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The Body of This: Stories

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After seeing the positive reviews of The Body of This I had high hopes for the book and looked forward to reading it. I have to admit that I have been disappointed. Although the book is being pushed towards a devout Catholic audience I fear that many practicing Catholics might be a bit put off by the graphic sex scenes and the four letter words. BUT, if a person does not mind descriptions of bodily parts and bodily functions on practically every page then they will LOVE this book. Yes, the sacraments are included, such as when in the first story a woman goes to Communion right after sexual play with her boyfriend. The description of urine on the pregnancy test did not exactly thrill me but there is no telling how some other people might be inspired by it. I actually have not read such colorful descriptions of bodily functions since I read Nabokov in college. If you liked Lolita then The Body of This is definitely the book for you.

There was something about the book that as I read it I began to feel despair. The stories were not uplifting, just gross. I have been told by some literary types that McNabb's book is art, and that it is beautiful, and that if I do not see the beauty then I am a prude or a philistine. Well, then, so be it. The book reminds me of some of the modernist Catholic Churches that were built in the sixties and seventies, twisted structures, ugly as sin. My parents were told that such buildings were Catholic and that they were great architecture and that everybody needed to be more open and progressive. They were deceived. After seeing for myself the old churches of Europe I learned what true beauty was, and will never again be taken in by vulgarity masquerading as art.

If you enjoy profanity then you will relish The Body of This, and if you despise Catholic piety then you will be even more delighted, since it is pretty scarce in the volume.

The Liturgy of the Hours (Office of Readings), the Seventh Week of Easter contains the following excerpt from a sermon by a sixth century African bishop:

"The disciples spoke in the language of every nation. At Pentecost God chose this means to indicate the presence of the Holy Spirit; whoever had received the Spirit spoke in every kind of tongue....It was love that was to bring the Church of God together all over the world. And as individual men who received the Holy Spirit in those days could speak in all kinds of tongues, so today the Church, united by the Holy Spirit, speaks in the language of every people....

"This was the way in which the Lord's promise was fulfilled: <em>No one puts new wine into old wineskins. New wine is put into fresh skins, and so both are preserved.</em> So when the disciples were heard speaking in all kinds of languages, some people were not far wrong in saying, <em>They have been drinking too much new wine</em>. The truth is that the disciples had now become fresh wineskins, renewed and made holy by grace. The new wine of the Holy Spirit filled them, so that their fervor brimmed over and they spoke in manifold tongues. By this spectacular miracle they became a sign of the Catholic Church, which embraces the language of every nation."

I quote this passage at length because it expresses perfectly something of my own purpose in founding Idylls Press, as well as my broader hopes for a "new Catholic literary revival"--a revival befitting our age, and one that would include fiction that radiates the Church's eternal vision while expressing it in "manifold tongues", embracing "the language of every nation".

The passage also seemed a perfect introduction to Andrew McNabb's exquisite little collection of short (sometimes short-short) stories, THE BODY OF THIS. McNabb, bless him, a gifted young writer, is not afraid to speak the sometimes coarse and pungent language of his unchurched contemporaries. It is a language perfectly suited to the overarching theme of the collection, which is the mystery of the Incarnation: the choice of God to enter into the often mucky and grotesque "thingness" of bodily human existence...which in our own day seems to get more mucky and grotesque by the week. Or, as a good friend of mine (and mother of eight) once said, "Life is so *daily*."

No human language, as we know, is capable of expressing the fullness of the Glory of the Lord. Some languages are simpler, others far more complex; some have developed a brilliant literary culture, others haven't even developed an alphabet; some are graceful-sounding and poetic, others almost brutal to the ear. It reminds me of the joke that was going around my university's Foreign Language Building back in the seventies: "Italian is the language of art, French is the language of love, and German is the language you speak to your horse." And yet, as the passage from the Liturgy reminds us, whatever its gifts or limitations, the Gospel is capable of being preached in all languages, in all places and times and cultures, and it is the present task of Catholic storytellers to find a language-or rather "languages", since each storyteller speaks a different one-that can be understood by the people of our own time and culture.

McNabb's language is succinct and gently humorous, and sometimes appropriately coarse, since the vignettes in this collection are mostly about those daily "bodily" realities that none of us can avoid but few of us like to talk about; realities that some of us (I believe mistakenly) regard as unsuitable for Christian literature or contemplation: the penitential grace to be gleaned from cleaning up after a despised neighbor's pooch; saying prayers to Jesus's Shoulder; the mysterious "law of gradualism" that can, with grace and good will, bring a pair of young lovers out of a hurtful and sinful sexual relationship into a consecrated one; the beauty of sharing an aging spouses bodily humiliations. To eschew these subjects out of squeamishness or a misapplied sense of modesty or decorum is to leave the strategic field of the nature of bodily life wide open to the depredations of secular writers, many of them misanthropic materialists who have no concept of the Incarnation or hope of Resurrection; it is to follow the counsels of timidity and despair, and will not further a Catholic literary revival.

Having said that, McNabb's stories will not suit every taste, and that's alright too. If you think Walker Percy is crude, or Flannery O'Connor weird and grotesque, you will probably not like McNabb, who though a Yankee is ploughing similar territory. But I don't make the comparisons lightly: McNabb is very very talented.

Take this disturbingly familiar bit from "Extrusion", McNabb's 700-word story about a man named Bent, praying for grace, sort of, as he watches a neighbor letting her mangy dog poo in his pristine front yard:

"This wasn't the Balkans where neighbors turned murderous overnight, but Portland, Maine, where it was the case, as with any other place humans lived, that at a moment's notice you could circle in and find what was easiest to despise about just about anyone. Bent knew her. And he knew her type. Of the three main kinds on this block, she belonged to the original--those living enclosed by tin or vinyl clapboarding on the outside and faux wood-paneling in. Defiant beside gentrified brick and stained glass, and living knowingly, gleefully, among a litany waiting for her death.

"Deed done. There she went. Bent sucked on her first step away like a strychnine pop."

Or how's this for a great opening to a sweet story ("Service") about the Christian ideal of service:

"So here it is: It was Terry Mulvaney's lifelong desire to live the Christian ideal of absolute subordination and obedience, and so he got a job at The Home Depot in South Portland.

"He was thirty-three now, and had lived enough of life to know that true callings rarely came at the pointed end of a thunderbolt."

That's beautiful stuff.

Andrew McNabb, I believe, is one of our most talented young writers, and one whose career I intend to follow closely. I hope he tackles a novel one of these days, sooner rather than later.

The Body of This, Andrew McNabb's debut collection of short stories, belongs to the body of finest modern, timeless literature. Informed as much by McNabb's unswerving Catholic faith as by his incisive observations of this world from the perspective of writer, man, husband, and the father of four young children, these stories open a new - and slant - eye on the world, on the spirit, on the human being, on the physical body, and on the unknowable whole that is so much more than the sum of these parts.

The characters in McNabb's stories are people we know, and would like to know, and are afraid of knowing. They are ourselves, and our other selves, alternative versions of everyman and everywoman, each holding his or her unique and deeply private world up to the light, each of those worlds settling at an oblique and unnervingly precarious angle to the earth.

There is Charlie, in To Jesus's Shoulder, who dresses and thinks in full and constant color as he walks through life with a question mark raised high before him; Lazarus, in Dead Man Walking, of Sudanese extraction, who must make his way home in a brave new - white - world, relying on himself and trusting the natural elements and his own body; the unnamed narrator of Rapture, who inhabits an unnameable world between the architectures of the soul and the skin.

On the book's cover, Brett Lott cautions the reader: "The Body of This is a tough little bundle of shards that can as easily cut and make you bleed as it can reflect the one true light." The blood that is let from those same cuts also has the capacity to wash and heal, as the brine of the ocean, or the curious balm of life's eternal questions, raised in these stories, that life most often leaves unanswered.

A superbly gifted storyteller, McNabb brings us a brand-new distillation of the finest American-Irish literary talent. He treats each chosen word with respect but is not intimidated by his own vocabulary: he weaves himself into the lexicon of his stories as confidently as a bird through the sky, and offers his readers - within the generous minimalism of his language - a space in which to contemplate the landscape of life, the shapes between the shapes, where life is truly lived.

See other reviews by this writer: The Sea by John Banville; Perfect Madness by Judith Warner

The Body of This

Caveat lector. The short stories in Andrew McNabb's collection, "The Body of This," are not about Catholics, or even catholicism. Seven are about faith and the way a person handles it ("Blemished," "Bride of Christ," "Jesus's Shoulder", "To be Married," "The King of the Tables," "Herbert Wenkel was not your Average Man," "Service"). The remaining 21 stories deal with other perplexing human issues (getting old, being fat, being beautiful or not, being pregnant or not, being an immigrant, the petty irritations of life in a small town, Life and Death, heterosexual sex, and so forth).

The most important thing about "The Body of This," is that McNabb is a good story-teller, with a gift for bringing to the foreground significant details that illuminate his characters' hearts and minds. Most of these beautifully crafted miniatures give enough detail, enough personality to their characters, that they linger in your memory, long after you've given the book to a friend--who calls you to ask, "Who IS this guy? What else has he written?"

Almost all the pieces are finely turned miniatures. But McNabb is very good when he breaks out of self-imposed confines. In "It's What it Feels Like," at 22 pages, the longest, most fully realized short story here, he shows an exceptional ear for dialogue, dialogue that reveals character and advances the drama. He leaves his characters free to interact and be themselves. That they fail to rise to the occasion presented them is poignant, no more. At the end, we wonder if they'll ever change. McNabb makes it acceptable to admit that some people won't--don't--ever change. And that's ok.

McNabb leaves us looking forward to more stories like "It's What it Feels Like," stories in which the characters can develop more fully and let us in to more of the nooks and crannies of their world and their reactions to it and to each other.

Andrew McNabb is a unique writer. That said, it is a shame that more people are not doing what he is doing: contemporary literary fiction informed by a sacramental Catholic worldview. However, there is no reason why any of these stories would not appeal to someone of a different worldview. This finesse sets him apart from an unfortunately large number of writers.

I find many contemporary writers have nothing to say. McNabb does not have that problem, and if only for this is worth reading. He might just be the antidote to the narcissism and nihilism that are everywhere in contemporary fiction.

Andrew McNabb is a brilliant American writer who is poised, upon the release of this amazing debut collection, to take his rightful position within the canon. Yes, the book is that good. How does a writer capture in succinct and concise parlance the ethereal pain and wounded beauty of yearning and sadness? How does a writer turn magic and reality into a short story collection that at once prompts tears and laughter? How does that same writer offer eloquent character descriptions that haunt the reader as a subtle spice of thought contained within a reading's "afterlife"? (The detail of a young nun as having "eyes like French chocolates" has created a luscious ringing in my ears for at least a month now.) McNabb pulls all of the above off brilliantly. The spiritual, the physical... the human, McNabb relays it all. McNabb's scope is both precise and wide as his writing embraces many experiences and people; therefore, the book is an entirely enjoyable read, even as the compelling edge sneaks in and holds your heart. Andrew McNabb is an exceptional writer with much to share, READ THIS BOOK!!! YOU WILL RELISH EVERY PAGE!!!