A TISSUE OF LIES

A teenager intent on becoming a Catholic priest is rocked by family secrets in Nemeth’s knotty coming-of-age novel.

It’s the summer of 1965, and 14-year-old Eddie Kovacs has his heart set on attending a Catholic seminary in the fall to study for the priesthood, cheered on by the priests and nuns of St. Catherine’s parish in Appleton, Wisconsin. But his family is too tied up in their own problems to help advance his ambition. His father, Frank, a domineering, cash-strapped union official at a paper mill, would rather he go to a public high school than a pricey seminary; his mother, Gail, is a beaten-down alcoholic who has to beg Frank for shopping money; and his brother, Danny, worries that the draft will derail his dream of playing professional baseball. Eddie begins a chaste romance with Marcy, a bohemian classmate who plies him with books like Crime and Punishment. The two begin spying on and photographing people, uncovering hidden scandals: Father MacMillan may be a pedophile; Father Bauer and Sister Mary Alice are conducting an illicit affair; and Frank, who is also the parish bookkeeper, is skimming the Sunday collection. All of this violates Catholic ethics, but so does Eddie’s scheme to use blackmail to save Danny from the draft, keep Frank out of jail, and obtain his seminary tuition. Nemeth’s yarn vividly portrays a family under pressure, their quarrels and picking sharpened by a grinding lack of money (“We have priorities, Eddie,” sighs Gail; “Your priority is gin,” he retorts). Eddie is a complex anti-hero: not as holy as he thinks, but capable of deep feeling, rendered in lyrical prose (“Sometimes I cried because I’d never see my grandmother again, and sometimes I laughed when I remembered her antics…She loved to dance and she loved to flirt. I had watched her do both at the wedding of the girl who grew up across the street”). Readers will root for his crooked search for a compromised goodness.

An engrossing story of a kid deciphering the fine line between right and wrong.