An imaginative plot and some lively dialogue can’t overcome the forced eccentricity of the characters and their facile...
An unhappy performance artist imagines herself as a sacrificial lamb in this debut novel.
As the founder and editor of the ’zine Hip Mama, Gore challenged the belief that motherhood barred women from a hipster cultural scene and tapped into a readership that wanted to rewrite traditional social roles. Her insight forms the basis of this novel, in which an unlikely band of social misfits create a traveling performance-art show organized around saints, resurrections and redemptions. Behind the scenes, they come together as a family; they seek romance, take care of a child and nurture each other’s fragile egos. Frankka, the narrator and star of the show, is a stigmatic, able to replicate the wounds Jesus received on the cross. Her fellow performers include a trapeze artist, a psychic, a drag queen and a moody Italian firebreather who imagines the troupe as his salvation. The narrative alternates between Frankka’s account of her disaffection with her theatrical life—which intensifies following a newspaper article that leads to questions about her authenticity—and her brief, breezy introductions to the lives of various Catholic saints. Despite being rather overcrowded with saints and sinners alike, the story never quite takes off. The characters’ tormented relationship with their own pasts is strangely flat, their quirkiness studied and unconvincing. Even the narrator’s soul-searching, which often takes the form of extended and rather labored meditations on Catholic rituals and symbols, seems contrived and forced. The author has a nice ear for dialogue, and there are moments when Frankka’s diffuse anger and loneliness come alive, but her insistence that Frankka—and by extension her fellow performers—are already suffering saints gives this work an annoyingly moralistic quality in which we learn a lesson about our common humanity.
An imaginative plot and some lively dialogue can’t overcome the forced eccentricity of the characters and their facile insights.Pub Date: May 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-085428-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2006
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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