Customer Reviews

Milk: A Novel

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Religious guilt and sexual angst saturate Milk, author Darcey Steinke's poetic and somewhat prosaic novella. Full of kinky, furtive sexuality and religious self-loathing, the three characters in this short, but powerful novel, traverse the snowy streets of Manhattan in a kind of spiritual and pious torment. Tension and desire ebbs and flows, as the god and sex obsessed Mary, Walter, and John, try to find meaning in a world that has been steadily abandoning them.

Mary, the central character, is a strangely troubled mystic, who pleasures herself with holy devotion, turning a prayer - ''Come, Lord Jesus, have mercy on me'' - into a lascivious invocation. As Mary tries to feed her newborn baby with her breast milk and cope with a husband who is emotionally distant, she becomes convinced that she has been made out of cosmic refuse - "stardust, and smoky vapor" - and of she concentrated, "she could tease down the life force for her own selfish use."

Walter is a gay, conflicted Episcopal priest who has been demoted to an outer-borough church for trying to seduce a teenager at Manhattan's Church of the Heavenly Rest. Although he's pretty much failed as a pastor, he still holds tenuously onto his position, seeking out monies for the economically challenged diocese wherever he can.

Walter harbors an ardent desire for boys. He spends his nights cruising gay bars and his days visiting Web sites ''for theologically minded adherents of S-and-M.'' He just can't let go of the ashes of Carlos, his one-time lover, and when he's not wishing to reconnect with the soul of his dead boyfriend, he's busy hating and despising the world.

His rage flies out and attaches to objects, and the only place he feels comfortable is in the warm and barely lit bars; his attitude being that "all through his life things outside the church are just as holy as the crosses and the statues inside."

And then there's John, an ex-claustrated monk who moves to Brooklyn Heights, and turns to a prostitute whose number he finds in The Village Voice. John has pretty much failed as a monk; "he had not let himself become absorbed into the monastic life; and out of insecurity, he had tried to protect his identity." When he wonders why God has forsaken him, the answer is, ''so you can know yourself." But life on the "outside" sees John preoccupied with carnal pursuits.

From the beginning, Milk has an almost rhythmical, supernatural quality, which enchants and captivates at regular intervals. Steinke's prose is floating, fluid, and remarkably balanced, depicting flirtation, and the object of desire for all three characters held just out of reach.

The frail Mary is forced to live with a husband who is more concerned with his image - his attempts to look sexy - than with his new family. Surrounded by her husband's ''Star Wars'' kitsch and other artifacts', including a ceramic unicorn, Mary becomes strange. She takes to hiding in closets for long sessions of prayer, and voices instruct her to fill her bathtub with dirt and plant flowers. In a dream, God had urged her to "save the world in prayer."

Mary eventually moves on to a heady affair with John, while Walter is heartbroken and is compelled to question the meaning of life when a cute, younger man cruelly rebuffs him. All three seem be suffering, searching for life's meaning, and wondering whether God seeks you, or whether you seek God.

Solemn and intense, Milk is also surprisingly sexy. But with its emphasis on the sacrificial in the form of blood, tears, and milk - the novel is about the often-sordid mix of sex and religion, combined also with the meaning of life. At one stage, Mary comments, "the world was on the age of revolution, pregnant with a different kind of life."

Perhaps then, Milk is really a veiled and oblique Christian allegory, a novel that shows us what happens when religion, sex, and the need for spiritual intimacy, can finally connect and intertwine. Mike Leonard May 05.

Milk, by Darcey Steinke of Suicide Blonde, is a strangely sexy novel. It is also a strangely spiritual novel. But-strangely-it is not a loving novel. This strikes home especially upon considering its title and opening scene. When we first meet Mary, one of three protagonists, she is nursing her baby. Nine short pages later, both she and baby are experiencing a religious vision, what we soon find out is called an Aleph, a point where time stops to open into God's universe and godhead itself. She mistakes the vision for an electrical short, but when she sweeps a broom through, it appears more like a holograph or even a reflected "magic trick." Now, there is no doubt that we are meant to take this vision and her returning encounters with it as real-or at least there is little doubt, as I will explain later. Little or no doubt, because Mary's baby becomes fascinated by the vision too and "bicycled his legs again and rocked his whole body forward."

The overwhelming spiritual aspect of Steinke's novel, however, derives not through any one organized religion. This, despite that Mary and both remaining protagonists are members of the Catholic Church. (One is a priest, the other a monk named John who has recently left the monastery in search of God.) In fact, not a single scene occurs inside a church proper. We've seen Mary having visions in her apartment; she later takes to praying in closets, since she claims they so resemble "little chapels." Walter, her friend and the priest in charge of an economically strapped inner city parish, decides that a bar he enters is "definitely holy. Mostly because of the longing. God loved longing and imbued it with sanctity." Similarly, John writes a letter justifying his departure from the monastery: "I want you to know that I now understand . . . that it [is] philosophically impossible for God to even think about evil, that Love is all and we must make ourselves into vehicles of Love."

But-and this brings up a huge gap-for John and all the characters "vehicles of Love" persistently stumble into vehicles of sensuality. Mary's sexual encounter with John leads to divorcing her husband, who has clearly been cheating and has lost all interest in her. John himself was warned as he left the monastery that the mystical woman he was leaving to search for was a "robot, an idealized notion of romantic love, impossible to replicate." And the last protagonist, the homosexual priest named Walter, endures a series of devastating and degrading sensual encounters in his quest for stable love. Even Mary's breast-feeding takes on a mystical intensity that cannot be sustained.

All this does not indicate a fault in the novel; rather, it indicates Steinke's theme: longing. Mary remembers, upon returning to a husbandless home after her initial tryst with John: "Walter always said that the chief thing that separates us from God is the thought that we are separate from him." John, in a cab leaving the monastery, echoes Christ's prayer, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" The answer God gives lines later is: "So you can know yourself." Walter, the priest, alters between believing that Mary is "some modern Hildegard or Mathilde, any of the early mystics who had experienced God firsthand," and admitting she is becoming "a sort of spooky chick," thus urging her to take her St. John's Wort and get on Zoloft. Ultimately though, he "understood what fueled her longing. It was unconscionable to live separated from God, like a cork held under water."

This novel offers a wonderful one-sitting read because it is so brief (130 pages) and so intense. And it is easy to read because the scenes and characters-even minor ones-are so well drawn, the plot so straightforward. The language too is lovely, though a warning is in order: much of its loveliness derives from rapid ascents into heavenly visions and equally rapid descents into hellish vulgarity. That is the novel's challenge.

In her acknowledgements, Steinke offers praise for "the work and ideas of Thomas Merton." Merton was a Trappist monk who once offered his own praise for the writer Flannery O'Connor, adding this admonitory question: Must all her characters be so despicable? If he were alive today, he would surely praise Steinke in a similar manner, asking whether all her characters must remain so unfulfilled and isolated. Both she and O'Connor would no doubt give the same reply: "Of course they must." Just so, at one point Mary confesses to her long-time friend Walter: "I understand my soul is like a piece of God implanted in me, and while it's the same substance as God, it's much more cloudy because it's so hard to be human."

I won't give a book review (since a few others have given complete synopses) but I have to say that this little book was simply put, beautiful in the most profound, soulful way. I wanted to underline most of it or commit entire paragraphs to memory. To call it prose is not quite right. It was poetry in the highest, purest sense of the word. I loved the way the author gave you bits and pieces of each character and let you fill in the spaces. I've never read a book quite like this one. The entire book was a praise poem to SPIRIT. I can't wait to read Ms. Steinke's other books.

Don't let the short length fool you, this is a book that packs a powerful punch. This story of three people, a new mother, a gay minister and a former monk, all searching for meaning in their lives, takes place in a wintry Brooklyn that is as bleakly beautiful as their internal struggles. It is a quiet book yet full of powerful imagry, with a sustained mood that is both hoepful and despairing.

This is an extraordinary novel, like all of Steinke's work. There's such poignancy in the contrast between the stasis most of the characters seem frozen into and their inner turmoil, the intensity of their feelings and thoughts, the philosophies they're struggling with. Their emotions are almost exhausting to experience, and the reader DOES experience them. And yet the book is so delicately nuanced, so subtle and elegant -- a perfect sonata.

This short novel is based heavily on events and characters from the authors own life. A typical DArcey Steinke tale in that it is more than a little bit sad, somewhat ugly and yet still beautiful all at once.

Darcy Steinke weaves together a wonderful journey where you observe spirituality, sexuality and the diversity of the human condition through the dark and ambiguous lens that is the writing of Ms. Steinke.

There are few answers here because there are no "right and wrong" where these things are concerned. The mundane lives of the characters in this novel hide the complexities that lurk beneath the surface, the desires that drive us to take great risks for small rewards.

The command of language is wonderful, and her take on view from the bottom that she exibited in Suicide Blonde is even more developed, so palatable in this book that you can taste the desperation.

I was disappointed in Milk. I did not find any of the three main characters believable or likeable. I felt that the author was trying way too hard to shock readers with her prose and wasn't too successful at that. She was trying to created something that wasn't there. A big disappointment.

I read the summary of this book and thought it would be very interesting. Instead all I got was a lot of unanswered questions. Mary just had a child and is unfilled by her husband, who stays out long hours supposedly working. Walter her gay Episcopal friend is looking for love in all the wrong places, and John the monk who just left the monastery that Mary ends up having a sexual relationship with.The author intertwoves religion and sex that part I did not get. Did not enjoy but felt I needed to complete this book at least to see what happens and yet everything still was not tied in. I know not all books come to a full conclusion but this one left you hanging long before it was close to ending.