Comments

1. Alan C. Mitchell 05/10/2011 - 8:54 am  subscriber

   Mollie,

   She is quite the story-teller; a gifted writer with the power to take one back in time. I found the mention of Paul Shanley to be unsettling, leaving me wondering where this was going. I downloaded the novel from iBooks.

2. Patrick Molloy 05/10/2011 - 11:44 am  subscriber

   A review of the novel in today’s WSJ:

   http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703859304576307560498005444.html

3. Brendan McGrath 05/10/2011 - 9:18 pm

   I was delighted when Commonweal started publishing fiction again (they published a story by Graham Greene way back when); I was disappointed when one of my short stories was rejected. :( (I was crushed; it seemed so perfect for a magazine like either Commonweal or America — what other venue could there possibly be for a story that deals with both the Iraq war and Mary’s perpetual virginity?).

   Incidentally, there are so few Catholic magazines, journals, etc. that publish fiction, and those that do (e.g., U.S. Catholic, the Liguorian, St. Anthony Messenger) are usually more interested in “inspirational”-type fiction. And the maximum word count is always so low — ironically, with such low word count limits, I don’t think they would have been able to publish a single one of Flannery O’Connor’s stories.

   And yes, I AM posting this comment hoping that it will pique someone’s interest at Commonweal and prompt them to say, “Oh! Brendan! Let’s take another look at it!”

4. Brendan McGrath 05/10/2011 - 9:29 pm

   … OK, I can’t resist: here’s the opening of the story, plus a few clips:

   Caterpillars

   “Intercourse is the pure, sterile, formal expression of men’s contempt for women.”
   ~ Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse

   “In this tormented time in history, while terrorism and wars are threatening peace between men and women and religions, I would like to entrust you to Mary so that you may become champions of the culture of peace…”
   ~ Pope John Paul II, April 10th, 2003

   “O thou Mother, fount of love, touch my spirit from above, make my heart with thine accord:
   Make me feel as thou hast felt; make my soul to glow and melt, with the love of Christ my Lord.
   Holy Mother, pierce me through; in my heart each wound renew, of my Savior crucified:
   Let me share with thee His pain, who for all my sins was slain, who for me in torments died…”
   ~ “Stabat Mater”

   ARCHDIOCESE OF PHILADELPHIA
   AUGUST-SEPTEMBER 2003

   If they put a stop to it now, before it went on any longer, perhaps they could still avoid any abnormal defects. Neither Mr. Meehan nor his wife was certain when John had started doing it, but it couldn’t have been more than a few weeks at most. He was only five, but that didn’t matter: no son of Dan Meehan’s was going to play with dolls.

   It was his wife who’d first discovered it, on Friday of last week, two days after John’s birthday on August 20th. She’d caught him in his little sister Bridget’s room, holding one of her baby dolls in his arms and pretending to give it a bottle. It was sunny out, so she took him outside to play, thinking that would be the end of it, but it wasn’t—later in the day he’d returned to that effeminate behavior again. Mr. Meehan was revolted when his wife told him about it that night, and angered when she suggested that playing with baby dolls might make boys grow up to be better fathers. Boys were supposed to play with trucks and monsters, GI Joe tanks and guns—the ones who played with dolls and cuddled them like girls wound up as sissies. The other kids in their Drexel Hill neighborhood already made fun of John, and this would only make it worse. Even his nine-year-old brother Danny joined in, and Mr. Meehan couldn’t blame him—he’d have gotten in on it too when he was his age; it was any normal boy’s instinct when he smelled weakness.

   With any luck, being made fun of would make John stronger and encourage him to be more like his older brother. Mr. Meehan suggested they should have the two spend more time together: Danny was into sports and had lots of GI Joe toys, including a huge new tank with a big long gun on top—it was modeled after one that the army was using right now over in Iraq. Get Danny to show him that; that was the sort of thing John should be playing with. It was about time he toughened up and started learning how to be a man.

   ***
   From later in the story:

   …It was cloudy the next day, and John spent a lot of the day inside tending the wounds of the crucifix’s detached corpus, pretending to be the Blessed Mother, as he’d done with Danny’s GI Joes. He carried it all over the house, even took it to bed at night. The day after that, he brought it into the kitchen where Mr. Meehan was eating his breakfast and reading the Sunday paper. A headline stared up from the Inquirer: Billions more needed in Iraq. Beside it lay another from a few days ago about troops from Pennsylvania accused of abusing Iraqi prisoners, along with an article Jeannine had printed out from a Vatican news site that said some Archbishop Martin “Warns That Current Situation Shows the Limits of Military Intervention.”

   Mr. Meehan looked at his son sitting on the floor with the figure from the crucifix, then looked back with disgust at the Vatican news headline. What did those bleeding-heart priests know? They didn’t even know how to have sex much less how to shoot a decent gun. He remembered angrily how they’d sent some meddlesome prelate to try to get Bush to change his mind, how the bishops and the Pope had opposed America, with John Paul II calling war “a defeat for humanity.” The Church had gotten mixed up in wars in the past, way before the U.S. even existed; they’d been there—so why were they such peaceniks now? America would win the war within a year, find those weapons of mass destruction and make Iraq a democracy with the oil revenues to pay for it: that’d teach the Church a thing or two all right.

5. Jimmy Mac 05/12/2011 - 4:50 pm  subscriber

   “Intercourse is the pure, sterile, formal expression of men’s contempt for women.”
   ~ Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse

   I had forgotten about her — and am glad that I did.

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