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Hallelujah Side

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Living on "The Hallelujah Side"

Those of us who as children were dragged kicking and screaming against their will into church by their parents know that there are few joys in life better than sleeping in on a Sunday morning. As a result, who could blame us if we grew up harboring cynical attitudes and major resentments toward anything that smacked of God or organized religion. Hey, it's a lot easier to blame God (or your parents), than to look at how you might have contributed to your very own present miserable lot in life, right?

In fact, the church has been such a darling scapegoat and negative narrative engine driving so many novels that it is often easy to forget one seldom addressed and simple fact - there is real, bona fied, magic at the heart of religion.

And that is the triumph of "The Hallelujah Side," a wonderfully comic and sublime antidote for spiritual cynicism - a canny coming of age debut novel that recognizes the fear and intolerance fueling organized religion yet embraces rather than condemns the wonder, magic, and protective healing power of faith.

"It had been a Second Coming sky all day, which meant they might be in heaven by this evening." This remarkable first sentence kicks off a world of plush toy demons and blue-nosed angels - of midnight rooftop flights and wondrous water lilly maiden games. In other words, the divinely haunted world of precocious nine-year old Roxanne "Roxy" Fish.

The novel is set in the sputnik-fevered fifties in Ames, Iowa, where "it was so quiet you could hear the night crawlers traveling." Not unlike the Brewster clan in Arsenic and Old Lace, Roxy's immediate family, the Fishes, are lovingly drawn eccentric and likable oddballs. The difference is the Fishes don't want to kill people, they just want to convert them door-to-door. In fact, to the idealistic Fish way of thinking it is a glorious accident to be living in the Last Days. "Roxy marveled at her good luck in being born into a family that knew the truth. You could feel the Holy Ghost and the godly power of it, mad with possibilities."

The down side is Roxy not only has to endure the humiliation of growing up in her ultra-evangelical family but must also try to cope with the ever-present threat of eternal damnation hanging over her small red-headed soul. Needless to say, maintaining constant holy zeal can be very stressful. Luckily, like Moses and the burning bush, Roxy's best friend and spiritual advisor is a talking hedge.

Roxy's father, Winston, when not practicing baseball with Roxy, is a diligent minister in the First Assembly of God Church who regularly reads Newsweek and Life magazine to study the abhorrent things Americans are doing to find fodder for his sermons. Winston is a by-the-book Bible thumper who is none the less capable of amazing tolerance for his daughters' and others dissenting points of view. Roxanne's mother, Zelda Fish, who adores her family and constantly frets about them not making it to heaven with her, is always ready with a pithy come back like, "God isn't afraid of guns, God invented them." Roxanne's thorny sister, `Colleen the beautiful', pretends to be a Catholic, a genius, and adopted.

One of the best characters in the book is Roxy's uncle Roland, a Pentecostal healer who smells like newborn babies, prays in the closet and says hello by merely staring at people. Roland's God is a big God who impartially cures sinners, Dutch elm disease and insomniac dogs.

But this is Roxy's story and her duel dilemma is that she secretly loves singing rock-and-roll music and is not "saved." How can she ever reconcile her childish faith and her worldly desires? It is a heavy burden on a child's heart to try and belt out Little Richard with a `pork chop' voice and still have one ear cocked, waiting for the archangel Gabriel to blow his trumpet heralding the Rapture.

When the Fish family moves to California Roxy laments, "Pecan Street sported sinners' houses filled with lost souls who did not even bother to go to the wrong church. Some were atheists, she strongly suspected. In Glendale even the sky did not look Christian. The ragged clouds suggested not the Second Coming but Charles Darwin, Communism, dented Budweiser beer cans."

The tone may be reminiscent of Garrison Keillor and Ray Bradbury, but author Huffey isn't afraid to have her characters periodically collide head-on with real world sex and violence to both great comic and tragic effect.

The daughter of two Pentecostal preachers, Huffey illuminates the insular religious Pentecostal faith as only an insider could. That she is able to write about it so objectively and warmly only hints at demons she herself may have overcome and reconciled.

The book suggests that sometimes you must break away from both the status quo and family to find yourself. That redemption cannot be found in a Bible, an outhouse or a grade school music room. Redemption is not an outside but an inside job. Oh yeah, and sometimes very funny.

Huffey, like her avatar Roxanne, has obviously found her own fine "pork chop" voice. As I read each page I found myself smiling and felt my cynicism slipping away. I can hardly wait to read what she comes up with next.

Huffey tells her story without mocking or parodying her subject matter. This is a significant accomplishment when you consider that she is taking on organized evangelical religion, the 1950s, and the midwest, all in the same book. The book is wonderfully comic, and her nine-year-old narrator is neither cloying nor terminally cute. I laughed out loud on just about every page. Reading this book gave me a bit more sympathy for organized religion, something this old cynic hasn't felt for many years. I recommend this novel very highly, and I can't wait until Ms. Huffey writes another one.

Roxanne Fish, heroine of The Hallelujah Side, struggles to choose between serving her family's God or letting her gospel light shine by singing rock and roll. Ultimately she does both. What an interesting and funny and worthwhile book!

If you are not already a Holy Roller, reading "The Hallelujah Side" will make one of you. You'll roll in the floor laughing. The author does not ridicule Pentecostals. She writes from the perspective of an insider who has learned to laugh at herself. Anyone with a sense of humor will enjoy this book, regardless of their religious affiliation, or lack of it. Evangelical Christians with a Holiness or Pentecostal background, will especially relate.

Those who find this book interesting will definitely enjoy "Growing Up Pentecostal," a non-fiction book on the same subject by J. Sephen Conn.

Roxanne Fish, the young heroine of Rhoda Huffey's enchanting debut novel "the Hallelujah Side," hears voices. They are the voices of her parents, devout leaders of the First Assembly of God Church and they are the skeptical, worldy voices of her "sinful" neighbors, the Woolworths. They are the voices of her own personal demon, Fred, who regularly berates her attempts at religious devotion and assure he she will surely roast in hell, and the comforting imaginary sounds of the hedge around her church which assures her that her secrets are safe. The sounds come from her rebellious and captivating older sister, Colleen, who insists that she truly does not belong to this arcane family. The voices come from Little Richard and Aretha Franklin, who, almost as if in conspiracy against God, liberate Roxanne to discover who and what she is.

This fast-paced novel, after all, deals with life in capital letters. There are the Christians (renouncing the corrupt world in which they life and always preparing, always anticipating Rapture) and the Sinners (people like me, who enjoy the world and all of its illicit pleasures). Despite Winston's valiant attempts to purify his family (this pastor even enjoys deconstructing Das Kapital to prove its irrelevance to Christians), he never loses his humanity, and his resolve to live a morally pure life contains an unalloyed dignity. Winston repudiates travelling evangelists (whom Huffey scathingly portrays as hypocrites and con-men) and even literally throws money away from an airplane as an object lesson about devotion to his conflicted daughter. He is a strong father and the reader cannot help but like him.

The true beauty of the novel lives in Roxanne, whose adventures in the real world contain a surreal quality. Never permitted to experience life as her contemporaries did in the 1950s, Roxanne must rely on her imagination and her desperate need to disover her authentic voice. As Roxanne tells us, God does not like "alcohol, tobacco, sleeveless dresses, all nudity, lipstick, fingernail polish, earrings, rock and roll, Elvis Presley, dancing, movies, roller skating, swearing, murder, lies...and...Partagas Robusto cigars. The rest Roxy tried not to think about." Despite this (or perhaps because of it), Roxanne's spiritual quest is all the more compelling. How she reconciles faith and ability, religion and music, family and the world are skillfully rendered by an author whose own experience with faith and art give her first novel an air of authenticity.

"The Hallelujah Side" is indeed an interesting and unusual book dealing with a rare subject: an extremely stigmatized religion as seen through the eyes of a little girl who has never known anything else. The story takes many funny turns as Roxanne Fish, the main character, attempts to balance religion and rock n' roll. Definitely worth a read.

This book is very well-written, unusual and a great read. I would highly recommend it to baby-boomers and also people interested in different religious backgrounds.

Rhoda Huffey's nine-year old doppleganger, Roxy, knows she can hang onto her Mom's skirt and rise up with her into heaven in case Gabriel blows his golden trumpet just after Roxy has imagined how good corn on the cob will taste, thereby putting idols before God.Roxy adds immedately after knowing she has sinned in imagination, "with butter and salt." Incorrigible, Roxy is a throw-away line little poet who sees Ames as Huck sees the Missippi,and who talks to her personal demons in Ames , Iowa, just as Bulgakov has his demons chatting in Moscow in The Master and Margarita.This is a wholly original, wildly funny, but loving and clear-eyed evocation of growing up in a devout family in the middle of America in the 1950's. A great time there and then, celebrated in clean, swift prose. A great novel.

Huffey is on LA Channel 77's Omnibus show reading from her novel on November 6 at 8 pm. Same time and day on Chennel 3 in West Hollywood and Marina del Ray and in Beverly Hills on Channel 37. She is a great reader too.

I picked up this book expecting it to be quite good. There are many hard-to-understand beliefs and issues in the world of the uber-religious, and having them explained by a seasoned writer can be educational, thought-provoking, and even entertaining. This book was none of the above. Since the cover writeup points towards the humorous end of religion, I expected it to be of the caliber of Frank Schaeffer's Portofino. I was sorely disappointed. The writing is distant and half-formed, and I never fully identify with or understand Roxanne, the protagonist. The subject matter is halfway interesting, but Huffey's rendition takes the book down to mediocre. Retrospectively, literary tension between the extremely religious and "those of this world" takes one of two paths-gently humorous yet understanding, like Schaeffer's Portofino; or a cynical look at faith from a soul who has been tortured by it, like Mary Potter Engel's A Woman of Salt. I would steer you away from Hallelujah Side and towards either of those books if you're looking for well-written novels with religion as the subject matter. (Another good choice: Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver.)