UNHOLY CHILD

by Catherine Breslin ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1979

Presumably inspired (if that's the word) by a recent real-life case, Breslin has stretched a National Enquirer headline--Nun Murders Newborn Baby--into 600 talky, overwrought pages of ghoulish police-procedural, humdrum courtroom drama, sleazy sex survey, and half-baked psychopathology. Perky, pretty Sister Angela, formerly Gayle Flynn, is found hemorrhaging at her Minnesota convent and is rushed to the hospital (""Something--someone--had ripped this woman open from the vagina to the rectum""); and when the doctors discover clear evidence of a recent birth, the mortified nuns search the convent, finding the gagged-to-death infant (his mouth stuffed with a nightgown) behind a bookcase. Thus begin three parallel lines of inquiry: the cops build their case, tracking down the father of Angela's baby (an unstable drifter who describes Angela as sexily eager); the head doctors work with crazily prim Angela, who at first denies all awareness of the conception, the pregnancy, the birth, or the murder; and foul-mouthed reporter Meg Gavin tries to tune in on the real Angela while researching the unnatural sex lives of nuns and brooding on her own restless bedroom action (""Once again she'd let herself go quickly, fiercely, down into the fucking""). Result: a slow, gabby, revolving narrative that finally comes together in Angela's trial for manslaughter, and in Meg's realization that Angela, though kept crazy by ""those fucking lunatic nuns,"" must have been a split personality all along (""Two persons? My God, Tim, you mean she's two persons?""). Unfortunately, none of Breslin's other layers here are any more convincing than this limp, unsupported, B-movie psychology: her cop-talk is effortfully, stiltedly super-dirty; her psychiatrists are cartoons; and all her women, nuns included, talk and think in the breathy, italicized rhythms of That Cosmopolitan Girl: ""Oh God. Ned thinks what happened here was so enormous, so psychically devastating he wouldn't begin to know who could treat her adequately."" Readers titillated by ghoul-stuff (baby autopsies and such) or by nun sexuality will find lots to leer at here--but otherwise this is an inept psycho-crime pastiche, short on both surface suspense and emotional involvement. A pity. . . because a Patricia Highsmith or Margaret Millar could have spun Breslin's basic scenario into genuine, poignant horror--without the dubious and shamefully sketchy psychology, the fuzzy and cluttered quasi-feminist thematics, or the 300 extra pages of plodding padding.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1979

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Dial

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1979

Categories: FICTION