Another of Townsend’s rich dissections of Mormon failures and uncertainties, this time among the shock-troops of faith.
Uncertain young adults fess up, hook up, and give up in these wryly subversive stories about Mormons doing missionary work.
Townsend’s latest collection focuses on what must be one of mankind’s most grueling coming-of-age rites: the two-year, post–high school stint that Mormon men—and some women—spend roaming the world in business suits, trying to convince total strangers to convert to Mormonism. As they recite the doctrine of the faith, Townsend’s missionaries are beset by trials, doubts, emotional turmoil, as well as crazy plot twists: two missionary “sisters” attempt to minister to a Cincinnati streetwalker; two missionary men are counterproselytized by a film instructor; a black Mormon in Mississippi confronts thoughtless racism with forbearance; and an ambitious missionary thinks he can sell the church as a form of Nietzschean self-aggrandizement. In other stories, two missionaries break the rules by taking jobs as male strippers; another on a malfunctioning airliner insists that God will see him through; a perpetually horny Mormon wonders if sperm donation is a permissible mode of relief; and a duo is given a secret assignment to murder an apostate. Townsend draws an evocative portrait of the missionary experience and its mixture of exaltation and dejection. Readers see the intense bonding—and loathing—between missionary “companions” who are never allowed out of each other’s company; the statistics-obsessed missionary bureaucracy stomping the enthusiasm out of acolytes; the incessant crushing rejection, as missionaries’ targets greet them with slammed doors; and the crises of faith that these burdens spark in confused young people who dread the shame of being sent home. This being a Townsend work, stories sometimes culminate in unforeseen gay sex: poignantly, for a 49-year-old virgin who feels like “a glass that had just been filled with fresh water” when he reconnects with his companion, and very cheesily in the pornographic “Prayer Circle Jerk.” Usually, however, the author treats the clash between religious dogma and liberal humanism with vivid realism, sly humor, and subtle feeling as his characters try to figure out their true missions in life.
Another of Townsend’s rich dissections of Mormon failures and uncertainties, this time among the shock-troops of faith.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63490-592-3
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Booklocker
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 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
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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