Word: buechner
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...WRITER who has never indulged in this sort of bleary prose style is Frederick Buechner. In the twenty or so years during which he has been publishing novels, he has never turned one out in the sort of journalese which is so popular nowadays. If anything, his problem has been just the opposite. Rather than being simple and ludicrous, his plots have been intricate and Byzantine, his style deep and tricky. For just that reason, he hasn't had a major success since the publication of Long Day's Dying in 1950. In the interim he has tried, again...
Perseverance is an admirable quality, and it often gets results. It finally has for Buechner. Lion Country , his latest novel, is the most entertaining piece of fiction published in this country since Updike's Bech: A Book . Buechner has given up his sententious themes, and toned down his murky style a bit, to produce a highly amusing novel about a bunch of remarkably strange people...
...Buechner's characters do not easily lend themselves to humor. The narrator is a bachelor approaching middle age, who lives with his cat on the Upper East Side, and goes to the hospital every day, to visit his twin sister, who is dying of a bone disease, and has just been divorced by her husband. The narrator's subject is the middle-aged founder of a Southern fundamentalist religion, which ordains anybody to the ministry by request (and the payment of a love offering), a former Bible salesman who did five years in jail for exhibitionism. The other characters...
...hard to understand just how Buechner makes this all work, but, somehow, he does. The novel is extremely entertaining, very funny, but not frivolous. The plot is not overwhelmingly brilliant, merely an opportunity for Buechner to exercise his talent at describing and delineating characters. Throughout the book, he uses that talent to best effect, never descending to cheapness to make a point. His description of his protagonist's first act of exhibitionism is the most lyrical periphrasis of a grisly subject I have ever seen, a masterpiece of style and taste...
...there is a major fault in the book, it is the ending, which limps. But Buechner recognizes this, for he begins his last chapter with a quasi-confession of the fact. But this does not make the book any less worthwhile. Read it for fun, read it as a good example of prose style, or read it for his description of the electric cross above the Church of Holy Love, but by all means, read...