Nailed It!
A novel about an overly-enthusiastic Jesus reenactor, and more
Creatures, welcome. This one is just a couple book notes as I prepare to go Build Catholic Futures (!).
Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. I’ve read this before, and remembered it fondly. This time, I was struck as if by a crazed fan wielding an axe by the contrast between the early memoir sections, which are fantastic, and the later sections of writing advice, which are mostly wrong.
The memoir is just so good, and if you have any interest in King or even just resonate with his favorite settings, situations, and emotions, you will love it. Children trying to make sense of a senseless world; small-town poverty, hard work, parenting in between shifts at the plant and crafting fiction in the laundry room of the doublewide trailer; physical pain and grossness, our common heritage but doled out so unequally to Adam’s heirs; it’s all here.
It’s not as deep an addiction memoir as you might expect, and delves even less into the experience of recovery, with the huge exception that for King writing itself seems to play the role of a spiritual practice. King is sometimes preachy about the Power of the Imagination, and it did save him. But the writer of The Dark Half and Misery and the great deadly hotel’s own drunkalog in The Shining (h/t Leslie Jamison) also knows how we can tell stories that warp and destroy our own lives and others’. Imagination played a big role in my own recovery. I began to tell myself stories, explicitly fictional and self-indulgent, about what a character like me might do about their addiction. I usually don’t enjoy stories-about-stories that get too idealistic about the imagination, like, does the imagination need puff pieces? But I have in fact experienced the way storytelling can save your life.
Anyway so then a lot of King’s ideas about what constitutes good prose are very standard Strunk & White stuff, and you’ll either accept that as one voice you can use or shrug and walk away. He’s encouraging, and I liked the glimpse into his own process when he talks about not plotting things out, although I have found that plotting doesn’t really work like that in my own fiction. In general I would rather hear how he wrote his things than how he thinks I should write mine; the second half of On Writing is structured as general advice, rather than an actual “memoir of the craft,” and that weakens it.
Kirstin Valdez Quade, The Five Wounds. I read this big, heartfelt novel about a struggling Latino Catholic family in New Mexico while I was also reading Benedict XVI/Joseph Ratzinger’s Jesus of Nazareth trilogy. It proved an ideal companion. Ratzinger’s trilogy is fantastic, you should read it, it reshaped my ideas about the Lord and helped me with some longstanding questions. (And on a note I wish were not quite so necessary, Ratzinger takes contemporary Jewish thought and practice seriously, and vigorously counters anti-Jewish readings of Scripture.) But he is still our academic Benedict, happily ensconced in his library of German theology. The Five Wounds is about, among other things, the way the life of Jesus of Nazareth continues to interweave with our own lives. We don’t have to understand it, we don’t have to respond to it well, but His Face still gleams here and there in the alleys and junkyards and even in the fluorescent-lit good-intentions graveyards of the social workers.
The Five Wounds is structured around the liturgical year, and begins when Amadeo Padilla gets tapped to portray Jesus in the annual Good Friday procession, which will require a simulated crucifixion. Amadeo, guilt-ridden and uncommunicative (and kind of a loser, let’s be real), decides this is his chance to prove himself as a man and a Christian. You can imagine how well it goes!
From there we meet Amadeo’s family: his mother Yolanda, the family’s rock, who’s hiding a terrible secret; his sister Valerie, the educated progressive, and her exasperated children; his ex Marissa and their daughter Angel, whose journey is at least as important to the novel as Amadeo’s own.
I think if Wounds reminded me of anything, it would be one of those long-running comic strips that are about a family or community—like a Latino For Better or For Worse, or a Catholic Dykes to Watch Out For. As those comparisons may suggest, there is something a little too constructive and thoughtful about this book; lessons are maybe a little too learned. But it is still willing to get grubby. There are small triumphs and big failures. Relationships twist and skid in ways that feel unpredictable, but right, even inevitable—Angel’s relationship with another girl in her teen-parents class is especially raw and fresh.
This is a novel about inarticulate people, who either don’t say what they’re thinking or are reluctant even to think what they’re thinking. Their Catholicism is patchy, inexplicable, gothic, moralistic, intermittent, self-absorbed, transcendent, life-saving… all the things it is for me too.
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Quick notes on a whole passel of films: Benediction, Viva Zapata!, WALL-E, The Woodsman, Collateral, Class of 1999, Coal Miner’s Daughter, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Monsieur Vincent.
Now Playing
“Theme from ‘Graveyard Shift.’” Did somebody call break?
I wanted to get, like, a pen bleeding onto a page, but I couldn’t find anything under a Creative Commons license. So here’s Stephen King’s creepy house. Via Wikimedia Commons.