The Book of Longings, Sue Monk Kidd

Raised in a Lutheran congregation with a pessimistic view of humanity and abiding faith in God’s disappointment therein, I struggled with Christianity into adulthood. As a child, I simultaneously longed to be enfolded by my Lutheran faith and lived with gnawing certainty that I—a kid whose brain positively suppurated with damnable thoughts—was destined for eternity in the pit. I flirted with Pentecostalism over the years, then liberal Christianity and Judaism and, finally, Nicheren Buddhism. In time, unbelief came to seem an option—even a deliverance—I might honestly embrace. When I did at last don the robe of the unbeliever, it felt like a kind of salvation.

Still...

I remember a Good Friday procession upon which I happened at the University of New Mexico in the Eighties. I was working on a doctorate, consumed by my studies, and going home each night to a marriage wheezing out its final death rattle. A young man portraying Jesus Christ led the procession, a wooden cross hoisted over his shoulder, its base rasping the pavement behind him. In that moment, invited to share Jesus’ penultimate misery, I felt shattered by his isolation—hobbling to his death, an object of ridicule, abandoned by friends and supporters, to mount Golgotha alone. I wept then on that New Mexico afternoon and, really, in thinking about it, I feel teary even now.

But the tears I shed were for the suffering of a man, not the death of a god. In truth, I cried as well for myself, for in his harrowing friendlessness, I saw my own, much more trivial aloneness. Jesus, who shares my humanity, is a figure whose lonely end can move me. Jesus the supernatural being—well, I’m not sure what to make of him.

It is to this human heart of the gospel story that Sue Monk Kidd applies her pen in The Book of Longings. Ana, the rebellious daughter of Herod Antipas’ chief scribe and a fledgling (if unofficial) scribe herself, yearns to release her own “largeness,” to be remembered as a “voice.” Ultimately, these yearnings—and the behavior they provoke—consign her to the status of a mamzer, or outcast, among the Jews of Sepphoris, both an embarrassment and a burden to her Hellenized father and forbidding, status-conscious mother.

Jesus, an itinerant laborer and a mamzer himself thanks to the questionable circumstances of his birth, recognizes Ana’s largeness of spirit and embraces it, addressing her affectionately as “Little Thunder.” Jesus feels his god as everywhere present—too large, too loving to to confine Himself to Jerusalem and the precincts of the Great Temple. Together, the young couple resolves to set Him free.

Life, of course, intervenes. Newly married, Ana and Jesus bend themselves to the grind of subsistence living in ancient Nazareth, Ana setting aside her quills and inks; Jesus, his conviction that God intends him to serve a special end. When his ministry does at last begin, after an encounter with John the Immerser (Baptist) in the waters of the Jordan, Ana must flee to Alexandria to escape the wrath of Antipas, who’s incensed at her role in a palace intrigue. In Alexandria, she finds refuge among the Therapeutae, an ascetic sect of Jews devoted to the search for wisdom. With the Therapeutae, Ana finds room for her own heterodox Judaism and devotion to Sophia, the feminine aspect of the divine. Among these seekers, she will indeed come into her own as a “voice.”

So much is at play in this tale—the suffocating effects of religious orthodoxy and doctrinal devaluation of women, the psychology of collaboration and the politics of resistance, the ever-contingent acceptance of minds—particularly female minds—that incandesce. And finally, the vulnerability of even the most adoring relationship to the demands of the divine.

Ron Charles, writing for The Washington Post, adopts a patronizing tone with respect to The Book of Longings, faulting in particular Ana’s feminism as “immaculately conceived, wholly uncontaminated by the trappings of her culture,” and, one detects, lamenting both the book’s focus on a character ancillary to that of Jesus and Kidd’s eschewing of the supernatural. The first critique is frivolous—if we posit Jesus as a remarkable historical figure, why would we rebel at the notion that he’d choose a remarkable mate? And for those of us who find small value in accounts of the miraculous, the human Jesus of Kidd’s telling becomes a character whose sufferings matter—one who dares greatly, who loves indiscriminately, yet is broken, as we will all be broken, creatures of blood and bone, not the stuff of gods.

Jesus, whose heart swells with his Lord, exhorts all who’d listen to trust their God for care and sustenance. Yet at his end, it is women, those absent power, who provide him his last measure of care. It is Ana who tenders his last experience of love as he collapses on the road to Golgotha. God is not banished from this tale, but this is a human story, as stories that move me tend to be.

The Book of Longings is the best book I’m going to read this year, unless I’m mistaken. It’s likely the best book you’ll read this year, too—get it at your local bookstore or through bookshop.org, an online seller that uses part of its proceeds to benefit independent bookshops. But buy it.

Do.

Wife of the Gods, Kwei Quartey

Tony Hillerman’s Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee novels, police procedurals set in the Navajo Reservation of the American Southwest, first alerted me to the suppleness of the detective genre. As a reader, my pathway into the world of crime fiction ran through the hardboiled end of the street. Dashiell Hammett’s and Raymond Chandler’s genre-defining ur-heroes were rough-hewn (white) American males, knights errant with fists like rocks and hearts perennially vulnerable to whomever happened to be the latest busty damsel (or more likely, dame)-in-distress to apply her unblemished knuckles to their frosted glass doors.

Since those halcyon days of blackjacks, chloroform, and snub-nose 38s, writers like Hillerman, Richard Crompton, Sara Paretsky, Walter Mosley, Sue Grafton, and others have shown that a change in landscape or—more importantly—perspective can extend the detective genre’s mileage and reach.

But Hillerman and Crompton are white men writing (though writing well!) about people of color. And while I have zero sympathy for the current conversation around the ethics of appropriation (the art of fiction is one of making things up, and our pens should range widely and fearlessly), given my druthers I’d sooner read about, in this case, Africa through the lens of an author whose roots in that continent are familial and deep.

Enter Ghanaian-American writer, Kwei Quartey. The serial novel, in which the same lonely hero unwinds caper after caper by dint of his stubbornness, ability to survive concussions, and killer right hook is a mainstay of detective fiction. Quartey’s Detective Inspector Darko Dawson of Ghana’s Criminal Investigations Department in Accra (Ghana’s capitol city) joins such canonical gumshoes as Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe, MacDonald’s Lew Archer, and Spillane’s Mike Hammer in this regard. Wife of the Gods is the first of five novels that feature Dawson, and as is the case for all successful fictional sleuths, one dose of Dawson only whets one’s appetite for the next.

The genre’s suppleness reveals itself through the magic of Quartey’s pen. Darko Dawson is a modern man in a society struggling to free itself of the more destructive elements of traditional practice and belief. In Wife of the Gods, Dawson plies his trade in the hinterland village of Ketanu, investigating the murder of medical student and AIDS activist Gladys Mensah, a young woman widely admired for her intelligence, kindness, and beauty. Tracking her killer, Dawson contends with belief in witchcraft and quickness to scapegoat, that belief’s inevitable partner-in-crime. His efforts are further complicated by the Ewe peoples’ deference to the local fetish priest—and by his own outrage at the practice of trokosi, which relegates daughters of families fallen to misfortune to the status of temple slaves. Ghanaian belief in traditional medicine—both in its fallacy and its promise—provides a backdrop to all of this. In Wife of the Gods, Quartey depicts a society and a people in transformation, always aware that societal change is sporadic, painful, and unlikely to produce unalloyed good.

Quartey’s writing is spare without mimicking the staccato cadence pioneered by Chandler and affected by many of his epigones. Even so, the genre’s essential tropes are duly observed. Is Dawson a sucker for a beautiful dame? Yep, though in Quartey’s hands that beautiful dame is Dawson’s wife Christine. Does he have a weakness for intoxicants? You bet, though here they come not in the form of a bottle but in that of a well-rolled joint. Does Dawson suffer an unfortunate tendency to solve problems with his fists? Indeed he does. And once he latches onto a question, will he shake and squeeze it till it divulges its most disturbing truth? Well, what do you think?

Ultimately, in this fine telling, Gladys’ murder is driven by the same angers, fears, and jealousies that drive all humans to do ill. And perhaps that’s the most useful lesson Quartey has to offer here—in our cultures, in the details of life as we live it, we are diverse. But in our capacity for evil, we are the same.

Read this book! And read all the others in the Darko Dawson series! But get them from your local bookseller or from www.bookshop.org, a company that uses part of its proceeds to benefit independent bookstores. Jeff Bezos doesn’t need your money—he’s got enough.

The Body Electric, Brent Terry

Note: Brent Terry and I overlapped at the Bennington Writing Seminars. We’re pals, enthusiasts of (different) outdoor sports, and we’ve known each other for nearly twenty years. He once dedicated a poem to me, along with writer and mutual mentor, Doug Bauer. So read this review with those considerations in mind! I’ll note, however, that if I didn’t like the book, I simply wouldn’t review it—my opinions here are the real McCoy.

I’ve developed something of a hate-hate relationship with runners in this time of COVID-19. In my crowded Chicago ’hood, compromised by a history of thoracic surgery and radiation to the chest, I venture to the park (AKA my pooch’s public lav...) several times daily, where I’m assaulted by a horde of maskless, mostly new runners, huffing and puffing and broadcasting virus-laden spittle for all to take in, seemingly determined to make the novel coronavirus a gift we can all enjoy. I might have accosted some of those runners. I might have been loud. And possibly profane.

So you wouldn’t think I’d much enjoy Brent Terry’s The Body Electric right at the mo’, it being a work in which running forms the glue that binds its characters to the world and each other, the armature on which their tragedies and triumphs hang. But you’d be wrong, there. Finn and Sophie and many among their cohort are not your hyperventilating corona-gaspers—they are the elite, the fittest of the fit, denizens of cardiovascular territories most of us will never visit. They are the one-percent of the one-percent of the one-percent, and Terry—himself a lifelong, competitive runner—lifts his readers high enough to afford a peek, however brief, at their particular terrain.

Terry has managed something that, to a reader of my bent, seems near miraculous. His, it appears, is a dizzyingly high anthropology and his cast is composed of improbably good human animals. Even Gizmo, the novel’s sole nod to human darkness is, in his truest self, a fast and dependable friend. The magic here lies in the way the reader’s heart cleaves to these characters. One knows that, were one actually to meet such beings, one would necessarily love them. And so one fears for them, dreads the injuries that life will certainly deal them.

And deal them, it does. Poet Finn’s and painter Sophie’s—runners have day jobs!—is a romance so ideal, so urgent, as to challenge (albeit gently!) the bounds of credulity. Yet that relationship is rendered with tenderness and empathy, never with crass sentimentality. This is no romance novel, and the reader believes. When one of the lovers is taken by lightening strike while training in the Colorado mountains, the survivor is left to struggle against the loss of the irreplaceable and to struggle as well against an affliction—the Glimpse—that seems in equal parts physical and metaphysical, an affliction that’s both isolating and related inextricably to that terrible, defining event.

Throughout, Terry channels the elite athlete’s spirit through the pen of a poet. Consider —

“...it hurts a little, though, doesn’t it, sport? Pushing every system nearly to failure: the rhythm section of the heart and lungs, concerto of viscera in your flashing legs this close to devolving into a cacophony of clashing muscles, tendons, and ligaments that will leave you collapsed and twitching on the dead grass like an exploded calliope. But you’ve got this, don’t you, Kemosabe? The din between your ears is old hat by now, the burning in your legs and chest almost like some shitty old song on the radio, one you used to hate with a fiery passion but is now merely background noise, elevator music serenading you in the calm, moving bubble you have created for yourself. Sure it hurts, the aging rubber bands in your calves and quads and hamstrings propelling you over the frozen ground at a little under thirteen miles per hour, your lungs wrenching every last molecule of oxygen from the freezing air, heart firing that sweet oh-two like a drug through veins and arteries and capillaries and out to the desperately elongating and contracting muscles. The truth though, is that you have been through this rigamarole more times than you can count. You know the drill, sport, you know the discomfort is mostly a hollow warning, that sooner or later the voice telling you to slow down will just shut the hell up. It’s not that the pain the voice keeps yammering on about isn’t real. It’s just that you don’t freakin’ care.”

If you love exquisite writing and itch, however hypothetically, for the feeling of wind across sweaty limbs, if you believe that human bonds stronger than bone and sinew are real, close this window and order yourself a copy of The Body Electric. I mean, do it right this minute.

(Get it, by the way, through bookshop.org—keep a few bucks out of Jeff Bezos’ pocket and benefit local bookstores in this time of hardship. They need you and, you know, you need them.)

Trust Me, Richard Z Santos

Disgraced and clueless political operative Charlie O’Connell hopes for a new beginning. Santa Fe socialite Olivia Branch craves delivery from a marriage that’s become a prison. Chronic pothead and serial failure Gabriel Luna needs to scrape together a thousand bucks to send his kid to camp. Ex-cop and hammer-fisted enforcer Mallon just wants his world to make sense. Santa Fe, improbably, is building an airport—corruption is rife and wheeling-and-dealing abounds.

Richard Z. Santos’ maiden effort, Trust Me, follows these characters through two weeks of scheming, hustling, and betrayal, culminating in a denouement that, for me, felt unearned. Santos’ writing and plotting are serviceable, yet these characters  rarely managed to compel me. The nefarious schemes aren’t nefarious enough, perhaps, Charlie’s ineptness too inept, Mallon’s psychology too superficial.

The exception, for me, is Gabe Lujan, whose efforts at fatherhood fall prey over and again to sloth and poor judgement, compounded by the accumulated weight of a lifetime’s worth of mistakes. Possibly I’m alone here, but that tracks pretty well with my experience as a dad. Problematically, however, Gabe’s story and that of the others never truly coalesce. Trust Me seems, in the end, less a single novel than a short novel and a novella mashed together, for whatever reason, within a single cover.

Trust Me is not a novel that pretends to the literary, so perhaps—contra Updike—I’m damning it for lacks that its author didn’t intend to fill. The book’s New Mexico setting never came alive for me, in the way it does in, say, the novels of Tony Hillerman, Willa Cather, John Nichols, or Rudolfo Anaya. I confess, though, that I made my home in the Land of Enchantment for twenty years, so it’s likely that my standards for New Mexico authenticity are too extreme.

If novels of business intrigue please you, you’ll likely find much to admire in this book. And there’s enough of quality in Trust Me to make one optimistic about Santos’ next outing.