Review: A Mixed Blessing
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 06 23, 2012
At some level, most American literature is Christian literature, since what conditions the voice of American literature on the world's literary stage is its descent from the Mayflower and its subsequent passage through all the mutations and applications of Christianity in the evolution of this great and complex nation.  To the chagrin of crusading atheists, church and faith are at the heart of the American experience, whether you accept or reject God and religion.  In its way, even "Moby-Dick" may be read as a Christian allegory.  By contrast, European literature, at least for the last century, has been predominantly about literature itself, or psychoanalysis, or the human condition; as if Nietzsche had already solved the question of God, quite brilliantly, so noone need bother with it anymore.  In the reality show "The Next Joe Millionaire," the fake millionaire, David Smith, is a Catholic Texan who will chose a European woman by the end of the show.  In one dinner scene, he automatically starts saying a prayer before eating, and most of the European girls burst out laughing.  To me, that said a lot more than the producers probably thought it did.When you designate something as Christian, it probably means that it won't mind taking a few risks with the banal niceties we've come to practice since the Clinton years.  What you get here is a mixed blessing of enlightened views and some eerily reactionary ones.  One of my guiding principles comes from Noam Chomsky: "If you don't believe in free expression for people you despise, you don't believe in it at all."  This collection taxed my embrace of that noble precept.  Some of the stories here, like "Sanctuary," are utterly brilliant.  Others aren't quite as brilliant, but work very nicely.  Some stories I found especially revolting in their undisguised hatred not only of alternative lifestyles but of sex itself.  One tale, set during Gay Pride, details the unabashed emotional manipulation of a transsexual in the name of love, by an author who makes sure we know the party line about the LGBT community, before the protagonist sets about seducing an emotionally-insecure person (if you know anything about what hormones do to a person undergoing gender realignment, you'll understand what this means), after a barrage of hatred from "bad" Christians has reduced her to tears.  The "bad" Christians attack the tranny, and then the "good" Christians step in and make her feel welcome, when she's vulnerable.  Except that, fundamentally, both camps disapprove of her choices, and the "bad" Christians are the only ones who have the guts to come out and say so.  I thought the one thing Christ was hardest on was hypocrisy.  The story in question has all the warmth and heart of one in which Nazi soldiers are kind to a starving Jewish family by giving them poisoned food.Another distasteful tale goes out of its way to demonize human sexuality by presenting it as fundamentally repellant under the tiresome sex:bad-love:good rubric that, oddly enough, conditions much erotica.  And just as the "good" and "bad" Christians have something in common in one tale, so another tale shares something in common with the erotic requirements of a country that, as I started off saying, is, at least for now, fundamentally Christian and has yet to escape its Puritan roots enough to embrace Eros as a beautiful, liberating, and even sthetic force in its own right.  Christian fiction that accomplished something like that would be truly "edgy."  Which means it would probably, in the opinion of most, cease to be Christian at all.  And that--ironically--forms the crux of the problem: that Christianity is sex-obsessed, even when it tries not to be, and will probably always found itself on an individual's war with his or her own genitals.  For me, the stories that work best in this collection are the ones that ignore that familiar, pre-Freudian, historically trite and inevitably sick interpretation of Eve's forbidden fruit.