Customer Reviews

Modern Baptists

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

James Wilcox is the best author you have never heard of. His novels are comic masterpieces. MODERN BAPTISTS remains his best but NORTH GLADIOLA, PLAIN AND NORMAL, and GUEST OF A SINNER are all quite good. But if you read POLITE SEX or SORT OF RICH, you will be amazed by the way he balances hysterical comedy with dramatic pathos. In a perfect world his novels would be read by millions and he would have the status of a Phillip Roth or a John Updike.

I'm a voracious reader, but I rarely RE-read books. (You know how it is--so many books, so little time.) Still, I've re-read this novel over and over. Simply put, it's extremely funny, impeccably written, and contains some of the most vivid characters you'll find anywhere. My advice to those considering this book: read the first ten pages or so. If you're drawn into the story and/or find yourself laughing like a crazy person, then you know this is the book for you. If these things DON'T happen to you, well, I'm sure you're got good taste in some other area of your life. :) Really, if you're a fan of good fiction, you should give yourself the opportunity to experience the unsung, underrated James Wilcox, and this book is the best beginning.

Where has this author been all my life? Or, maybe a better questions is, where have I been? "Modern Baptists" was the first Wilcox novel I have ever read, and now I want to read them all. Deft, comic, eloquently spare prose, and hilarious on every page. With writing that includes lines like "I'm just here looking at the opera," (paraphrased - but it's close) I'm ready to read the whole Wilcox oeuvre!

I don't read much fiction anymore, but this book had amazing endorsements by such notables as Robert Penn Warren, Walker Percy, Toni Morrison, Anne Tyler, and others, so I gave it a try.

This book reminded me a lot of John Welter's I Want to Buy a Vowel in it's intimate, humorous, and ironic look at American small-town life. In this case, it's small-town southern Louisiana that Wilcox describes, and he does a fine job of realizing the little dramas and characters that inhabit this declining small town near Baton Rouge. I found the humor more bittersweet and ironic, compared to the thigh-slappers that one gets from authors like Carl Hiaasen, Tim Dorsey, Chris Moore, and Bill Fitzhugh, but it's still funny in a bittersweet sort of way and worth reading by itself.

I note that this book came out in 1988, not long after Hiaasen started writing, and things have gotten much wackier since in the humor genre. If you've read Dorsey's Triggerfish Twist and Fitzhugh's Pest Control then you know what I'm talking about. So although not quite in that league, I still enjoyed it and can recommend it for those looking for a writer with a talent for humorous, sensitive, and realistic portraits of small town life in the deep South.

I love James Wilcox, he is an amazingly insightful writer who can be wildly funny without ever resorting to caricature or hyperbole. Modern Baptists is great, but North Gladiola is better--unfortunately it is out of print. Mr. Wilcox is really writing one huge novel, characters and situations from other novels are alluded to in passing in what is a meticulous and thoroughly realized fictional town. If I could, I would move to Tula Springs, maybe take one of those apartments above the Sonny Boy department store...

Mr. Wilcox deserves a wider audience, and he deserves to become more than 'sort of rich' to borrow one of his titles, from his amazing work. Quick everyone, tell Oprah...

I thoroughly enjoyed this book the first time I read it, and find myself laughing out loud every time I dip into again (which is pretty often). Wilcox's powers of observation and satire are astounding, so much so that I wonder how much of the humor here will be lost on the non-southern reader.

Mr Pickens is one of lifes disasters through no real fault of his own. He just makes horrendous errors of judgement whilst trying to be good.Believing he is dying (he later finds he isn't) he takes in his jailbird half brother FX. Things go from bad to worse as he is fired from his job, gets caught up in one of FX's plots,decides to become a preacher for a new modern liberal Baptist church until he's caught praying in the dark with a naked man, and his suicide attempt fails when he runs out of gas....
Really funny, the comic pace and wit comes fast and furious over just 239 pages, and is crammed with eccentrics that lead confused amoral lives under the hell and damnation community ethos of Tula Springs (whilst every action they do is almost certain to lead to this damnation!)and the Huey Long school of politics.The undercurrent of how all this oppresses Christian spirit and makes an honest man who respects the law (Pickens) afraid of the law is wonderfully understated.
The characters-larger than life- are always believable and the humour so well constructed and funny that it will be imitated more than dated over time.
My favourite? Pickens thinking of how he can break the ice and make conversation with his dentist-who is totally ignoring him at the opera do-saying, "I guess you don't recognise me with my mouth closed" to completely the wrong person!
A book I really enjoyed.

James Wilcox is at his best in Tula Springs, and Modern Baptists, his first, may be his best work overall. While dealing with family conflicts and the convolutions of sex in a humorous way, Wilcox says more about being human in 20th Century America than many other writers do in page upon page of dense, analytic musings. Hey, if we can't laugh at the absurdity of our lives, what's the point?

I read and loved Guest of a Sinner and was excited to read more books by Wilcox. I checked out the reviews carefully before choosing Modern Baptists to read next. I found the book to be very dated. The characters were stereotypical, the situations weren't interesting, the pace crawled along. Unlike apparently everyone else who reviewed this, I didn't laugh out loud, not once. If I hadn't bought it new, I'm not sure I would have even finished it. I'm giving this three stars because I feel as if I must have missed something. . . but I'm not sure what it could have been. I certainly won't be reading it again to find out.

Only sometimes. But to her credit, she had a point, a purpose. Her characters were driven forward by the theme, the core of the story. Yes, they were quirky and irritating. Yes, they were funny. But they served a larger purpose. Unlike Mr. Wilcox's. I kept waiting for a point. I thought perhaps I caught the whiff of it for a while: submerged gay life in a Southern town. But no, that was just another false lead, in a book full of them. So many quirky little details, doing nothing, going nowhere. For example, at one point, the characters are talking and a dog walks up on the porch to sniff around, as it does every night. And that's it. Period. There's no point to the dog, no reason for it to be in the story. It's just another quirky, funny, little, meaningless detail. One of billions. Enough to drag any plot to a dead halt.