SAINTS AND MARTYRS

A teenager pines to become a saint in order to honor his father in this novel about spiritual discovery.

In some ways, Damian Kurt is a typical 17-year-old boy: He’s tormented by sexual fantasies, pestered incessantly by an intrusive and bossy mother, and loathes his family life so deeply he eventually runs away from home. But he’s also unique in that he longs to become a Roman Catholic saint in the hope that will ensure his place in heaven beside his father, who died four years ago from a sudden heart attack. In earnest prose, Damian expresses his deepest longing: “Today’s sin was my last, Dad. By this day next year, I’ll be a saint. I will. I’ll do whatever it takes so I can join you in Heaven.” To that end, Damian obsessively reads Butler’s Lives of the Saints and confesses constantly in order to purge his soul of sin. He’s also convinced, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, that his father, George, a former rugby player and plumber, deserves to be canonized as well and anxiously composes the man’s biography in order to demonstrate his worthiness. Damian finally makes his way to a seminary, but his worldview is turned upside down by the specter of a “dwindling Church” and a “dying clergy,” a diagnosis vividly portrayed by Roe. In this ambitious book, the author tackles the hypocrisies of the Catholic Church in particular and institutionalized religion in general with lighthearted verve—first and foremost, the story is best understood as satire. But Roe covers a timeworn subject—he has nothing fresh to add to this critique. In addition, his writing—and the novel as a whole—is anodyne: sentimental, melodramatic, and achingly didactic.

A vibrant but uneven religious tale.