In recent years, the phrase “Catholic writer” has become highly problematic. Some bestow it like a laurel on the brow of anyone who writes about pious Catholics who manage, through thick and thin, to follow all the rules. Others use the label in a nostalgic (and laudable) quest to find the next O’Connor, Percy, or Greene. Still others habitually track down Catholic “themes” in fiction by any author whom they discover attends Mass or was educated by nuns.
Every now and then the real thing comes along: a Catholic writer who writes well enough to satisfy literate readers who judge fiction by the canons of fiction, not theology. It’s a bonus when that Catholic writer occasionally peoples his narratives with familiar characters — like the sexually confused ex-seminarian or the young, excessively certain priest. You recognize him not by his profession of faith, or his attention to clergy and rituals, but by his well-crafted works of imagination infused with a sacramental intelligence.
Such a writer is the 40-year-old Andrew McNabb, whose first book of short stories is titled The Body of This: Stories.
McNabb’s name should ring a bell among well-read Catholics: Yes, he is related to the famous Dominican Rev. Vincent McNabb, who rivaled his friends Chesterton and Belloc as a stylist. “He was my great-grandfather’s father’s brother, Patrick, one of eleven, who came to the States,” McNabb told me on the phone from Portland, Maine, where he lives with his wife, Sharon, and their four young children.
Both of McNabb’s daughters suffered strokes before they were born and now have cerebral palsy. Working at home, writing early in the morning and late at night, he is the primary caregiver for all the children. “I started writing fulltime ten years ago, ever since I married Sharon,” he told me. McNabb had struck it rich in his 20s, living in New York City and working for a Russian trading company that shipped millions of dollars of poultry and beef to Russia. “Everyone wanted a piece of us,” he told me. His success allowed him to move from Greenwich Village to the affluent East 59th off Sutton Place — where he suddenly decided to give it all up.
McNabb took a seven-month break in Ireland, where he started writing, something he knew he wanted to do since he had studied for his MBA at NYU. Upon his return at age 30, he married his wife, who was then a junior partner at Smith Barney. They moved to Newport, Rhode Island, so she could work in Providence, they could begin their family, and McNabb could continue to write. After nearly four years, the McNabbs moved to the West End of Portland, where many of his stories are set.
It wasn’t a stretch: McNabb grew up not far from Portland, in North Reading, Massachusetts, where he was one of five children (including two who were adopted) in a practicing Catholic family. He studied business at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst before leaving for his eight giddy years in New York. Always a devout, practicing Catholic, McNabb admits to having “been more sinful than the next person — sex, drugs, the kind of people I kept company with.” When I observe that some of this experience shows up in his stories, he comments, “This has been my experience. To write any other way would be wrong.”
McNabb’s stories are not going to be read aloud on EWTN anytime soon. Impure thoughts abound — not just sexual, but violent and spiteful. Take this description of a man fuming with rage as he watches a woman, a widow he knows, waiting for her dog to leave an “extrusion” in his front yard:
This wasn’t the Balkans where neighbors turned murderous overnight, but Portland, Maine, where it was the case, as with any other place humans lived, that at a moment’s notice you could circle in and find what was easiest to despise about just about anyone.
Note the totally unexpected meditation that follows, as the man decides to go out and clean it up:
The widow and the others — the cowards who came and left under the cover of darkness, the hypocrites who bagged only when someone else was about — they provided for him this necessary task, this debasement, this penance, and for that he felt the tiniest bit of gratitude.
This is typical of McNabb’s stories; what makes them so involving and moving is his attention to moments in life where many of us instinctively look away or simply turn off our thoughts to get through unpleasantness.
Most of his stories are short — some as brief as 500 words. “This is just how it happened for me,” he explains. He finished two “crappy novels” but is working on a memoir, Daddy’s Hope, about being a stay-at-home father with kids who have health issues.
Many of McNabb’s characters are frail, sickly, and elderly. One of the most touching, almost haunting, stories — “Their Bodies, Their Selves” — alone makes McNabb’s collection of thirty tales a must read, and there are many others that rise to its level. “It’s What It Feels Like,” the only long story in the volume, about an estranged husband who has won the lottery, has an ending worthy of O. Henry. “The King of the Tables” follows an elderly man with a schoolboy crush as he competes for his beloved’s attention while serving meals in the parish basement.
McNabb’s stories juxtapose the pure and the impure, the violent and the tender, the body and the spirit — yet there is nothing in them suggesting a Gnostic dualism. The unity of his stories is achieved by drawing our attention to a dogged mortality we would rather ignore. The Body of This is a sustained, poetic meditation on one character’s message to her injured husband: “There you are, and here I am.”
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Very interesting man and writer. Your review makes me want to read his short stories. He’s the kind of Catholic writer I wish we had more of.
Thank you for the review, Mr. Hudson. He may be the first contemporary “Catholic writer” I have any interest in reading. The others I’ve seen are too syrupy sweet for me. And a lot of them can’t write, truth be told.
DT
GK Chesterton….died 1936. His book “Orthodoxy” could have been written yesterday and it`s incredibly modern.
Oh, I have read Orthodoxy a couple times. That is a very good recommendation. I also just ordered McNabb’s collection, so I hope the book lives up to the review! [smiley=wink]
Nice review. There is another one written by Katy Carl in the new issue of Dappled Things, as well as an interview with the author.
Here are the links:
The Interview
http://tinyurl.com/dfykcw
The Review
http://tinyurl.com/dftt6y
Nice to see solid Catholic writers popping up. I am rather surprised, however, that the Catholic press has almost completely ignored Carlos Eire’s memoir “Waiting for Snow in Havana.” That book is no doubt the product of a Catholic imagination, and it just won the National Book Award two or three years ago! I just discovered it a few weeks ago and have been delighted with it.
Bernardo, thanks for the tip about the Eire memoir, which I had not previously heard of. It looks delicious. Interesting that Eire, now a Yale history professor, came to the US from Cuba in the same “Pedro Pan” initiative that brought Sen. Mel Martinez as well.
On another front: I guess I shouldn’t have mentioned Chesterton in the review above. Chestertonians can’t seem to restrain themselves when his name is mentioned, even as an aside, to tell us what we already know, e.g., that “Orthodoxy” is a wonderful, and still relevant, book. There are many books I can put on that list, books that deserve to be read again and discovered by each new generation. Then their are books like McNabb’s, hot off the press, which should be read because they are deserving as well though not yet on any official Catholic reading lists.
Thanks for this article, Deal.
The (Catholic) hospital where I work has a lovely chapel which I really only “discovered” after having worked there for five years. Now I enjoy going down there to sit and read while on break. This book sounds like the perfect thing for that.
Kamilla
I’m no literary critic, but I know what I like and am a bit of a prose snob. That said, I had the chance to read McNabb’s collection as well, and everything Deal wrote is right on. This is a must-read if you enjoy intelligent, literary, and blessedly Catholic fiction.
Here’s the Amazon link. Don’t hesitate on this one.
http://tinyurl.com/d2t377
Thank you for your recommendation, Deal. You have never steered me wrong. I will get the book post haste. Sorry for the anonymous but I don’t want to be spammed. PS, I also appreciate the courteous comments from others.
I am humbled by the wonderful review/interview, and thankful to have been given the opportunity. Should anyone want to be in touch to learn more, please visit my website, http://www.andrew-mcnabb.com, or the publisher’s website for the book at http://www.thebodyofthis.com. Also, there is a fan group on Facebook. Please feel free to join! Oh, and the book…
Andrew McNabb
McNabb is the real deal. Believe that.
McNabb’s works are raw and real, the kind that must be read in relative quiet, demanding a kind of concentration by the reader on the characters and themes that seems rarer these days. Still, many are so short that they are
He is filling a clear but often overlooked genre: that of a kind of loyally Catholic but un-syrupy, unsanitized literary fiction. The results aren’t always pretty but they show quite a gift of layers, subtleties, yearning and among the wreckage, hope.
Deal, you’re quite right, and brave, to bring attention to Andrew’s unique stories. Thank you.
McNabb has also launched a publishing effort for literary Catholic fiction at Leoness Books. (If he returns to this thread, I’d sure like an update.)
The Body of This is on my “to read” list.
Deal,
Yes, indeed. Eire was a “Pedro Pan” child and he tells all about it in the book. It was really quite a desperate move on the part of his parents, as they waited too long to get out of the island and then they could not leave with the children. His mother eventually made it to the US, but not his father. You should definitely check it out. I think one of the strengths of this memoir is that at one moment he can be laugh-out-loud funny and then two sentences later seriously profound.
But anyway, now I’ll stop talking about Eire’s book in Mr. McNabb’s thread!
I’ve read this book and by all appearances, from what Deal and Joseph Pearce and others have said, I’m missing something. Can anyone tell me
How a story about how a married man who sees a woman biker accidently expose her breast at a picnic and then later meets up with her for a tryst is Catholic?
How a 13-year-old altar boy who has a wet dream about a particular girl and then sees her the next morning at Mass while he’s serving and has an erection under his cassock even though he sees the big pimple on the girl’s face is a Catholic story? (Yes, I know he’s an altar boy at Mass, but beyond those circumstances what is particularly Catholic about it?)
How a woman who has never been naked with her husband suddenly decides to get naked after her husband has had an accident in the bathroom and waits in the nude for the paramedics to arrive is a Catholic story?
An endorsement on the cover calls the book, “a tough little bundle of shards that can as easily cut and make you bleed as it can reflect the one true light.” Sorry, but I only found the bleeding. And the bleeding was from picking up the shards, which one who is sane tries only to do when one’s hands are gloved.
I am no prude nor illiterate (as in, I have read good literature before) and I have read such books as Percy’s Lancelot and seen such films as Manon of the Spring. And I know something of the Theology of the Body, which I think Mr. McNabb is trying to emulate in one way or another. But whenever John Paul talked about his theology, he left people with hope. His play, The Jeweler’s Shop, is a profound reflection on the body and marriage, and it is one which leaves you with a sense of hope. I felt no hope, no reason to work toward holiness, no reason for joy in any of these stories.
So I am hoping that someone can enlighten me as to how a story of a woman who is in an obviously sexual relationship with her boyfriend but is trying to preserve her “virginity,” and who still thinks she can go to Mass to receive Communion is supposed to help me or any other reader get to heaven. Any takers?
Dear Anonymous, your brief summaries of portions of McNabb’s stories are beside the point, completely. Great literature is often made out of what can sound like unsavory narrative elements. Take for example the case of a mother who marries her own son, unknowingly (Oedipus Rex) or the king who slays the husband of his mistress (2 Samuel). What about the father who get drunk and lewdly views his son’s naked body (Genesis). Also in Genesis is the story of a man killed by God because he “spilled his seed” upon the ground during the act of intercourse. Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” almost swims in blood; his “Hamlet” begins with fratricide and then edges toward incest before descending into madness. Marlowe’s plays are even more harrowing. Sins abound in literature, sacred and secular, great and ordinary. A piece of literature cannot be indicted and convicted because it contains — to use your example — a woman having sex but wanting to perserve her virginity. It is how this character is presented and within what kind of narrative. We all know that this kind of situation exists commonly among teens and young adult, and has for decades, if not centuries. Why shouldn’t it be portrayed in a story?
I’m quite aware, Deal, of the various elements of good literature, including biblical. As I said, Manon of the Spring is one of my favorite films, including the nudity, which is not gratuitous but integral to the story.
Please note that my observations were not limited to this one story. Here’s my question – given the contexts of the stories and all else about good literature, I want to know what is particularly Catholic about these stories. And please don’t give me anything about universalism here. McNabb is here and elsewhere being touted as a specifically Roman Catholic author. So I want to know what is specifically Roman Catholic about these particular stories.
When I have read other literature, I get the point. When I read McNabb, I don’t get the point. I’m not left with hope, I’m not left with a moral to learn, I’m not left with anything more than the printed words on the page. So I want to know what it is that others see that I don’t.
Thank you, Anonymous, for taking such an interest in my writing. I don’t believe a forum exists in which an author should attempt to convince a reader that he should be left with a sense of hope (or any other emotion) upon finishing that author’s work. While I would disagree with your requirements for what makes or doesn’t make a piece of writing “Catholic,” I invite you to glean something of my perspective by listening to the Cover to Cover program on Catholic Radio International beginning tonight. In a new twist to the program (in which Joseph O’Brien will be reading a selection of my stories over the course of four or five shows,) between at least a few of the shows (and on separate nights from his readings) Joseph and I will be discussing things “literary.” We will not be deconstructing the stories, but, obviously, the collection will serve, at least in part, as a framework for our discussion. I believe the first conversation will be between just Joseph and myself, but further conversations will include other writers.
Thank you for reading the book.
Andrew McNabb
Dear Anonymous, I am confused by your question because of these statements in the last paragraph:
“I’m not left with hope, I’m not left with a moral to learn, I’m not left with anything more than the printed words on the page.”
Why should a Catholic writer leave you with hope? Why should a Catholic writer leave you with a moral? Isn’t it enough that a Catholic writer give you insight in the inner of life of his characters, to help you understand why they feel, think, or believe the way they do? Why do you demand something more for yourself, whether it be hope, a moral, or what Flannery O’Connor called “instant uplift,” from a Catholic writer?
What about beauty? What about the beauty of the writing, the beauty of humanity revealed, as the elderly man, humiliated by being assigned to kitchen duty, suddenly turns up the music in the dining room and rushes out the door.
As far as you being left with nothing more “than the printed words on the page,” I assume that is hyperbole since you clearly followed the story lines of the stories since you referenced them in your initial comment.
Vulgarity and the stories in the Bible are apples and oranges.
So are acute and obtuse angles…
Euclid
Anonymous, “vulgarity” means “common,” it derives from the same Latin root as “vulgate” which is used to describe the Latin version of the Bible as translated by St. Jerome, as he sit in a tiny stone cell in the city of Bethlehem.
So to call something “vulgar” is ambiguous. It could mean “common,” as in having some in common, or it could mean “common,” as in the way a stern aunt would say to nephew (as my late Aunt Lucile would say to me), “don’t act so common.” I assume you mean the later.
I, too, think some literature is “vulgar,” in the later sense. In this category, I would put the romance and pornographic novel. There is no need to explain why porn is vulgar, but my view of the romance novel may surprise you.
Romance novels are vulgar because they appeal to lower level, though not the lowest, of sensibility – they are predictable, often poorly written, and, most importantly, they are intended to corroborate certain female fantasies. These novels add no insight into character or human experience, they simply titillate a fantasy life. They are vulgar because they are not, what the late art critic Bernard Berenson put it, life enhancing (should that have a hyphen?)
Anyway, I hope you get the point. Vulgarity can be sexual, but it can take the form of an sin perpetrated against art and literature, the sin of mechanistic repetition for the sake of commerce.
Andrew, I will be listening with great interest to that conversation. Thank you for being open to my questions.
Yes, what about beauty? Beauty – in whatever form – gives me hope, insight and comfort. I frankly found none in this book. I found no insight into the lives of these characters. Why does the married man with children go after the biker slut with dirty teeth? That is irrational and irrationality is not beautiful. What happens to the 13-year-old altar boy with the wet dream? What distinguishes him from the millions of other kids today and throughout history who do or have done the same thing? If he’s one in a crowd, where’s the beauty in that? Where’s the beauty of insight into a character who uses the ‘F’ word repeatedly? Why does the old woman suddenly decide to get naked with her husband and lie with him on the bathroom floor when he’s got a gash on his head? Again, that is irrational and irrationality is not beautiful.
What I am demanding, Deal, is to know why these things are Catholic and why McNabb is a Catholic writer and not a writer who happens to be Catholic and happens to set some of his stories in Catholic settings. People are going ga-ga over his stories and saying he’s an edgy Catholic writer. Big deal. I could write edgy stories with graphic details of lurid actions and potty-mouthed characters just as easily. It happens all the time and they’re known as best-sellers. But that doesn’t make them Catholic nor what McNabb wrote Catholic.
As I have said repeatedly now, I understand good literature. I can read a good story and know that it is a good story in and of itself and not demand anything more of it than to be a good story and am left with a sense of satisfaction. I have not that satisfaction after reading this. That’s what I meant when I said, ‘I’m not left with anything more than the printed words on the page.’ I am left frustrated because there is no insight into these characters. In my estimation, there is nothing more here than a bunch of unintelligible snapshots.
Why does the married man with children go after the biker slut with dirty teeth? That is irrational and irrationality is not beautiful.
True, on the face of it. I was also bothered by this story until I thought of it in light of the medieval popular story of King Cophetua and the beggar, which was often used as an illustration of to what sometimes disgusting depths God descends to raise grungy-toothed humanity to his level. From this we can have a discussion of whether a married man tempted to adultery can be an appropriate literary figure for Christ (I would tend to say no and therefore to doubt my own interim interpretation of the story), but in other respects the analogy seems to hold.
What happens to the 13-year-old altar boy with the wet dream? What distinguishes him from the millions of other kids today and throughout history who do or have done the same thing? If he’s one in a crowd, where’s the beauty in that?
I seem to have read this story differently than you did. At first it bothered me too, and I asked the same question. But then I realized that the “whoosh” at the end was not a return of sexual feeling, but instead a sudden inflooding of compassion for human flawedness and brokenness, perhaps even containing the beginnings of a vocation to the priesthood. After all, he is not looking at the girl’s attractive body but at her blemished face. I don’t think you can lay too much stress on that detail: “Blemished” is, after all, the title of the piece.
Where’s the beauty of insight into a character who uses the ‘F’ word repeatedly?
Here I admit there isn’t really a beauty beyond the beauty of truth (and it is well to remember that beauty, truth, and goodness are co-referential). The truth in this case is that of the sinfulness, the terrible self-enclosure, of humanity. Who can’t benefit from meditating on that?
Why does the old woman suddenly decide to get naked with her husband and lie with him on the bathroom floor when he’s got a gash on his head? Again, that is irrational and irrationality is not beautiful.
I found the scene beautiful not because of the nakedness itself, which is a bit grotesque, but because of what it signified: a barrier that had been finally broken down between the married couple, an intimacy they had not previously shared, and the wife’s new willingness brought on by suffering to share in the condition of her husband so that he would not have to be ashamed alone. This is perhaps “irrational,” in the sense of not adhering to strict logic and decorum, but it makes an emotional and dramatic sense that is hard to deny.
Can we deepen, and perhaps make distinctions within, the (certainly true) claim that “irrationality is not beautiful”? What constitutes rational human behavior? Are there ways to behave supra-rationally, and if so, how might it make sense (or not) to depict this supra-rational behavior in stories? Might it be beautiful? Which characters in The Body of This behave supra-rationally and which sub-rationally? When characters behave perhaps sub-rationally, but in a way that illustrates an attempt at virtue, can we find beauty in this attempt, or can we not? When the only beauty to be found is the beauty of a painful but necessary truth–a hazardous beauty not in the way of beauties that allure and fascinate in order to mislead, but in the way of beauties that sting and burn in order to heal–can we sit patiently with that beauty and consider it, too, despite the lack of comfort in the process?
Deal:
I’m not surprised at all at your feelings about “romance” novels & agree wholeheartedly. Emotional desperados find in romance novels what they are incapable of feeling or experiencing in real life. Sad intellectual commentary.
I’m finding it hard though, to put the vulgarity of McNabb’s writing into the right context. It is not just that they’re “common” as in hoi polloi. The dynamics are bizarre and sad and somewhat emotionally and sexually dysfunctional/twisted (or should I saw dwarfed?) and not in an entertaining way (and certainly not in a Catholic way!). Pimples and sex. Bleeding people and sexual attraction. Dirty teeth and sexual attraction. Swept up with white trash repeating the “f” word.
If this is the reality of personal thoughts and attractions not expressed in the Catholic crowd I found myself hanging with, I bet I’d be glued to romance novels, reality television and soap operas too?
I’ve thought of an analogy.
You know that feeling in the pit of your stomach imagining your new daughter’s boyfriend pulling up on a motorcycle and dirty teeth and every sentence has the “f” word in it?
The same feeling you get when somebody dirty and smelly sits beside you on a plane for four hours bending your ear about explicit sex thoughts he had as a teenager?
Emotionally, intellectually and socially stunted vulgar people who don’t have the capacity to filter their thoughts or reign them in are offensive to the soul and spirit. I want to run, not get down and dirty with them to read about their stunted thoughts.
I don’t think “stern” has anything to do with it. It’s class and culture and breeding.
A lot of my women friends were giddy about “Sex and the City”. I never saw the television show but I did go with a friend to see the movie. She was rooting for that poor woman to hook back up with “Big” who stiffed her on her wedding day. Prior to stiffing her, he was all about him. Being his third wedding, he rebuffed and was disinterested in what “she” wanted or what would make “her” happy in the wedding plans. Why do women aspire to watch another women get hooked up to a selfish jerk? This is what we are aspiring for each other?
God help us.
…when somebody dirty and smelly sits beside you on a plane for four hours bending your ear about explicit sex thoughts he had as a teenager?
Has this really, truly happened to you? If so, I can only say I’m sorry; that’s a traumatizing and disturbing experience. But I absolutely cannot accept it as an analogy for The Body of This. Of the characters in the book, I can think of perhaps one (the racist old man) who is accurately described as emotionally, intellectually and socially stunted vulgar people who don’t have the capacity to filter their thoughts or rein them in. The others are simply human beings, and your just-quoted description of them makes me question whether we read the same book.
I think perhaps the confusion is arising from a basic confusion about whether depiction constitutes endorsement. I submit, and I believe most educated opinion is with me on this, that depiction is not endorsement. To discover whether and why a depiction of vulgarity is necessary in a work of narrative art, we need to ask: what is the total effect of this depiction, in light of the whole piece or the whole body of work? Does it help me to spot evil and call it what it is — what Walker Percy called “naming death-in-life” — so that I can more easily avoid it? I would say that in McNabb’s work, this is the effect the depiction of evil has.
That some of the characters in a work of contemporary fiction behave immorally should be no surprise to people who are familiar, as you clearly are, with the degraded nature of much popular culture. That they are realistically depicted as doing so should be no surprise to anyone who is familiar with the idea, common in the West since Chaucer, that narrative art should include realistic depiction.
Of course, this way of thinking about fiction is not without its dangers. My husband has said that in order to take in artistic work depicting vulgarity without being ourselves vulgarized, we need to develop not only certain critical faculties but certain moral dispositions. He is right. The primary critical disposition we should be cultivating is attention to detail, which gives us many clues to authorial intent. The primary moral disposition we need is holiness, which enables us to drink the figurative poison without taking any harm from it.
Of course, growth in holiness may do many things. It may develop our compassion so that we are able to sit with grubby, sinful literary characters — to say nothing of grubby, sinful human beings, for which interactions the characters may help to train and inure us — and develop toward them, even them, the patience and charity of Christ. Or it may also change our taste so that we have no inclination to engage with artwork that shows vulgarity, so that we would rather spend our reading time in something that enables us to work through the difficult particularities of human life in another way.
But at the minimum, we should be able to tell what is good by the standards of art from what is not. To compare a finely wrought work like McNabb’s to the squalid ramblings of an ill-groomed stranger on a plane or to the emotional and sensual pandering of a show like Sex and the City — to make such a comparison, I believe, is both inattentive and inappropriate.
(Also, Anonymous and Anonymouse, are you the same person? Because of the spelling ambiguity I am doubly unsure whose arguments I am responding to, and it’s making me a little dizzy.)
I am startled and delighted to find that Andrew McNabb’s stories – of which I have been a fan for some time – have sparked such an engaged and passionate discourse. It seems that his work and his words in ‘The Body of This’ have touched a nerve in his readers. Perhaps it is the same nerve in all of us: the one that we attempt to cover and protect with utilitarian social constructs of civility, decency, and socio-economic stratification. The messages on this forum suggest that even these time-tested layers are no more than a flimsy gauze which barely camouflages that nerve … the raw nerve that is our own humanity.
McNabb has the courage to look his humanity in the eye. He challenges his readers to do the same. Using the tools that he knows and handles so well, he is able to summon scenes from a Catholic life and present them in a form that both illuminates and transcends the boundaries of devotion. He draws his characters with a deft hand and a searing, exquisite honesty that could only be informed by compassion, that most universal component of all faiths. He does not expose his characters in order to render them naked and vulnerable, but to hold them up to the light and make them apparent, visible, and very real.
We might ask little of a writer whose work we choose to read, other than to be left with an old question re-examined, or a new one formulated. It is not the duty of a writer to leave his reader more comfortable when the story is done and the book closed. If literature is to serve a purpose other than bland entertainment, it might well be to cause the sort of discomfiture that prompts query, self-examination, and some measure of personal evolution, analogous to the friction theory of growth in physics.
McNabb’s unique voice and his thoroughly modern treatment of timeless human quirks and quandaries have apparently begun to challenge his readers on many levels. At the very least, in our reluctance to face ourselves, we might find ourselves able to face McNabb’s characters and to say (paraphrasing Sarah Maguire in Their Bodies, Their Selves): There you are, and here I am, and we are not so very different.
Two different people.
Katy,
Dirty and smelly doesn’t bother me at all – perverted sexual thoughts of people who equate sexual intimacy with pimples, dirty teeth and a bleeding injured man? That is hardly something a balanced person purposely goes through an exercise of “taking in”. If you come across it on a plane, you may be forced to endure it, but it makes you sick to your stomach. Art imitates life. The thoughts are as disturbing to read as they are to experience. Traveling down a road of trying to quash your natural impulses screaming “sick” is ill-advised. You are desensitizing yourself.
Thank you for taking what I asked seriously, Katy. I will, however, contend with some of your answers.
From this we can have a discussion of whether a married man tempted to adultery can be an appropriate literary figure for Christ.
A man tempted to adultery, yes, for Christ was tempted in all things that we were. But a man who commits adultery, no. And from what I can tell, that’s what the guy in this story does. So I cannot see an image of Christ here, only an image of a man whose descent into the disgust of this woman’s life is not to lift her out of her own hell-hole, but to join her and wallow in it.
But then I realized that the “whoosh” at the end was not a return of sexual feeling, but instead a sudden inflooding of compassion for human flawedness and brokenness, perhaps even containing the beginnings of a vocation to the priesthood.
Wow, you read a lot more into that than I did, and I’m not sure it’s there. Yes, the story is entitled Blemish, but ascribing that kind of insight to a 13-year-old who has thus far exhibited nothing but typical American 13-year-old boy feelings and who shows no other propensity towards such insight is, I think, a bit far-fetched.
Here I admit there isn’t really a beauty beyond the beauty of truth (and it is well to remember that beauty, truth, and goodness are co-referential). The truth in this case is that of the sinfulness, the terrible self-enclosure, of humanity. Who can’t benefit from meditating on that?
I’m sure we can all benefit from meditating on that. However, my own life provides plenty of examples of it without needing to be supplied with more from others, especially with such hopelessness. And hopelessness is not fully the truth.
This is perhaps “irrational,” in the sense of not adhering to strict logic and decorum, but it makes an emotional and dramatic sense that is hard to deny.
Emotional and dramatic, I will grant – but irrationally so. If my wife were to do something like that, I would wonder what insanity had taken hold of her. Most wives would cover their husbands with a blanket, and when the paramedics arrived, would be sure the blanket stayed on him. What would possess a woman who has never before been naked in front of her husband to do something so irrational? Lying naked with him in his suffering and humiliation isn’t a sufficient answer. We have no motivation, no true reason, no basis for her to do such a thing. If I was a paramedic arriving on such a scene, I would think I had two patients — one for the ER, the other for the psych ward.
Here is another part of the irrationality – why is she not tending to his wound? Again, this is something any wife would do.
Your question on rationality has some validity. The way Babette acted in Babette’s Feast was seemingly irrational. She had won the French lottery and could have left the cold of Denmark (or wherever it was) for France. Instead, she acted in a seemingly irrational sense and spent it all on giving a feast. But the rationale was to show the totality of love. And there was precedent for it in Babette’s life. She cared very much for the people of the village where she lived and hid her identity as a great chef while doing so. So it was not out of character for her to make such a sacrifice.
But in this story, there is nothing of this. We have a history of a couple who were prudish in their marriage and suddenly she’s getting naked on the bathroom floor while he’s lying on it bleeding from his head. This is not the same kind of supra-rationality that Babette shows or that Thomas More shows in saying to Meg (in A Man For All Seasons), “But beyond reason, there is love.”
There are more examples to cite, but I fear I have gone on too long. As I said, “In my estimation, there is nothing more here than a bunch of unintelligible snapshots.”
“Blemished” is a beautiful story about a young altar boy we might call Dante who sees his Beatrice in the church and struggles with the flaws of his and her flesh… and whoosh! all is grace in the end.
Anonymouse,
Your answer to Katy Carl makes no sense. By that standard, anything that would be terrible to endure in real life would be out-of-bounds for fiction. Right now I’m reading Crime & Punishment, for example. To have to meet a person like Raskolnikov in real life — let alone see him commit his brutal murders — would be horrible. Much worse that having to listen to a perverted guy on a plane. Are you then going to chuck out Crime & Punishment along with The Body of This?
Although it has already been pointed out by others, the fact that McNabb’s stories take a look at the often dirty, vulgar, or even perverted actions of people in no way means that he is giving you these characters as people to emulate. And that the characters do irrational things does NOT mean that the stories themeselves are irrational (again, take a look at Crime & Punishment). But if dirty, vulgar, irrational, and perverted acts and people make a part of the world we inhabit (and they increasingly do in our times) then it is not only OK for the writer of fiction to ponder these realities in his work, it is critical that he should do so!
And look: since reading the book you seem to have been pondering these realities yourself. Your own realization that these people are very broken and that something is disordered in many of their actions actually suggests that McNabb may have been doing something right. After all, our world increasingly portrays a disordered vision of the sexual as not disordered or broken at all. But that’s not the truth of things. Sex in our world has to face the reality of the fall and of our brokenness and sinfulness. It seems from all I hear (since I haven’t yet read the stories) that McNabb takes this matter seriously, the issue of the fall. That alone would make his stories very Catholic, even if they don’t uplift you or teach you a moral (which, anyway, is the last thing a story should do).
Again, I have not read the stories, but let me suggest one way in which a connection between bleeding and sexual attraction may make sense. It seems from the summmaries I’ve read that this is not a rightly-ordered sexual attraction. In other words, it is lust. Now lust is vampiric: it is an intense desire that seeks to be satisfied by getting pleasure out of another person while discarding the actual person as such. That the blood could be connected to sexual attraction thus removes the glamorous veil that our porn culture has given to disordered sex, exposing it for what it really is: vampirism. But again the point would be that in showing that McNabb would not be trying to teach you a moral, but only to reveal a truth about our sexual nature given the fact that we are fallen creatures — creatures who on the one hand have a real need for others (and ultimately for God), but who also twist that need towards all sorts of terrible and tragic ends.
I don’t know if that is a correct interpretation of what McNabb has done specifically, but at least I hope it can serve as an example of how elements used by McNabb — those specific elements you object to, Anonymouse — can definitely be used in ways that are compatible with a Catholic understanding of the world and the human person.
Syme,
I appreciate your sincere efforts to enlighten me but I’m afraid it still doesn’t gel.
We may come across evil in the Bible, but the morals of the parables are always good is good and evil is evil and dysfunction and disorder is clear.
In these stories, the morals of the stories are disordered. If the story of the woman who took the moments of her husband’s serious accident to become sexually aroused had been even a little different, it would have had a pearl worth wading through the slime. Husband hurt, emotionally and sexually labile wife feels compassion that moves her and two weeks later when he gets home from the hospital, their relationship blossoms/better late than never. This is balanced. Imagine a relationship struggling with sexuality and intimacy and when you’re lying in pain and bleeding somebody tries to get naked and sensual?
Pain, bleeding, dying, sex.
Cheating on your wife with dirty biker woman
“f” word, sex
pimples, sex
Finding beauty in the wiring of these libidos?
Yes, there are disturbed and stunted people everywhere.
Rationalizing that we should sit down and watch the Rock of Love because we must feel compassion for sexually and emotionally disturbed people just doesn’t fly. There’s no beauty there. Trust your instincts and change the channel.
Go to a soup kitchen.
Where does it say in the story that the woman with poor teeth is a biker? Stop reading for everyone else. Does the man actually commit adultery as you suggest? Stop reading for everyone else.
In the Hunchback: The “f” word, uttered repeatedly by someone who, as it is stated in the story, had sworn less than ten times in his life until recently. Clearly he is suffering from dementia. Since you are so literal, pray that you or someone you love never suffers from it. And your word for the Hunchback because of his utterances: “White Trash.” Your words. Not the author’s. Not anyone else’s on this list. Talk about disordered. But read on: The Hunchback wants to know where “that despotic beauty” is coming from, and why; a man who had spent his life working with fabric and colors? Think for a moment why there are now so many Africans in Maine: Genocide. Ponder that. And stop reading for everyone else.
And perhaps that young altar boy realizes that he has idealized the human form and when he discovers the pimple, that desire to enter the priesthood comes back with a whoosh. How might that be sexually disordered? Did he intimate in any way that he the pimple turned him on? No. To most readers it seems to be just the opposite. Stop reading for everyone else.
And there are more than just three or four stories in the collection, most of which don’t broach the topic of sex at all.
Dear Bif,
Yes, perhaps thinking about sex and head trauma, adultery with unsavory dirty people and sex and pimples gives some people head rushes. Keep up with the Kadashians. Whoosh.
It’s really okay for other people to have other opinions. This is a comments’ section where people post opinions. That’s the whole idea of it.
Did anyone else who read Their Bodies, Their Selves think that there was anything even remotely sexual about the older woman disrobing? Could she have been symbolically disrobing to ease her husband’s embarassment? A turd in the toilet, her husband on the floor unable to get up. Yes, that screams septugenarian lovemaking. “Quick, let’s do it before the ambulance arrives!” Perhaps a little introspection is needed. Stop reading for everyone else. And again with the “pimple,” did anyone else who read the story blemished get the sense that the young boy was turned on by the pimple on the girl’s face? And do young people not get acne?
Hardly surprising from someone who looks down one’s nose at someone who is physically “dirty,” which is as un-Christian as it gets. Christ washed the dirty feet of beggars.
And finally, how about the other twenty-five or so stories?
Bif,
You may be onto something there. Maybe pimples are the key to priestly celibacy. The seminaries could put posters around of people with acne. Whoosh.
I must confess, getting naked beside bleeding, injured people and straying from my marriage enticed by dirty people are not part of my culture. If that makes me a prude in your mind, so be it.
Next time my family serves at the homeless shelter, I do some introspection. If I’m moved to take off my clothes or cheat on my spouse, I’ll let you know that I’ve had the Catholic epiphany. Whoosh.
And about those 25 other stories…and about all the people coming to your defense…you must really be on to something
This will be my last post, because, it is clear, you need the last word. So have at it. Whoosh!
Bif and Anonymouse: I’m not part of the staff here, but can I remind you of rule number two of this comments section?
“Assume the goodwill of the other person, especially when you disagree.”
Seriously, I don’t see the reason to get all upset over this. If we can’t learn to talk civily about a set of short stories, what can we be civil about? I think Anonymouse is misunderstanding what is going on here, and then setting up straw men to make the stories sound silly, but Bif is not being helpful either with the rather hostile tone.
Anonymouse: clearly no one is saying that cheating on a spouse is having a Catholic epiphany. Do *you* seriously think that is what McNabb is trying to imply? Or any of us? Clearly you are not finding the worth in these stories that others have, and maybe we just have to leave it at that since all our arguments have not convinced you. However, at least I think we can all avoid the sarcasm.
Dorothy L. Sayers in her letters has many enlightening comments about the necessity for writers of fiction [and other artists] to strive to be good writers, not good theologians, or good pastors.
The distinction is important to avoid those occasions when a writer [or an artist] might be more interested in provoking [say] impure thoughts [pornography] than in telling a story, than in recording human acts and emotions. In a good artist the technique triumphs over the subject.
Consider how Rembrandt paints his Saskia as Bathsheba – a rather dumpy woman with all the graces of a queen, which is to say of a woman.
I wholeheartedly agree. I DEFINITELY was not upset either at the content or Bif’s hostility. I apologize if you didn’t find my humor to lighten the mood helpful and am grateful that you assume my good will in using it.
I’m not at all building straw men to make the stories look silly – I am sincere and acting in good faith in pointing out the psychological and spiritual disorders.
Compassion is an appropriate response to a traumatic injury with bleeding but taking off your clothes instead of flushing the toilet, covering up your husband and tending to his wounds until the ambulance arrives is the sane response. Taking off your clothes is silly on it’s own. And, silly is really not the right adjective – disordered is. Taking off your clothes is a sexual and sensual problem they had in their marriage that this woman who chooses an insane response. There is no grace in the byline – just disorder.
Adultery, may be a sexual temptation that affects many at one time or another in our lives. Before marriage, during a rocky part of a marriage, divorced but not annulled – etc. A sexual attraction to somebody with dirty teeth when the sane response is compassion?
Really, “Our bodies, our selves” mentality and “The Theology of the Body” come from two different spiritual maturities.
Grown mature Catholics being moved by reading about a teenager’s wet dreams?? It just doesn’t exist in my world or in anyone have had the privilege of working with in Christendom. And, I’ve been around. (In fact, even as a 14 year old, I wasn’t anymore interested in getting into the nitty gritty of what was going on in the brains and pants of teenage boys having wet dreams anymore than the boys lighting their farts on fire.)
I honestly cannot imagine what has gotten into people to be attracted to such intellectual and spiritual confusion.
Another great story in the collection features a unique character named Charlie who is intrigued by “a prayer to a wound.”
The wound is one of the controlling metaphors for THE BODY OF THIS. We won’t find many normal, healthy people in McNabb’s stories, or outlines on how to live a holy life, but rather Jesus’s Shoulder for the weak, crazed and broken.
Some of these discussions remind me of Augustine’s discussion of peace in (I think) Book 19 of the City of God. He describes how all people in all places tend toward peace–even thieves, even murderers. And the peace that they tend toward, even in their profound sinfulness, shows that there is no harmony or pleasure that can possibly be apart from God’s willing it. (I.e. you cannot steal pleasure from God–even in your sin, God is giving.)
Another theologian who might be illuminating for those who want to understand what is particularly Catholic about McNabb’s stories (and I’ve only read one of them so far I should admit) is Hans Urs von Balthasar. Just read something like the first 10 pages of Seeing the Form, the first volume of The Glory of the Lord. While there is no beauty apart from truth, beauty is often the counter-intuitive transgressor that reminds us we cannot encompass the whole truth. Sounds wishy washy, but it’s true. Beauty appears irrational and allows God (in our perception–obviously in reality God needs no allowance from us) to be wild, free, not constrained by our own expectations. Von B’s is a theological aesthetics that would not fit with most protestant theologies, I think, and helps to make Catholic sense of stories like A. McNabb’s.
Speaking personally as someone who has worked over the past several years in a pastoral setting with murderers, alcoholics, traumatized soldiers, the mentally ill, etc. etc., I find stories that treat with humanity and grace the bizarre mix of suffering and joy that characterizes the experience of fallen mankind to be entirely worth reading and indeed to be sustaining… As long as reading such stories is accompanied on my part with prayer, reflection, receiving the sacraments and so on… A man cannot live on short fiction alone of course.
I have to admit, these kinds of stories are not writings that I would ordinarily read. It’s just not my cup of tea (I am not a fan of Macbeth and other highly praised works, some of which I had to read in school when considerably younger). I have to admit I have not read the book, but the interchange here I have found most interesting and educational from both sides, pro and con.
Reading the back and forth between those who do not appreciate McNabb’s stories and those who do has really given me lots of food for thought. I feel have I have been given a glimpse into the value of this kind of writing, even though it would not be my choice. It takes all kinds to make the world go round.
The illustrations made by some writers between these stories and others that differ from these short stories were really illustrative to help me comprehend the differences and to grasp ever so slightly why these stories in question have Catholic value even though they are not generally talking about virtue directly. They are illustrating wickedness by showing it and writing in not always literal ways of making points. These artistic ways of expressing truth I generally do not follow well, so the lessons I have learned in reading through all the comments have been most appreciated.
Thank you all for your help in comprehending this a little and thank you Andrew for writing such provocative stories.
May the grace and peace of the Triune God be with you all.
Andy
Having just read all of the comments [but not the book], I believe that I have missed something… whatever it is that makes McNabb’s work Catholic in character. Would somebody kindly explain that directly without tangent? I might be slow, but I do want to know.
After reading the discussion here on Inside Catholic, I ordered the book, looking forward to reading something a bit edgy with a Catholic slant. I am disappointed, and little disturbed. It was just too explicit for my taste. The first story is a graphic description of a man deflowering his girlfriend. The other stories are mostly along similar lines, all oozing sex quite graphically, with a sprinkling of religion, but in away that almost mocks the Faith. The problem with the stories is that they are so focused on the bodily functions there is nothing else.
I am quite shaken that this book has been praised by so many Catholic writers. I cannot bring myself to recommend the book since such literature is incompatible with living a chaste and devout life. It may not glorify sin, but neither does it turn from sin. The reader is caught in the sexual conflict of strangers. There is nothing redemptive about any of it. And I guess I am just not sophisticated enough to appreciate the repetition of the F-word.
I am a simple believer who likes to read good books. Sorry, I do not think I will ever again trust anything recommended on this site.
One of the reasons that this is not truly a Catholic book, and also the primary reason most of us would devoutly wish it to be, is the fact that Christ does not receive ALL sinners with open arms.
That Christ is open to ALL sinners is a myth that is widely held and, sadly, too often by many of the most egregious Catholic sinners.
As has been pointed out over and over again in the comments here by several people, repentance is very hard to come by in this collection of McNabb’s stories.
It seems to me that any Catholic lessons to be had in this luridly irrational texts are either accidental or in the mind’s eye of the beholder which is precisely what Mr. Hudson speaks against in his opening Salvo here.
I hope Mr. McNabb makes good money on his guest-speaker circuit and uses it to write a truly Catholic book, by a truly Catholic author.
MEL
Thank you for rehabilitating my comments.
Please include the web site as I did in the beginning.
Since you saw fit to publish my full name, you may feel as fit to publish the place where it is most convenient to reach me on the web.
This has been a very interesting experience for those of us who are party to this little experiment in free speech.
Mary
I replaced your “MEL” with your real name. Apart from that, I didn’t change your post or your web site, so I don’t know what you’re talking about. Your link is right there in the original post (click the globe).
Dear Eric,
Thank you for directing me to the icon that links to our web sites. I had not adverted to the fact the site is indicated by the little blue button.
It is always difficult to disagree decisively with any author or piece of writing of any sort. Much of what we feel about a book or an author is a matter of personal taste. But in the Case of Catholic writing, there are indeed some objective criteria that need to be met.
It would have been more honest of Mr. McNabb to have established himself as a Catholic author without insisting that his book is a Catholic text.
In that case many of us would not have been having any part in any discussion of the book at all, since I tend, and I know many other Catholics tend, not to read or to promote smut, as a matter of personal taste and a matter of obedience to the principles of Spiritual Warfare promoted by the saints and fathers of the Church.
To promote the text as a fine sample of Catholic literature is a bit of wishful thinking in very real and objective terms.
The text is a fine portrayal of disintegration and the smutty side of fallen human nature. It is also a fine portrayal of the irrational and the pornographic side of fallen human nature. That does not automatically qualify it as literature or as Catholic.
MEL
Perplexed by what authority Mary E. Lanser has been made the arbiter of what constitutes “Catholic” writing? Further perplexed by the statement from Mary E. Lanser: “It would have been more honest of Mr. McNabb to have established himself as a Catholic author without insisting that his book is a Catholic text.” Question: Was the esteemed and experience author of this article/review “duped” by the author of the book? And what of the majority of the posters on this forum, who read the same book you read and whose interpretation was radically different? Did they do so under the Devil’s influence? And what of the dozen or so professional reviewers from Catholic magazines and newspapers who did not read/interpret the text the way you read and interpreted it and who *do* consider it a “Catholic” work? Paid off by the author?
As I type type this, fresh in my head is Ross Douhat’s wonderful review of “Digital Barbaris,” by Mark Helprin, in yesteday’s NY Times Book Beview. Douhat: “One of the more trenchant cartoons of the Internet era features a stick-figure man typing furiously at his keyboard. From somewhere beyond the panel floats the irritated voice of his wife. “Are you coming to bed?”
And what authority for negative critique, on the issue of your book being a Catholic book, would you accept, Mr.McNabb?
You continue to demonstrate your lurid imagination here, but you have failed to refute my observation that your book fails on a number of levels to meet any objective criteria of a book filled with Catholic themes, so striking so as to be called a Catholic book.
There have been many books and plays over time, written by Catholic and non-Catholic authors, that have been falsely called Catholic books. Mr. Hudson apparently is capable of recognizing many of them and refers to them in his review here. Unfortunately he makes an exception for your text…and yes, I do find that most curious.
Mary E. Lanser [Lansing if you must]
Perhaps the May 1st and June 8th editions of The Back Cover on Catholic Radio International, in which three Catholic writers and critics discuss the book and its Catholicity, might provide some answers. I am convinced that the problem here is a misunderstanding.
Trying to judge or measure McNabb’s short, punchy stories against Graham Greene’s novels/films, Chesterton’s apologetics or
Christopher West’s theology for dummies will inevitably fail. Of course McNabb doesn’t have the appearance of a Catholic writer; no one knows what that term even means.
Consider for a moment Chaucer, the greatest writer of English before Shakespeare (also probably a Catholic, by the way). Chaucer, by all appearances, was earnestly and steadfastly Catholic yet spoke truth to power, writing, like
Boccaccio (his name ends in a vowel–you guessed it, he’s Catholic), of promiscuous nuns, monks farting on each other, vicars having affairs with married women, and students falsely prophesying a deluge in order to sleep with a
married woman. What is so Catholic about that, you might ask.
Catholicism is not a culture. It is a set of dogmas, doctrines and practices. Indeed, it touches every aspect of our lives, but do not confuse form for matter or matter for form. Anyone who misses McNabb’s Catholicism is a shallow reader.
Catholicism is distinguished from other religious traditions by the sacramental imagination, the idea that the Lord is
immanent, not distant, infinitely merciful, infinitely compassionate, infinitely beautiful. Catholics do not believe in total depravity nor do they tolerate frivolous ideas like double predestination.
Bearing that in mind, Christ, the light of the world and Savior of mankind, lights up the ordinary material of the quotidian. Everything matters to a Catholic. Little moments can have eternal consequences. Catholic writers, even if
they are not consciously aware of it, feel these truths in their souls as they put words on paper. McNabb, if anything, is a sign of contradiction to the secular culture, in that he writes about Catholics who are normal, intelligent, and human just like everyone else,
whereas if you were to watch a movie like Doubt or the Da Vinci Code you would find Catholics to be rare, eccentric, miserable, and out of touch with reality.
The Body of This is Catholic not only because it is populated with Catholics, but because it is sacramental: the body is sacred, design is sacred, sex is sacred, death is not something to be feared but endured.
McNabb, like Chaucer, writes morally ambiguous, even confusing stories. They are not morality tales; the God of Catholicism is not the kind of God that throws lightning bolts at sinners when they cut someone off in traffic. The reader, rather than being treated like a child, is left to puzzle over the contents of the stories, which are more like our experience of living than saccharine tales of a world that does not exist. As Oscar Wilde said, you know it is
fiction when the good guys win in the end.
All fiction, like all music, relies on the building of tension and then resolving it. Asking an author to write a story in which everyone is pious is like asking a composer
to write a symphony of one-note.
Few people can do what McNabb does, that is, pack a great deal into a small number of pages. His work is a breath of fresh air for our troubled times. McNabb’s work is not for
the squeamish but neither is great literature (Chaucer) or, for that matter, real life.
MEL forgets that Christ came into the world to save sinners, not to call the righteous, who were already called. We meet these sinners on every page of the Body of This. We meet the very people whom Christ died to save–people like you and me, with flaws, compulsions, memories, all of whom are loved unconditionally by the One True God.
Of course it is another matter whether or not any of us accept the unmerited love of the Redeemer, and this is the tension behind every single McNabb story. For an atheist writer, the death of a character is the worst thing that can possibly happen–and yet it is not as bad as what can happen to a character in McNabb’s universe, which is eternal hellfire.
McNabb’s stories, therefore, have greater meaning than the atheist competitors on the bestseller lists, simply because reality, in his and my worldview, is infused with profound meaning beyond mere appearances.
The altar boy with the erection, the dying naked man, the biker slut are all called to come to Heaven by the all-Merciful One, and, in every story, it should be possible to notice the sometimes slow, mostly quiet movement of grace. That is what Catholic fiction is all about: see Brideshead Revisited if you don’t believe me.
And another thing: Catholics believe we have free will. Calvinists don’t. That alone makes Catholic writing 100 times more interesting. Calvinists (most Protestants) write puppet shows.
It is a shallow Catholic, unable to face the ugliness of fallen humanity and the great gift of redemption and salvation, by faith and works, who cannot cope with the fact that Christ does not automatically elevate all to sanctity. Not all are saved.
As I noted earlier, without the mind of the reader adding a great deal of their own imaginings to the story there is no repentance to be found in any of the stories told in Mr. McNabb’s book. And Mr. Hudson makes the ever so important point quite strongly that it takes much more than a Catholic author to make a Catholic book.
The fact of the matter is that all Mr. McNabb shows us in his writings is the banal, the ugly and the perverse, the irrational, the smutty and the pornographic, the insensitive, and the prosaic.
The End
There aint no more.
Mary E. Lanser
Wow-this thread is so exciting I will shout it out WOW! Somewhat like a Parish Council meeting that has neglected to follow Roberts Rules of Order.
I dare not claim to be a literary expert, nor am I one who is capable of critiquing literary style. The opposite is true. I am but a lowly follower of Christ who may by some be considered a functioning illiterate. Having spent over 10 years as a drug smuggler, and not getting a GED until the age of forty, leaves me way short of being a scholar.
What is obvious to the average reader here, or in my opinion should be, is that some of the responses seem to be more of a personal attack than a critique at all. Having read the “rules” before posting I noticed that all but one have been violated. While there is no mention of physically attacking anyone, or violence in any manner, if the responders can not read, comprehend and understand the few simple rules, it is not wise to
Give Any weight to statements made towards something as complex as this book and or the author!
Excuse my simplistic outlook or observations but I am only capable of commenting from my 12th grade GED and life experiences. Is life itself not dysfunctional? Scripture is full of strange behavior and dysfunction. The odd and twisted is the reality of the “flesh lusting against the spirit”! It seems that this book strikes a “nerve” for many whom appear to be trying to live out a 16th Century Catholicism in the 21st century. I can relate to many instances in the various stories, as I am guilty of doing and have done, some pretty dysfunctional things trying to live out my Catholic faith in the midst of a “twisted and depraved generation”!
My mentor for many years, Fr Al Lauer, (founder of Presentation Ministries and Author of the One Bread, One Body Devotional) taught me to not just look at the “text” of an author but to look at the “intent”. In order to understand scripture one cannot read it and simply attempt to interpret the text with out understanding the intent from the author, all of which are affected by culture, experiences, fears, etc.. and need to be understood in order to understand! The same seems to be true here.
So; I will leave with this quote from Herbert Spencer.
“There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance-that principle is contempt prior to investigation”
While you may not like the content of this book, or maybe have an issue with it’s author, please do not insult the integrity of the board by overlooking the rules! It would only prove the point about “everlasting ignorance”!
Having read the book myself I totally agree with Mary Lanser and am grateful to her for having the courage to speak the truth. To compare McNabb’s stories to the stories of Chaucer or Boccaccio is so absurd that my only response is laughter. Is this some kind of a joke?
For one thing, Boccaccio himself would laugh to see his stuff recommended as “Catholic literature.” And am I to understand that just because someone is Catholic then we are to consider their work to be Catholic as well? Does that mean we should all be pondering the works of Machiavelli on our path to heaven? Yes, Boccaccio and Machiavelli are important for every educated person to read as long as they are read in context of their era and of Catholic teaching. Some of the behaviors they talk about are not for Catholics to imitate. Or are they? If Boccaccio’s stories are a model for me to imitate then I guess I have been being too strict with myself.
Since the definition of what makes Catholic literature has been so broadened here that I guess I can go to the Wikipedia list of Catholic authors and start recommending every single book they wrote as “Catholic.” That’s good to know.
Am I to understand that being a sinner automatically qualifies a person for salvation? I thought that a person had to repent first. I see little or no repentance in any of McNabb’s stories. I do see a great deal of self-indulgence of odd whims and dark fantasies. If it’s “Catholic” then I don’t know why I have been trying so hard to follow the teachings of the Church.
I agree that repentance is difficult to see in the stories and that compassion and fallen nature are obvious in them. I do not agree that failure to appreciate the stories as Catholic or the work of a Catholic imagination implies literary ignorance or doltishness. The stories are, in a way, elusive to appreciate as specifically Catholic, except that holiness does lie in cleaning latrines. Some of the carnality in the stories, though, does not suggest a latrine-cleaning or sex-as-sacred or body as holy sensibility but appears superficial, as a veneer thrown in for prurient interest. There were moments when I wondered, was this thrown in to please the New York Times Book Review or similar?
Given that our God is incarnate, what aspects of the divine are present in The *Body* of This? The most obvious answer lies in the language of the stories, which is beautiful and evokes great longing. What are some other answers?