Word: bebb
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...earlier novel, with a dim notion of writing an expose, Antonio became involved with the formidable Leo Bebb, a sleazy but possibly genuine faith healer who cranked an ordination-by-mail divinity mill in Armadillo, Fla. It turned out that Bebb was quite capable of exposing himself. After he did so, raising up his loins in thanksgiving at the climactic moment of a healing ritual held to restore the sexual potency of a wealthy Indian chief, he had to leave town one jump ahead of the law. But by then Bebb's daughter Sharon had an occasion to cure...
...humor of Open Heart runs less to slapstick (perhaps because Bebb already has done most of his turns) and more to De Vriesian one-liners: "I knew that I had to get away that day-their fresh-faced guilt was too great a reproach to my shifty-eyed innocence." Antonio, the narrator of both novels, is five years older in the new one, and he has coalesced to the point where sometimes it is possible to get a look at him. He travels west, returns home, encounters an acquaintance of Bebb who just may be a demon. He accepts cuckoldry...
...since grown to the girth of an alderman. "Get a pig," he recommends. "Friendly, well-mannered, clean, follows you anywhere." He is working now on a kind of devil's dictionary of religious terms, and doesn't know whether there will be another novel about Antonio and Bebb. "Maybe; I don't really know the truth about Bebb - I see him only through Antonio's eyes, and I'm curious...
...embarrassing attempt to deal with the strangeness of being a pastor. Buechner, however, seems to have found an acceptable way to deal with religious mysteries in fiction. His stratagem is to leave the I very existence of such mysteries an open question. As a faith healer Bebb is certainly half a fraud, and possibly two halves of one. But Antonio accepts Bebb without worrying much about his genuineness, and the reader is left with the lightest and least insistent of uncertainties. Another question is left, too: whether this indefiniteness is merely tact, or a measure of the author...
...reader does not enter Buechner's rarefied world but stands outside admiring. Presently he realizes that Parr, the hero, and Buechner, who invented him, are standing there beside him too. So is all that is visible of Bebb. A conversation develops among the onlookers that is solid, witty and as full of profundity as one could wish for on a hot day. Disbelief is not suspended, but since things are so pleasant, there is no reason that it should...