Knowledge of Angels

Christian Century, Oct 12, 1994 by Jill Pelaez Baumgaertner

THE WORD "spiritual" as most people use the term does not have much to do with the practice of religion in neighborhood churches and synagogues. It has a lot to do with the rediscovery of the spiritual dimension in human development and the reimagining of myth, including Christian myth, to satisfy the need for a belief in the transcendent. This reinvention is supported by those who want religion on their own terms--often religion in which traditional authorities, now considered irrelevant, are discarded.

Besides focusing on formative events in the lives of three girls on the brink of adolescence, these three novels explore spiritual themes. Each in its own way presents arguments for and against the presence of a god concerned about and connected with human triumph and failure. Only one of the novels, however, deals convincingly with this topic. The other two are interesting reflections of the culture that spawned them--a culture of disbelief that is nonetheless searching wildly for something to embrace.

Doris Betts has published seven works of fiction. Her first novel in a decade is the story of a 13-year-old girl with an incurable kidney disease. The subject is an old one, the consequences inevitable, the questions raised about God's justice predictable. A lesser writer would have turned this into an emotionally indulgent exercise. But Souls Raised from the Dead is a remarkably unsentimental novel that presents a convincing picture of a modern family dealing and not dealing with the death of its youngest member. In some ways the novel bears comparison with Peter De Vries's The Blood of the Lamb, the story of a father's loss of his preadolescent daughter to cancer and his resulting crisis of faith. Betts's book is as moving, but curiously not as devastating. It presents unblinkingly a child's death, a parent's worst nightmare, in a way that pushes the reader beyond catharsis to reconciliation--an exceptional feat for any work of art.

The child of a state trooper father and a mother who deserted the family three years earlier and has not been heard from since, Mary is in love with horses, in particular a horse named Chancy, which her father decides to buy for her after her illness is diagnosed. Her father, who suffered a kidney injury in a work-related shooting, is ineligible to donate one of his kidneys to his child, and her mother, whom the family finally is able to contact, is unwilling to donate hers. Mary becomes dependent on dialysis and aware that she is "like a good letter in a bad envelope." Somewhere, she thinks, she exists in another life on a different track, a track in which her mother was a different, perfect parent, and "her real and healthy self was taking ballet lessons or riding Chancy or acquiring over a single weekend her first menstrual period plus a pair of boobs with nearly magenta nipples."

Mary's fantasies about perfectibility are appealingly earthbound, but they are in many ways similar to her grandfather's musings about heaven in which he wonders how, if all imperfections disappear, he will recognize his retarded brother Bobby, who died at age ten. In both cases the characters imagine an Eden in which death and disease are obliterated. Meanwhile, Tacey, Mary's grandmother, is introduced to Francis Thompson's "Hound of Heaven," about God's relentless pursuit of the human soul. Tacey is a woman of faith who now encounters a God willing to "beat some sense into members of his unwilling flock," an inscrutable image that gives her a headache. Nevertheless, when asked what she does when she runs out of steam, she has to admit to herself that she has only one answer: "Say prayers." This is no glib response. In fact, she is reluctant to mouth the words. "She never knew whether at such moments God required her to testify to her faith like St. Paul or whether He had taken into consideration how pious and awful it would sound."

The characters in this novel meet death head on because they have no other choice. With their strengths and weaknesses exposed, they learn in the midst of understandable doubts and wavering faith the various ways of affirming or denying the resurrection. The reader never doubts the reality of Mary's final vision, which pushes her beyond death into life. This is a profoundly religious novel which turns religiosity on its head.

Paul Theroux, a prolific novelist and writer of travel books, has written a dark fantasy which staggers under the weight of the Christian myth imposed upon it. One hesitates to call the novel a Christian fantasy because that term is usually reserved for a vision informed by the incarnation. In spite of its reliance on scriptural analogues, this novel never convincingly points to anything larger than itself. Its intense self-consciousness keeps it from becoming anything more than a curiosity and an indulgence.

THEROUX ATTEMPTS to provide a commentary on the shabbier aspects of our culture: the hunger for scandal, for fast food, for tabloids, and for a religion that includes the other three. It is a novel driven by its grotesqueness, which is derived from the peculiar religion developed by the main character. Millroy believes that Americans' main spiritual problem is intestinal blockage, which needs to be purged by a healthier diet. Anyone who eats right, who becomes regular, Millroy insists, will be able to live to 200. With recipes derived from "The Book," he begins to preach and to convert, using magic tricks to help convince the unbelieving.