she sit, naked, and read him the poems of 13th Century Persian poet Rumi. I have no desire or intent to avail myself of a prostitute, but there is something kind of epic about that whole picture. I haven’t read a whole lot of Rumi, I’ll admit, although he was apparently wildly popular in the 1960s and 70s. See below for a selection. McCann threads lines from Rumi throughout the book, and his presence is a ghost in the narrative.

Poetry is connected to this book in another way.  The title itself comes from a couplet in Tennyson’s Locksley Hall:

Not in vain the distance beacons. Forward, forward let us range,

Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change.

McCann ends the book with a poetic line of his own:

“The world spins. We stumble on. It is enough.”

This could perhaps be the theme of the book itself. The characters stumble on. They are afraid of love (as Lara says), in part because they have lost so much. They all mourn something. But in the end, love is still worth it, and the characters know this, and risk for this idea. They choose to love, to be vulnerable, to accept the pain, to embrace it even, as the necessary experience which makes them alive.

This book was a good read, with outstanding and compelling writing, some of the best characters I have seen in a modern novel, and enough thoughtfulness that the book sticks in your mind afterward.

***

Note on the audiobook: The version I listened to is by Recorded Books, and featured eleven different readers - one for each character. Each had his or her own voice, accent or dialect, and cadence. A rather brilliant use of the audio format - definitely look for this version if you listen to it.

***

A little Rumi (translated by Jonathan Star):

Gone to the Unseen

At last you have departed and gone to the Unseen.

What marvelous route did you take from this world?

Beating your wings and feathers,

you broke free from this cage.

Rising up to the sky

you attained the world of the soul.

You were a prized falcon trapped by an Old Woman.

Then you heard the drummer's call

and flew beyond space and time.

As a lovesick nightingale, you flew among the owls.

Then came the scent of the rosegarden

and you flew off to meet the Rose.

The wine of this fleeting world

caused your head to ache.

Finally you joined the tavern of Eternity.

Like an arrow, you sped from the bow

and went straight for the bull's eye of bliss.

This phantom world gave you false signs

But you turned from the illusion

and journeyed to the land of truth.

You are now the Sun -

what need have you for a crown?

You have vanished from this world -

what need have you to tie your robe?

I've heard that you can barely see your soul.

But why look at all? -

yours is now the Soul of Souls!

O heart, what a wonderful bird you are.

Seeking divine heights,

Flapping your wings,

you smashed the pointed spears of your enemy.

The flowers flee from Autumn, but not you -

You are the fearless rose

that grows amidst the freezing wind.

Pouring down like the rain of heaven

you fell upon the rooftop of this world.

Then you ran in every direction

and escaped through the drain spout . . .

Now the words are over

and the pain they bring is gone.

Now you have gone to rest

in the arms of the Beloved.

So beautiful.