Fiction Friday: Another Roadside Attraction by Tom Robbins

“Hardly a pure science is closer to animal husbandry than it is to mathematics in that it involves selective breeding. The principal differences between the hubandryman and the historian is that the former breeds sheep or cows or such and the latter breeds (assumed) facts. The husbandryman uses his skills to enrich the future; the historian uses his to enrich the past. Both are usually up to their ankles in bullshit.”

Long before Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code there was Tom Robbins and a mummified Jesus on display in Another Roadside Attraction. Robbins writes in a rambling and wildly fragmented fashion, telling his fantastically conceived stories in an almost mythical style reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges. Though Robbins lacks the imagination of Borges, he does share the Argentinian’s gift for erecting curious outposts of cultural self-awareness. Throughout Another Roadside Attraction the reader feels less like a companion of the characters (like most fiction) and more like an anthropologist, peeking into the field notes of a colleague who has discovered a bizarre and deliciously intriguing foreign culture.

That culture turns out to be our own.

Our main characters are an unlikely collection of pluralistic creatures: a magician/artist/musician, a an earthy pagan princess, the specter of Modernity bearing the name “Marx,” and a martial arts expert disguised as an assassin-monk who wandered the catacombs of the Vatican only to discover the mummified secret at the heart of the world’s most powerful religion. Though Robbins skewers Christianity in this story, it would be a mistake to read this novel as merely an attack on that faith. Robbins project is more ambitious – Jesus just proves to be the fattest sacred cow in what he considers to be history’s husbanded barn of “bullshit.” Ultimately, all of it must get shoveled out. Robbins reflects, in his disjointed prose, a postmodern prejudice toward the wild complexity of life and the futility of linear narratives. The pervasive – yet somehow funny and lighthearted – skepticism toward authoritative meta-narratives lie at the heart of Robbin’s novel; he simply doesn’t believe the power-claims of history anymore. Jesus may be the most conspicuous casualty, but he’s not the only one.

Robbins wants us to question history as well. Are magical thunderstorms, assassin-monks, and a mummified Jesus in the catacombs of the Vatican any more implausible than Manifest Destiny, Western Cultural hegemony, and the story of Jesus’ resurrection? Robbin’s would have us see that compared to Western history, Another Roadside Attraction is possibly the saner narrative, or, at least, no more the husbanded product of cross-pollinated scat than history itself. Because he writes with more art and honesty than Dan Brown, his critique – though ultimately adolescent – comes across as more damaging.

Yet Robbins has tossed out too much. He shovels out possibility of a truth with any purchase on people, and thereby tosses out the very concept of history itself. Without history there is no heritage, no sense of self via the communal connections of a shared identity. Without history there is no ethnicity, either inborn or adopted; there is no culture or conversion, only the wildly individualized consumption of personally invented identity. There are no convincing alternatives teased out in the relationships and philosophies that are always clever but never authentic, always wry and witty, but never satisfying. He seeks to “enrich” the future through the selective breeding of fictionalized historical alternatives, but ends up bankrupting our future by looting our past.

Technorati Tags: Another Roadside Attraction, Books, Fiction, Tom Robbins

Joe Boyd Explores Childlike Faith in Between Two Kingdoms

Fairy tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.
—G. K. Chesterton

And so, Joe Boyd’s fairytale, Between Two Kingdoms, begins with the words of Chesterton, promising, by proxy, an adventure of truth, danger, and perhaps even a dragon waiting to be vanquished. What follows is a delightful tale of childhood faith, broken people restored, and, yes, a dragon of sorts, set within an imaginary realm that somehow contains two very different kingdoms.

Joe Boyd has been on quite the adventure himself over the past thirteen years. During that time he helped to plant a large “church-within-a-church” in Las Vegas in 1997, then transition that into APEX, a decentralized house church network in 2000 (Joe’s story was recounted in the 2005 book Emerging Churches by Eddie Gibbs and Ryan Bolger). Boyd is now the Teaching Pastor at the Cincinnati Vineyard Christian Fellowship, and working to integrate his passions for the Kingdom in a new city.

One of those passions is creative expression (Boyd is also a professional actor), and Between Two Kingdoms is his take on a Kingdom of God fantasy, complete with a King, good and evil Princes, a magical doorway between two realms, and an atmosphere of both innocence and tragedy. Throughout the tale, we follow our reluctant hero, Tommy, as he endeavors to follow his hero the Prince of the Upper Kingdom. Together they seek to rescue wayward subjects in the Lower Kingdom. Along the way we discover a little something about what it means to to have faith, be a friend, recognize true danger, and, perhaps most importantly remember what needs remembering and forget what we need never hold on to.

There is much more in this densely packed fable. There are swords, rescue missions, perilous confrontations and mysterious creatures. And, as you might suspect, Between Two Kingdoms is, more than anything, a re-telling of the redemption story. However, Boyd manages to work in some surprises through his deceptively simple characters; surprises that may reveal more about ourselves and what we truly believe than we realize going into it. And that, of course, is what good fiction is really all about – telling the truth. Overall, Between Two Kingdoms is a delightful read, perfect for sharing with children who love fantasy, or adults who haven’t forgotten what it means to be children.

Technorati Tags: Between Two Kingdoms, Books, Christianity, Fiction, Joe Boyd

Fiction Friday: A Good Man Is Hard To Find by Flannery O’Connor

In her short story, A Good Man is Hard To Find, Flannery O’Connor casts doubt on the Modern paradigms of family, class, and religion as taproots of grace and goodness, and suggests a source more disturbingly alien.

Through the narrator we follow the main character, a well-mannered grandmother working to steer her family toward a simple life of respect and dignity. However, we quickly discover a vacuum of goodness among all the characters. Bailey, the grandmother’s son is ill mannered and disinterested; the grandchildren, despite their names (John Wesley, a reference to the Anglican founder of the Methodist movement, and June Star, perhaps a reference to Christ himself, born in June and heralded by a star) are spoiled and intolerable; and the children’s mother is apparently so inconsequential she doesn’t even warrant a name. Even the grandmother is self-important, and manipulative, and blind to her own prejudice.

O’Connor’s poetically sparse style and adept use of regional dialect make for an earthy and accessible story. Yet, it is O’Connor’s true-to-life human insights that make the story thoroughly believable, and it’s her ironic juxtapositions that make it both memorable and wickedly funny.

Still, make no mistake, reading A Good Man is Hard To Find isn’t always easy, even if it’s always compelling. O’Connor causes intentional conflicts within the reader, making us part of the story. The first disturbance is simply that nobody in this story is good. This can be difficult to stomach. We’re accustomed to hero tales and epic battles between good and evil. We spend the entire story searching for a good man – or woman – in vain. But there are no good men or women in this story – only grumpy, self-absorbed, and pathological men, women, and children. The impression is so pervasive we might complain that it simply isn’t realistic, except for one thing – these melancholy depictions ring so true. And that is the second disturbing discovery; in these wretched characters we recognize our own grandmothers, our own children, and especially our own selves on the pages of prose.

O’Connor saved her most difficult disturbances for the end when the family come face-to-face with a thoroughly southern version of the devil called “The Misfit.” Full of fear, the grandmother preaches Jesus, but the moralistic deism of her version of Jesus makes no sense to this man, who dismisses her appeals to salvation while admiting he longs to know the truth about Christ, saying, “I wasn’t there so I can’t say he didn’t [raise the dead] […] if I had been there I would have known and I wouldn’t be like I am now.” In some ways The Misfit takes Jesus more seriously than the grandmother, and he is moved to sorrow by this confession of ignorance. But because he can’t see Christ, he can’t see past his own entrapment and be redeemed by a radically gracious love. Hence, we discover at this climactic moment that Christ himself is the “good man” that is “hard to find.”

Yet, someone does find this Christ. The irony of the ending is that the grandmother seeks to save the The Misfit and save her own life, but it is her who ends up being saved through her own death. In a moment of clarity she surrenders and sees that her and The Misfit are the same (“Why, you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!”). All pretension falls away and she connects with something alien, something other, a source of inexplicable grace that empowers her to reach out in one last pure act and accept this grotesque man to herself. In so doing, O’Connor has compellingly rendered the peculiar story of human depravity and redemption at the hands of a scandalously gracious God.

O’Connor is not for everyone. Her prose is straightforward and bears little ornamentation. However, for those willing to look face the darkness of humanity found in her stories, the light of the gospel shines ever brighter through moments of enduring grace. More than anything else, revealing grace, not just grittiness, was Flannery O’Connor’s gift.

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Fiction, Flannery O'Connor

Fiction Friday: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

For me the title of this book has always conjured the image of a young Jack Nicholson in roughneck clothes grinning dangerously within the sterile ward walls of a mental hospital. It was a defining role for him and in many ways serves as a cultural landmark for America as well, signaling the transition of our society from the logical 50′s to the passionate 60′s.

In that sense, the film was a faithful rendering Ken Kesey’s watershed novel of the same name, which takes place not so much in a mental hosptial, but in that manic and medicated space between freedom and security, anarchy and order, organism and institution. These archetypal Modern nemeses are sketched in the characters of Nurse Ratched, the authoritarian dictator of the ward, and McMurphy, the new patient faking mental disorder in order to live a life of leisure among the harmless stooges.

The hospital ward is an extension of Nurse Ratched herself: cold, clean, hardened and impersonal. Everything is orderly, material, and tightly controlled. She wields power through punishment, provides safety by threats, gives comfort by means of control. Into this micro-culture McMurphy enters as the revolutionary, the anarchist, the agent of spirit and creativity which overturns convention. Like all freedom fighters he represents danger for both his rulers as well as himself and his compatriots.

As with the 60′s, the power struggle between McMurphy and Ratched is most powerfully symbolized by sex. Ratched is uncomfortable with her own sexuality – her large breasts strictured by uniformed sterility. McMurphy is sexually unfettered, introducing prostitutes to the residents and working to arrange a sexual encounter for Billy – the tamed and timid child of Modernity’s puritanical authoritarianism. This is the struggle of our era, one just beginning to simmer in the early 60′s when Kesey wrote this novel, and its tragic ending turned out to be remarkably prescient. We view this descent into violence through the narrative eyes of Chief Bromden, the bewildered native-American who stands, perhaps like most of us, off to the side pretending not the hear or speak, while the extremes of society battle for supremacy.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a mythological drama for the malcontented children of Modernity, a dramatic battle between the gods of our age: Eros, the creative Greek god of sexual love and beauty, and logos the neatly-ordered incarnation of Christendom’s version of Jesus. In this sense I don’t think the relevance of Kesey’s novel ended with the flower-children of the 60′s. Eros is still the god of loafers, poets, artists, and lovers and he still strives to liberate the repressed in a logos society dominated largely by cold calculation, dogmatic assertion, and quantifiable production. This struggle continues in various postmodern subcultures like Hip-Hop, Hackers, Freegans, Street Artists, Cybergoths, Polyamory, and hundreds of other North American neo-tribal groups who still can’t conceive of a brand of institutional authority rooted in anything but control, and toward whom the American church still largely projects the Jesus of logos.

Kesey provides no answers – no hopeful way forward. In the novel, this climactic battle wounds both sides irreparably, and as I set it down I couldn’t help but wonder just how prescient Kesey may yet turn out to be.

Technorati Tags: Fiction, Fiction Friday, Ken Kesey, Modernity, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest