Slake’s Limbo, by Felice Holman
Mr Pye, by Mervyn Peake
The Gospel According to the Simpsons, by Mark I. Pinsky

This month takes us on three spiritual quests, ranging from an unsubtle thematic exploration on the rocks and under the tracks, to a sort of allegorical cocktail, to–screw it–non-fiction straight from the bottle. Slake’s Limbo, although it’s a young adult book, is heavy enough Christian and pagan symbolism that it could cultural studies goofballs all tipsy. Mr. Pye inflicts a rather overt Christian symbolism on its main character, and while I don’t think the thematic stuff added very much to Slake, how well Pye succeeds depends almost entirely on what it was the author was trying to do. It’s probably more compellling to talk about than it was to read. Like most things, I prefer my symbolic heavy-handedness when it’s used to make jokes. You can write entire books explaining them, and one Mark Pinsky has done just that. The best success of The Gospel According to the Simpsons is to remind me how good the jokes could be.

Slake’s Limbo was one I read to my children. It’s funny what young people can groove on, because as an adult, I found this one positively turgid with written curlicues and unannounced asides and flashbacks, utterly shameless about piling on the gusty pathos, but children have a weird tolerance for purple prose. (I’d argue it has something to do with being read aloud, but at my daughter’s age, I was plodding my own quiet way through Tolkien, jaw glued to the floor.) The protagonist’s name, “Aremis Slake,” almost perfectly encapsualtes the whole aesthetic. It’s an interesting fictional name, but you can feel how hard she tried to get one with the precise literary heft, exactly the right combination of dirt and dignity. Slapped with that moniker, the poor boy is destined for verbose melodrama. The book is written for young people and I don’t want to imply that the language is challenging exactly, but the form is a far cry from the approved, formulaic “chapter books” they get assigned from school to beginning readers these days. It comes from a 1970s school of children’s vérité, where edgy urban reality (that is actually pretty far from real reality) is presented unflinchingly. The boy is brought up utterly neglected, malnourished, and suffers the indignities of bullying by drunken eighth graders, of his retarded companion’s tragic death, and, as we quickly learn, hiding underground in a New York subway for four months straight.

As a more modern, adult reader, I had Slake as autistic. His worldview, at 13 years old, is strikingly primitive (for example, he makes a futile stand against the passing seasons, trying to tie leaves onto the trees), he’s described in animal terms (his fear is a bird), with animal companions (gee, is that rat significant of the boy?), alarmed by positive human attention, and he’s got a burrowing creature’s obsessive habits. He can evidently read without trouble though, and he sat through a few years of school and learned stuff. If his weirdness got the attention of his classmates, somehow his condition was invisible to any adult. I think Holman means us to read that the boy is severely stunted in terms of imagination and emotion, and his time in the subway is spent taking those baby steps toward becoming human. I think this is a strong point of entry for young enough readers actually, for whom that same sort of maturation wasn’t so long ago.

With a limbo in the title, you can bet that (barring any Jamaican dancing) the metaphysical imagery is going to get laid on pretty thick. Thankfully Holman doesn’t detail the spiritual journey explicitly, which is a blessing of sorts, because I didn’t care to explain it. It’s more Dante and Virgil (or Jonah, or Jesus, or you know, take your pick of mystical underground ordeals that end in ascension) than Adam and Eve (or whoever). Hammering out the time-honored fictional devices is a fine analysis for a term paper, but at the blunt level they’re used in this story, I’m happy enough just making the acknowledgement. When the kids get to the point when they’re deconstructing catharsis and rebirth and all the associated literary mumbo-jumbo, they can do worse than to remember Aremis Slake.

#

If Slake is an obvious metaphor, Mr. Pye is an explicit one. Mervyn Peake is better known (especially in the United Kingdom) for his (deservedly) more famous and more popular brainchild, Gormenghast. In this novel, there is some of the the oppressive stone landscape of his better work reflected in the sea-carved features of the island of Sark, and both places are populated with a similar set of grotesques for characters. Mr. Pye is more human-scaled though, and anchored to the known geography of the Channel Islands. It’s also a great deal shorter, and more thematically driven, as if the author had a different mission than letting the great, looming masonry create a mood. Oddly, I don’t think this served him all that well: at his best, Peake created brilliant edifices of prose that I always want to call “painterly”, luridly colored, overly shadowed, heavily textured, and in which the details of visual composition are conceived so strongly that their relevance surpasses the dynamical stuff of plot. A good deal of that was lost with Pye’s softened setting and constrained scope, and while I usually support excision of superfluous detail, Peake sacrificed what he was best at.

Peake actually spent a good deal of his life on Sark, as an artist before the second world war and later with his family, and his characters (the painter Thorpe and the titular Pye), the two aliens in the island society, are almost surely depictions of the author himself. It’s a fascinating viewpoint, because each of them are loaded up with profound measures of love and contempt, it’s as if they’re two little vehicles of intense self-deprecation, executed with enough social intelligence to loathe the self-absorption as much as anything. Thorpe, a minor character, is merely a dope, easily swayed but impervious to conversion, a man with an occasional eye but who is lacking either sufficient motivation or sufficient talent to turn those visions into anything like an artistic truth. Mr. Pye, on the other hand, is ostensibly a man of all the right kinds of conviction, an earnest seeker who is, over the course of the novel, punished for the effort. (It would be an interesting exercise to contrast Peake’s conception of himself the artist to Franz Kafka’s. Both suffer for their genius, but Kafka goes for martyrdom, the art ultimately understood only by the artist, and Peake finds only derision in that pose.)

Harold Pye comes to Sark to gently proselytize a vague message of goodness, a church of God the great omnipresent Pal, winning the locals over by wit, respect, and example. Pye is so self-possessed, so pure, so sweet, and so right that he begins to transform the moral landscape of the island. He’s so good that his Pal gives him wings, which, on real people, isn’t precisely a blessing. To get rid of the horrifying things, he abandons his evangelism and tries to work them off with sin, the results of which have their own unsettling supernatural manifestation.

I want to tell you that Peake doesn’t play his spiritual dichotomies well, but the truth is, I’m not sure it’s not intentional. Pye’s goodness is of an ecumenical sort, pushing at ideas of spiritual harmony, forgiveness, and emotional moderation, and those wings, they make more sense as divine irony than as a vehicle for character study, but the irony isn’t much in the prose. At the climax of Pye’s evangelism, the author throws the putrefying corpse of a whale onto the shore, and this feels allegorical too, it feels like celestial sabotage and for unknown reasons. Afterwards, the evil that Pye undertakes to remove his wings isn’t the naturally opposite (antisocial) sort, but instead tends more symbolically biblical. In an effort to make them shink, the character engages in some petty vandalism, which is funny, and yes, he corrupts one comically deserving member, but other than that, he refrains from actually hurting anyone, or from going after the obvious avenues of emotional abuse (or gratification). Instead, he’s diverted to some silly off-camera Satanism, something suggestively involving goats.

I want to tell you that these things don’t balance at all, but the book feels subtler and more powerful in hindsight than it felt while I was reading. As constructed, it works a lot better as a backhanded condemnation of God. It would explain the contrast of the charitable positivist religiosity, which only resulted in the well-timed punishment by a capricious deity with the goofy nature of evil, and the (uncondemned) sexual characters that came closer to naturalism than the Great Pal ever did. Does the author hate Pye for his self-satisfied benevolence? I can tell you that I didn’t connect to him very much, but he was really too thin a character to annoy me either. And in context, Pye’s good works produce good humanist consequences, which is a point against irony. The bad deeds that follow (pitching the old bat down the stairs, say) are as intentionally nasty as the prior events were wholesome, and they don’t come out as unintended consequence of good effort. Peake may well be poking views of right and wrong and their alleged spiritual consequences, but for me to buy into the deeper meaning of Mr. Pye, I’d have to believe that the author meant it. I could be convinced of that, I think.

#

Not everyone is so delicate in exploring their ideas of faith. You can go to some overtly religious writers if that’s the fix you need. I’ve been exposed to things like The Gospel According to the Simpsons as a young person, still associated with a sort of liberal church. There was some “cool” Christian literature we’d talk through in those days, looking for unceremonious expressions of faith to maybe stoke up the youth.

Gospel doesn’t work very well as a theological argument though. In the opening sequence, Pinsky pretty well nails his case shut before he opens it. He brings up a scene from the series in which Homer Simpson throws up an intercessionary prayer:

“confirmation of the deal, he prays, will come in the form of ‘absolutely no sign.’ There is no sign.” [God doesn't even mind if Homer eats the offering of cookies and milk himself] “Homer mutters the benediction, ‘Thy will be done.’”

The ensuing discussion calls upon the Intelligent Design authority William Dembski (and even barring what I think about ID, Dembski deserves ridicule for heading a chapter with ‘Recognizing the Divine Finger’ without irony), along with Biblical chapter and verse to overanalyze the theological argument, while committing the worst sin of all, completely failing to get the joke. (Hint: possibly something to do with the milk.) It’s not all that bad, but it’s sure a bad opener. Pinsky himself shows ample signs of equanimity, but he’s far too credulous of his experts for my tastes. Reaching back to other religious “thinkers” like Jonah (‘what should dismay liberals is that so many of today’s pieties are constructs of the Left’) Goldberg in the conclusion really doesn’t do the cause any favors either. The deep Godly content is already a stretch before the dimbulb scions of the moral majority get drug out to support it.

Pinsky tacks on a couple other notable failures in the getting-the-joke department. In a cartoon television series, God’s occasional tendency to grant wishes through prayer doesn’t actually affirm any real aspect of the universe’s nature. I hate to remind the guy that it’s fiction, even if divine reward does fill the need for storytelling motifs. Likewise, the point about Ned Flanders, who gets a whole chapter to himself as the model Evangelical, is that while he is indeed a nice man, his rigid Christianity can also make him totally inhuman (sometimes in a positive way, but hardly always). These tidbits grate, but on the whole, the middle part of this book is surprisingly readable and enjoyable. Or maybe not surprising: Pinsky basically runs down at length the favorable approaches the show has taken to religion, and the entire middle of it is more of a report than it is an argument, often summarizing entire episodes, pointing out the religious jokes that the writers threw in. And the jokes are still funny. Most of the analysis (as well as most of the humor) is a run-down on the quirky, mild-mannered Protestantism the family participates in, but there’s the show’s token Jewish entertainer, and the Hindu character gets a chapter, as did the one episode of Buddhism. (In this edition. Homer’s native American vision quest brought on by a Guatemalan pepper remains unexplored.) As they get further from the Abrahamic faiths, the writers come off a little more shallow, and the parts they got right or wrong was analyzed in a shallow way, but it was still not unappreciated. I can’t say I’ve read any interviews with the writers before, and Pinsky’s discussion of their backgrounds and roles writing the show was the most interesting original content.

But let’s point out the obvious. Although there is faith depicted in the series, The Simpsons is not about religion. The writers of the show, to their credit, have complex enough viewpoints about Christianity and other religions to offer a spectrum of positions as they suit the story or, more importantly, the humor. The Simpsons has religious and other conservative elements, and is, in fact admirable about balancing their worth, but calling the show a religious experience is reducing it. What The Simpsons does have is damn good comedy writing, and after 15 years of watching the silly program, I thank Pinsky for reminding me of that.

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