Customer Reviews

Praying to a Laughing God: A Novel

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I thought this book might be a paean to aging, but it isn't. It is an extended and tedious look at what happens to a man when his testosterone supply diminishes. The hero of the story moves through a fairly uneventful life in a small Minnesota town. He must face the fact that he is aging, his wife is dying, and his son is a failure. But sex is the real subject; every conversation moves to sex, every observation is tinged with sexual particulars, every reverie eventually ends in a backseat or a bedroom. The story is told with palpable distaste for its characters, with particularly unforgiving eye turned to their physical flaws. There is a murder subplot and a romance, but these are expressed in images of masturbating priests and wrinkled, aging thighs. Eventually, we learn whodunit. We also learn that the ebbing of testosterone is a GOOD thing, since men are so horrible when acting under its influence. This is an especially disappointing book because the quality of the writing is excellent.

True crime writer Ted Lewell arrives in the small town of Credibull, Minnesota, researching his next effort: the real story behind the murder of Albert Wilson, who was killed almost four decades ago. When septagenariun Clark Holstrom learns what the famous author plans to do, he begins to worry about how this will affect his ailing friend, Maynard Tewle, a person who many townsfolk believe actually committed the murder. However, the state could never prove its case....

The who-done-it aspects of PRAYING TO A LAUGHING GOD are somewhat interesting, but are overwhelmed by the more poignant and brilliantly described harsh realities of aging. The characters are first rate and Kevin McColley, a renowned writer of young adult fiction, has gracefully moved into the adult world with this passionate, sentimental, and very melancholy ode to old age.

Harriet Klausner

As a 32-year-old woman, at first I had a hard time getting into the main character (a 72-year-old man), but I kept going. The problem then became that the first half of this book was un-remittingly bleak. The writing is good and the plot becomes interesting or I would not have hung in there. A little light is introduced...but (I don't want to spoil the plot) it ends up being undeserved and that is the greatest frustration of all. Perhaps the author thought the point was that anyone can change but the ending seems to show that they haven't changed, or at least not enough.

At the end of the book, it didn't matter anymore who committed the crime - you had finally reached the end of a long, drawn out story about a murder.