Mennonite chick lit

Posted on January 27, 2010 by doradueck

Mennonite in a Little Black Dress by Rhoda Janzen has all the marks of chick lit, which I don’t usually read. (If that sounds snobbish, let me rush to explain that it’s an age thing: I’m up for some well-written crone lit, actually, if it’s out there.)

Plus, Valerie Weaver-Zercher, reviewing the book in Christian Century, said Janzen “manages to reveal little of consequence about either herself or the church from which she came,” and “her wit at times obscures authentic self-revelation.” I thought I didn’t need to bother with it then.

But I also read other more positive reviews and a discussion of the book at the Center for Mennonite Writing. And, of course, there was the fact that, if chick lit, it was Mennonite chick lit — an oxymoron, perhaps, until now. I learned further that the “going home” of the subtitle was to the Mennonite Brethren, which happens to be my brand of Mennonite, and the author’s father is Edmund Janzen, for some years moderator of the General Conference of Mennonite Brethren Churches (although author Janzen calls him “head of the North American Mennonite Conference for Canada and the United States…the Mennonite equivalent of the pope”). Don’t most of us like to know what’s being said about “us”?

Given the intrigue of conflicting reviews, then, and my undeniable curiosity, I decided to buy the book and find out for myself.

Continue reading →

Now found wanting

Posted on January 25, 2010 by doradueck

Here are some lines from Marilynne Robinson’s novel Housekeeping, which I’ve just finished reading (emerging from it as from a marvellous dream). I find them evocative — within their context, but without it too.

Imagine that Noah knocked his house apart and used the planks to build an ark, while his neighbors looked on, full of doubt. A house, he must have told them, should be daubed with pitch and built to float cloud high, if need be. A lettuce patch was of no use at all, and a good foundation was worse than useless. A house should have a compass and a keel. The neighbors would have put their hands in their pockets and chewed their lips and strolled home to houses they now found wanting in ways they could not understand….

A second round of “The Road”

Posted on January 8, 2010 by doradueck

I simply have to come back to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

I read the book over Christmas and talked about it in an earlier post and now I’m re-reading it (which is unusual for me, since I like to move immediately from the Read to the Unread). On this second round, I already know the story — a man and a boy trying to survive in a bleak and ruined landscape — and I know the turns and twists of plot (such as it is) and I know the ending. With those matters in my mind, I can sink into the language. I see nuances I’d missed.

I don’t know how McCarthy does it. Here’s the same ashen world described over and over but you never feel he’s repeating himself. Even the ubiquitous color “gray” seems newly revealed in its grayness at every turn, and I realize what’s happening is “the triumph of language over nothingness,” as the Chicago Tribune’s review put it. Or maybe it’s even better put by an experience of the man in the book:

There were times when he sat watching the boy sleep that he would begin to sob uncontrollably but it wasnt about death. He wasnt sure what it was about but he thought it was about beauty or about goodness.

I’m not sobbing as I read, but the ache in me is the same, and I’m not sure what it’s about either, but I think it has to be this beauty of words, this resilient and scavenged goodness of story.

Cormac McCarthy

There’s a biblical sensibility here as well, due perhaps to the author’s Catholic childhood and education, and though McCarthy said, in an interview he gave Oprah, that the novel is just about that man and that boy on the road, but people draw all kinds of conclusions from reading. Yes, and it’s okay that we do. I hear a riff on Psalm 22 (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”) and discover a catalogue of rituals that sustain the soul: eating together, the man tousling the boy’s hair “like some ancient anointing,”and telling “old stories of courage and justice as he remembered them.”

As you can tell, I like this book a lot. I know I’ve come to it later than many folks, but if you haven’t read it yet either, I’d certainly recommend that you do.