Customer Reviews

Real Presence

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This was my first Richard Bausch book and it's made me a fan. The characters are all interesting and well developed. He does a great job of creating realistic, mult-faceted personalities and looking at the characters from different perspectives. For example, the priest isn't overly saintly and good in choosing to help an unfortunate family...he struggles with what to do and shows some natural human resistance and suspicion. The father of the family appears at times to be very hard-headed and yet at other times very understandable and likeable. the plot moves along at a good pace, the relationships are nicely balanced, and the characters are interesting. It's a good read, as I've discovered, are his other novels and short stories. Having lived many years in Virginia, I also enjoy his descriptions of the small towns and mountain areas of the state.

A family under intense economic pressure is helped, begrudgingly, by a priest and his somewhat dissolute neighbor. Not surprisingly, the novel explores people's response to need. Primarily, though, it is a novel of state of mind: loneliness, desperation, loss of faith, love. It manages to be interesting, without resorting to any facile devices of plot or character to hold the reader. The writing is very good, although if I were Bausch's editor for this book, I would have tried to eliminate some of the descriptive analogies which just don't work, and detract from the force of his simple prose.