More vibrant parables about doubts and blasphemies that hide beneath a veneer of piety.
Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints grapple with the harshness of church teachings in these ironic but heartfelt stories.
Townsend’s (Lying for the Lord, 2015, etc.) latest collection features mostly Mormon characters, some devout and some questioning, whose faith is tested by crises great and small. A man whose niece is missing in a great tsunami wonders why local churchgoers seem indifferent to the catastrophe; a literature student is asked by a church leader to write Amazon reviews of anti-Mormon books—without reading them; and a teacher decides that cruelty is next to godliness, for her students and everyone else. In other tales, a couple’s marriage is threatened by church regulations; a woman is appalled when the death of her family in a car crash becomes grist for church moralizing; and a Girl Scout troop endures heat, bugs, and horror stories about anti-Mormon atrocities. In still other stories, a woman finds her bishop’s condemnation of her murdered son’s homosexuality to be strangely comforting; an ex-missionary who’s abandoned the church decides to apologize to all the converts he baptized; and a teenage girl wonders why divine prophecies about her future keep changing. Townsend’s tales are steeped in religious peculiarities—his characters shape their lives around rituals and process the world through the lens of Mormon doctrine, which invests ordinary family life with cosmic significance and even the tiniest vices, such as drinking coffee, with dire sinfulness. Some motifs repeat: the experience of young missionaries scrounging for converts is a favorite, as are iconic scenes of family get-togethers. The author treats Mormon idiosyncrasies with a mixture of fond bemusement and resentment; many stories are about how empty theodicy—theories of why God permits evil—can seem to suffering people. In his great theme of the eternal clash between liberal humanism and religious strictures, the latter usually come off as petty and callous. Still, Townsend is a wonderful writer with a wry but sympathetic eye for humans’ frailties and the ways in which religious belief both exacerbate and console them.
More vibrant parables about doubts and blasphemies that hide beneath a veneer of piety.Pub Date: April 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63490-342-4
Page Count: 206
Publisher: Booklocker
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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