Word: buechner
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...usual the substance of the book is Frederick Buechner's amiable conviction that the hound of heaven is a wet spaniel, apt to shake himself at any moment and shower a man with faith and grace. What is also unsettling, in this successful sequel to Buechner's Lion Country, is the considerable attention but negligible weight that this gifted and amusing writer gives to earthly matters...
...several times when he learns that his wife has slept with his young nephew. But there is no real danger that he will follow his impulse and in revenge take his 17-year-old student Laura to bed. In fact there are no real dangers of any kind in Buechner's gentle world. Death, pain and anxiety exist, but are seen small; the hideous, wasting illness that kills Antonio's twin sister at the beginning of Lion Country is worth little more than a sad smile...
Through it all, Antonio remains essentially an equivocal but clever device to help the author work things out in his head. Given this undisguised sketchiness in a central character, it is something of a mystery how Buechner has produced a live, warm, wise comic novel. And yet that is exactly what, in all shifty-eyed innocence, he has done...
...inside back flap of his novel's dust jacket. It is thus very good to be able to put down, as Novelist Barry Hannah did on the jacket of Geronimo Rex, "troubleshooter in a turkey-pressing plant." It is not so good to write "Presbyterian minister," and Frederick Buechner, who interrupted his writing career for several years to take a degree at Union Theological Seminary and become a minister, admits that he has thought of publishing his novels under an assumed name. As things are, he says some reviewers tend to review not the novels but the sermons they...
...suspicious secularist would be reassured by Buechner's working habits. He lives in a comfortable white frame house on an unfarmed farm in southern Vermont. For discipline, the author knots on a necktie and travels a few miles to an office in the parish house of the Manchester Episcopal Church. For three months last winter, when the church was without a regular pastor, he preached the Sunday sermons. He feels sure that none of his temporary parishioners, most of whom are elderly women, has read a line of his fiction...