LION COUNTRY

by Frederick Buechner ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 1970

Frederick Buechner has written novels ranging from the original to the singular and, most recently, they have been increasingly interior with his early elegance of style smudged by a kind of mystical preciousness. All that has lifted (not that the chimeras here can be readily clarified) and in its stead you have much that is ornery and randy and genuinely comic, inflected by the scruffy scrub country of the South where most of the novel takes place. Going down there (prophetically foreseen) is Antonio Parr, a conservative schoolteacher of no particular courage about living and at the moment inextricably involved in the dying of his twin sister. He answers the summons of a charlatan-evangelist Bebb (a contraction?) and his Church of Holy Love although Bebb's life has been an unholy mess: his Tropicana-tippling wife; his nubile adopted daughter Sharon; his unexplained (jail?) absence in the past, and his now startling performance at the ordination of a convert richer than his native Texas. All of this leaves a litter of inscrutables and ineffables in its wake, but perhaps Mr. Buechner is only trying to justify the ways of man to the Lord in terms of human frailty and throttling limitations (there is a lion country down there where they roam freely). Whatever, the novel has a teasing, suspended fascination.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1970

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Atheneum

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1970

Categories: FICTION