Being the mother of the crucified, risen and glorified savior must be a bit like being a retired pope. Just what exactly are you supposed to do? This, in any case, is something of the challenge that the Irish writer Colm Tóibín, him of The Master fame, has assigned himself this Christmas, though a less Christmassy book it would be hard to imagine. Toibin’s novella, The Testament of Mary, reflects on the events of Jesus’s public life and death from the perspective of a mother who understandably wished it had never happened. Looking back from years later, Mary is in some kind of house arrest or at least close supervision at the hands of Jesus’s followers. They seem not to be the disciples he gathered around him during his life, whom she dismisses as “a group of misfits,” but a more deliberate and dedicated generation who will “thrive and prevail,” while she will die. We are, I think, to assume that they are the evangelists who will make Jesus’ life and death into the stuff of the gospels. Mary, meanwhile, has abandoned the synagogue for the temple of Artemis.
Now, of course, all of this is somewhat shocking to believers, but perhaps only because our access to the historical Mary is through the brief gospel references and the myths that grew up around her in the years of the early Christian community. What Tóibín has taken on himself is answering a question that believers have asked all too rarely, just how was it for the mother of Jesus of Nazareth? If one is not satisfied with the idea that Mary simply believed in her son as the Messiah and Son of God–and even if you go that route, the question of how she coped with being the mother of such a creature still remains–then imagining her coming to terms with the brutal events through which, eventually, perhaps after her death, his followers will have come to believe in his divinity, is all that is left to us. This is what Tóibín has attempted, and much of it is persuasive, if not all. Mary in particular is a figure of gravity and plain humanity in equal measure, loving the memory of her son and wanting him back again, the way he was in the years of his youth. Martha, her sister Mary and especially their poor brother Lazarus are thought-provoking expansions upon their gospel personae, rather than distortions, which may not be the way many readers will feel about the picture of the mother of Jesus herself. And whether or not you buy Tóibín’s implication that the Christ of faith is a product of a generation later than the one that actually knew the historical Jesus of Nazareth, there is no question that the Jesus of the gospels is in part a work of the creative imagination of the evangelists, though it does not seem to me that they need to be as menacing as Tóibín has made them. Unless, of course, they are afraid that Mary will give away the secret of how it all actually was.
While the word “cynical” has been used to describe this novella, I do not think this is accurate. The perspective is that of Mary, disturbed and confused whether or not Jesus was self-deluded or the Son of God, not that of Tóibín. “How it was” and “what it meant” are not confused or interwoven, and while the assumption might be that the author is unconcerned with faith or its absence, this is not the point. Mary is the point, a woman who as a human being seems to disappear from Christian history at the moment of Jesus’s death. The Church that followed may venerate her as mother of God and blessed virgin, but hasn’t ever seemed to care about the question Tóibín explores: “how was it, really, for her?”

Then Herod, when he saw that the had been tricked by the Wise Men, was in a furious rage, and he sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under, according to the time which he had ascertained from the Wise Men. Thus was fulfilled what was spoken by the prophet Jeremiah:

“A voice was heard in Ramah,
Wailing and loud lamentation,
Rachel weeping for her children;
She refused to be consoled,
Because they were no more” Matthew 2:16-17

Each night before I put him in his crib, I sing the “Salve Regina” to my son. We have been performing this little ritual almost every day of his almost six months of life. And, as you might imagine, the words “gementes et flentes/ in hac lacrimarum valle” have taken on a deeper valence the last couple of weeks, and will certainly do so again tonight on this Feast of the Holy Innocents. Read the rest of this entry »

Paul Elie has a cover essay in today’s New York Times Book Review in which he posits that contemporary fiction has lost its faith.

[I]f any patch of our culture can be said to be post-Christian, it is literature. Half a century after Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Reynolds Price and John Updike presented themselves as novelists with what O’Connor called “Christian convictions,” their would be successors are thin on the ground.

So are works of fiction about the quandaries of Christian belief. Writers who do draw on sacred texts and themes see the references go unrecognized. A faith with something like 170 million adherents in theUnited States, a faith that for centuries seeped into every nook and cranny of our society, now plays the role it plays in Jhumpa Lahiri’s story “This Blessed House”: as some statues left behind in an old building, bewildering the new occupants.

It’s not stories of Catholic upbringings or knuckle-wrapping nuns that he’s seeking (“even today, there are as many novels of religious childhood as there are parochial schools and Bible camps”), but work that plumbs the deeper question of belief and how belief “can seize individual lives.” Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” meets this criterion, in Elie’s opinion, as does Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. But not much else, maybe not even Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, which Elie calls “representative… set in the past, concerned with a clergyman, presenting belief as a family matter, animated by a social crisis.”

Is Elie overlooking anyone? He mentions Cormac McCarthy and Don DeLillo, but gives short shrift in my opinion to DeLillo’s story “The Angel Esmeralda,” speaking of it only in the context of Underworld, the huge novel into which it was eventually absorbed, and boiling it down to the scene in which its nun protagonist sees the vision of a murdered girl on a billboard in the Bronx. The standalone version of the story (originally appearing in Esquire and later included in Best American Short Stories) lays much more groundwork for this climactic scene, with belief and faith in action at the forefront, not with what Stuart Dybek might think of as the “primitivism, incantation and metaphor” suggested by a paraphrase of that ending.  Dybek himself is not mentioned in Elie’s essay, nor is Robert Stone (Damascus Gate and A Flag for Sunrise both come to mind). Nor is Richard Bausch’s “Design,” about the relationship between a Catholic priest and the dying pastor of the neighboring Baptist church, or Lydia Davis’s “Pastor Elaine’s Newsletter,” in which a non-believing narrator fastens on to a quote from Paul in Romans: “ ‘I do not understand what I do; for I do not do what I like to do, but instead I do what I hate. What an unhappy man I am.’”

I don’t cite these as a way of suggesting Elie is purposely or neglectfully leaving anyone out, but rather as a way to continue the discussion. Are there writers out there today who make faith central to their fiction? Perhaps like Elie, I don’t read contemporary fiction with the expectation of encountering themes of belief, but when those themes are present I do find myself engaged in a deeper way, if at first only out of surprise. And Elie himself reveals that he is about to “get some skin in the game”: he’s at work on a novel “with matters of belief at its core.”

I suspect that each of us wishes to pick up a book without being overly prejudiced one way or another about its worth.  True, there is little hope of approaching a favorite author without positive expectations. A Booker prize winner is likely to have the same effect. But what happens when an author who is both a favorite and a prize winner publishes a work that you know has been negatively received by critics you admire? How do you give that book a fair reading? Ian McEwan’s latest novel, Sweet Tooth, has provoked mixed reactions.  The day before I started to read it, I heard an off-putting analysis on NPR that slated the work for its attitude, implied and stated, to women. The critic admitted that she felt this way despite being a fan of McEwan’s other fiction. I also read comments about the risks he courted in using the spy/thriller genre and on the surprising twist in the plot, close to the novel’s close, that was reminiscent of a similar ploy in the writer’s Atonement.  Christopher Ricks, in the latest NYRB, wrote a canny and teasing epistolary response, more send-up than put-down.

I was certainly not un-prejudiced as a found myself easily led by the tale, seduced you might say, by its plot and fluent prose. The first person narrator, a twentyish daughter of a bishop, Serena Frome, pronounced as “plume,” studies Mathematics at Cambridge. She is also prepared and then recruited as an agent for MI5 (in the late sixties) by a university tutor who is also her lover. He gives her the historical education necessary for her future role. Her first active assignment has her posing as a literary agent for a foundation whose secret aim is to promote Western values as deterrent to Soviet idealism. Serena is successful, beyond expectations. She not only finds the promising novelist, Tom Haley, (an alter McEwan) required for the project, but she also falls in love with him and he with her. She sponsors his successful career.

Her deception and the suspect nature of her lover’s success ground the conflict. She is both in love with and “running” her author. As a sub-plot there is an awkward relationship with a fellow spy who is Serena’s immediate superior. He in turn forces the novel to its climax.

We sit in with Serena on various meetings with those in the upper echelons of MI5, and McEwan indulges us with some humorous institutional satire. We have to ask if these men are really Cold Warriors? Her own life in London is ably sketched along with her infrequent returns to her family and her meetings with her father, The Bishop. So far, so believable. Realism’s illusion prevails, as does conformity to conventional spy dramas.

There are of course inevitable post-modern ploys: Serena reads some of Tom’s stories and recounts them in digest form in the tale; these recall specific early McEwan pieces. The themes of the stories mirror the central tensions of the larger plot and these parallels are noted in a letter from Tom to Serena. Her mathematical background has her pose for Tom a “counter intuitive” solution to a problem. Serena has the distinct psychological advantage in terms of her superior mathematical skills: she has the power in a relationship that she also controls through deception. Her comeuppance is inevitable, indeed announced on the first page.

Crisis arrives, Serena’s cover appears to be blown, and the novel heads to its peculiar resolution. This occurs through a narrative sleight of hand that depends in turn on a suspension of disbelief that to me threatens the whole work. When a novel thrusts its artifice at the reader and lays on it the burden of character and technical climax, then we have to ask about the tone of the author towards his audience. McEwan is far too skilled a writer to do a patch work job at resolving his plot. That the novel has such an ending seems to signal a great deal about the writer’s regard for his readers. Are we simply being admitted to the great game of story-telling?

Yet, there are so many things to enjoy about the book. The suppleness of the writing and the recreation of the not-too-distant English past make the novel an engaging read. Even the mathematical problem Serena sets for Tom is based on the old TV show hosted by Monty Hall, and gives a reader pleasurable pause in understanding the logic of the solution. Yet I still come away with the sense that I have been involved in an authorial scam, manipulated in a way that is unsettling.  Is the work one of authorial bravado or condescension?

Now all of this relates to the prejudicial comments that I could not avoid hearing or reading before I began the book. Admitting that this is so does little to help evaluate my own judgment. I suppose I would like to hear the opinion of others.