I was in a mood this month to take a bitter but comical view of theology and humanity. Here are two books that scratched the itch.
James Morrow, Towing Jehovah (B+)
I was going to open this review with “what this author lacks in writing ability he makes up for in big brass ones,” but as I went on, I found neither statement to be true. Early on, Morrow drenches his prose in too many bad similes (“eyes scintillating like twin Van de Graf generators” and such), but he does finally catch a groove with it, and by the time I got to the protagonist’s sardonic captain’s log, I found myself chuckling with some regularity. And some of the jokes and puns are ridiculous enough to be good. A bookish priest chasing after a bunch of debauched apostates, begging them to remember their Kantian imperative, is funny stuff. As far as the brazenness is concerned, I guess it’s there, I mean there’s the gigantic dead body of God floating in the ocean and all, presented eventually with all its warts and pimples, and defiled at every opportunity: driven on, towed by its earbones, eaten by sharks and by a desperate crew, burned, rotted, drained of blood and torpedoed. Horrible as all of that sounds, Morrow pulls off something that’s more of a madcap romp than it is biting satire.
And that’s really the problem–okay, my problem–with Towing Jehovah. It’s the utter lack of spite in the thing. The book posits the factual existence of God, and, by consequence, the veracity of all the rest of the stuff in the popular Judeo-Christian mythology. A variety of ideological blowhards are assembled to have their philosophies shattered on the bluffs of the floating Corpus Dei, and it’s all great fun, but the observation that God tastes more like Chicken McNuggets (you know, for the masses) than filet mignon is about as sharp as the satire gets. Under it all is a secular humanist body of morals that’s left in the wake of the ones long ago imposed on stone tablets. Instead of getting angry at a creator that holds his wreck of a creation responsible for itself, Morrow plays all these inconsistencies up for laughs.
Lucky for him, I like laughs, so the high grade is maintained.
Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth (B)
I don’t want to mislead you. If this were a novel, or some other coherent collection of complete works, it would be pure gold, but Letters from the Earth is not that. It’s a collection of fragments, cleaned from the master’s desk upon his death, and pasted together by his (probably well-meaning) editor and biographer for the purposes of making a posthumous buck. Said editor made a noble effort to hold the “Papers of the Adam Family” section together, and, to my delight, the titular holds together quite well all by itself, but that doesn’t excuse the man for scrabbling together the middle third of this volume. There’s great prose in it but no unity of purpose, and too often it’s comprised of the unpublished bits of things that had already grown legs and hiked themselves out of the protoplasm, leaving shed tails behind for the consumption of completists. It tears my heart out, but I’m afraid the mere passing grade must stand.
But since I’m into blasphemy this time around I’ll limit what’s left of the review to the section “Letters from the Earth” and similar pieces, which, as it happens are the best ones anyway. Near the back of the book, there’s an essay collection called “The Damned Human Race” which, saying the same thing in more prototypical form, bookends the volume nicely.
When I think of Mark Twain, I consider roughly equal parts schmaltzy Americana, humor, wonderful prose cadence, and negativity. The first thing obviously battles the last, and who can deny that that conflict helped make the man great? The spotlighted bitterness is probably what delayed the publication of Letters until 1962. Unlike Morrow, Mark Twain took a dim view of humanity at heart, and a dimmer view of its creator. The letters are from Satan (on leave for his loose tounge) to the other archangels describing the peculiarity of man. Among them: the implausibility of creation; the ridiculousness of devising an afterlife people hate (and other assorted “sarcasms” regarding our view of God and his of us); the description of man as God’s lowliest but most prized creation, and the superlative evil we’re capable of. People suck, and yet….and yet, here we are.
It’s good stuff, and this time around, just what Doctor Downer ordered.
Back to my usually jolly self next time around.
