Customer Reviews

Midrash on the Juanitos: a didactic novella

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I love this novel. It starts out like Fear & Loathing in LV, but the hero is a preacher who tries to literally walk into the Bible. This is at the behest of his lawyer, "a Biblical literalist who doesn't believe in God." Meanwhile, his therapist sees his problem as a chemical imbalance and says that reading the Bible is a trigger he should avoid. So when his lawyer says that the Antichrist is dead, and the proof is in the three Epistles of John (the Juanitos), Rev. L can't help but "pull the trigger." It becomes a detective story. To paraphrase the reverend, he's drawn by the possibility and authenticity of the Bible, the heart-breaking beauty of living in a walking-in-love kind of life, as opposed to the shopping/downloading/flat-screen life that offers "nearly authentic pleasure." Full of hallucinations (or are they?) and funny, beautiful streams of conscious and subconscious, with amazing illustrations by Jim Larson. Read it. Or walk into it. Whatever you're comfortable with.

The lovable Reverend Lamblove rides again. And what a ride--equal parts Revere and Quixote. Neither post-modern nor pre-judgmental, this is no history-channel Naked New Testament documentary. Lamblove's crazed/inspired quest, for some fidelity in the authorship and meaning of the three Johns, is laudable. It is also hilarious. Lamblove's torturously non-geometric hermeneutical process elicits multiple insights, sidelights, and disclosure regarding the real anti-Christ. But Russell Rathbun's precocious preacher-man serves us all by his exegetical excesses. He is simply willing (if not certainly able) to excavate and decode some textual tension that many of us were not even aware of. In an era of widening gaps between mainstream Christian theology and some questionable cultural overreactions, Rathbun's novella brings fresh meat to a traditional midrash's stone soup.