From Publishers Weekly
Set in rural Missouri a few decades ago, this fifth novel from poet and novelist Glancy (Flutie; The Closets of Heaven) consists of short, evocative vignettes related by Hadley Williges, the eldest daughter of her quarrelsome family. Her fervently Christian mother, Ann, and Aunt Mary, seek the road to redemption, while her father keeps taking the road out of town. Hadley's dad, Bill, writes for the Kansas City Chronicle. He and his brother Farley, a photographer, travel the highways searching for stories and photos, earning Ann and Aunt Mary's wrath. After difficult college years, Hadley becomes a Chronicle reporter and travels with Farley. As they collaborate, her faith in Jesus and the Bible collides with his secular trust in human works. In single images, remarks and disjunct scenes, as if from a journalist's notebook, Hadley lays out each important moment of her maturation, from grade school to middle age. Many vignettes come with biblical epigraphs: some accompany passages from Aunt Mary's visionary journals (which also explain Glancy's mysterious title). After finding a disturbing secret in Mary's attic, watching her brother, Gus, descend into madness and losing her beloved sister, Nealy, to missionary work in Africa, Hadley is left with no clear answers but a resignation born of faith. While all the Williges are well drawn, Hadley is Glancy's finest creation. Given the number of evangelical Protestants in America, current American fiction contains surprisingly few sympathetic portraits of believers. Hadley and her life story come as a welcome, saddening, realistic and entirely convincing surprise. (Oct.) FYI: See Notes below for another forthcoming work by Glancy.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
The prolific Glancy (Flutie, 1998, etc.) continues her exploration of the sources and nature of religious faith. Hadley Willigie's family, rooted in a small Missouri town, is loudly dysfunctional: her mother is stringently religious, embracing a harsh version of Christianity; her father is a tough-minded journalist, outdoorsmanand skeptic. Hadley, her brother Gus, and her younger sister Healey react in varied but equally extreme ways to the escalating battles over child-rearing belief between their parents. Healey becomes profoundly devout, Gus retreats into a seductive dreamworld, and Hadley, torn between a desire to believe and admiration for her charming father, frequently draws her mother's ire. Looming in the background is Aunt Mary, their mother's astringent sister, a woman absolutely convinced of the rightness of her disturbing, caustic, and intense version of Christianity. Glancy follows Hadley from childhood to middle age. She marries, becomes a journalist and a mother herself, and continues to wobble between despairing doubt and faith. Healey, meanwhile, becomes a missionary in Africa, returning home only infrequently and seeming more serene than her mother or aunt, but just as devout. Glancy seems to suggest that Hadley's inability to enjoy life or connect fully with her husband or children has something to do with her inability to discover a healing faith. That changes, though, during a revival meeting, when a faith-healer, seemingly by the laying on of hands, is able to arouse in Hadley a restorative sense of belief and self-acceptance. Glancy's determination to plumb an unfashionable question in fictionhow faith or the lack of it shapes and sustains our livesis admirable, but it's undermined here by a fragmented, sometimes cryptic narrative, by language that sometimes labors too hard to catch the tang and pace of real speech, and by Hadley's wan character. Nonetheless, there are moving passages, and the battles over dogma and doubt are often fascinating. Well-intentioned, but more interesting for its ideas than for its characters. --
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