What to Wear to See the Pope: Stories [Hardcover]

Christine Lehner (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 29, 2004

The Codwell family is a jovial, tight-knit clan that dines together often and for whom dinner table conversation is repartee as art form. But subtext runs deep, patience wears thin, and recriminations run rampant. A conflicted Catholic and amateur linguist, Ursula Codwell’s passion for saints and semantics is surpassed only by the affection she feels for her family—and that includes her precious bulldog. Brought up in what she refers to as the “fraught and schizoid tradition of Belgian Catholicism,” Ursula is herself rather fraught and schizoid, personality traits that often threaten to overwhelm her children and her ostensibly tolerant Unitarian husband (“What he generally had to say about the saints was not worth repeating”), not to mention herself. Her indecisiveness and excessive attention to detail lead her to become fixated on matters such as what to wear to see the Pope when he comes to her hometown in New York’s Hudson Valley or reclaiming her surgically removed teratomas from the pathology lab. Reminiscent of Allegra Goodman’s The Family Markowitz, Christine Lehner’s What to Wear to See the Pope is a dead-on portrait of fragile family connections and crises of the soul, brought to life in ten wonderful interconnected stories.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Ursula Codwell is obsessed with saints, her drippy-eyed bulldog Saint Joan, her teenaged son's minimalist vocabulary (with "chill" as an anchor), the exact fruit that may have been the apple in the Garden of Eden and much more idiosyncratic minutiae. The narrator also has two tumors and a cyst removed; these extractions more or less bookend this collection of 10 interconnected stories, but are told in the same wool-gathering, navel-gazing style that, depending on your threshold for sitting in someone else's bathwater, either delight or tire, or more likely, actively stir both responses, often on the same page. Questions abound in Lehner's highly contextual stories: What is the weight of an arm? Was François Villon hanged or did he just disappear? And, well, what to wear to see the pope? Meanwhile, the book sits in traffic on some of the larger emotional questions: What keeps Ursula and husband Gus together besides their communal love for debate? Why does her life feel defined by the shapes of other people's lives, especially those who may not have even existed? These stories are punctuated by epiphanies—as in "The Phantom Limb," when Ursula says, "It's becoming clear to me that tumors... are all psychosomatic, or least they're outgrowths of mental states"—but Ursula, like so many of her beloved saints, remains a mystery.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

PRAISE FOR WHAT TO WEAR TO SEE THE POPE

"Lehner gives Ursula an original voice, captivating, convincing . . . as she veers from tangent to tangent, from saints to salads, from hell to a hell-bent destructive kitchen knife."-THE BOSTON GLOBE

"Perhaps the most haunting, idiosyncratic, gleefully subversive, and satisfying story collection I've read since Isak Dinesen's Seven Gothic Tales."- RICHARD RUSSO, author of EMPIRE FALLS

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Carroll & Graf (March 29, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0786713291
• ISBN-13: 978-0786713295
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #450,495 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Just literally plain fun!, April 16, 2004

By 

Charlie Chump "musicguy" (Utah) - See all my reviews

This review is from: What to Wear to See the Pope: Stories (Hardcover)

This writer has a great use of language and can poke fun of an extensive vocabulary all the same. I am a book reviewer for a major newspaper and a published author as well, so I kiss a lot of toads to find the royalty that will go in our columns, this one made it in stellar fashion. I am including this as one of 2004's best debuts. I read much of this book while climbing a stairmaster at the gym. On three occasions people came up to me to ask me what it was that was "SO FUNNY" about the book, writing down the title to go find it. ENJOY!

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This is a terrific book., November 30, 2004

By 

Hubert Herring (Dobbs Ferry, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: What to Wear to See the Pope: Stories (Hardcover)

In a voice that's distinctive and marvelously quirky, the author tells tales of domestic life that dance on the edge of the absurd but resonate with essential truth. The voice is so quirky that it would be easy for it to go over the top, or become cloying, but it never does. Lehner delights not just in chasing absurdities to comic lengths, but in playing with the language -- and while it can be irritating when writers toss in fancy words, it doesn't here. She's not showing off; she's rejoicing in the richness of the language. My favorite is a tale about a knife that seems to have a malicious mind of its own, but the story of a phantom limb runs a close second. And, throughout, these odd saints keep appearing, to delightful effect.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Better than Belgian Chocolate and funnier too, April 20, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: What to Wear to See the Pope: Stories (Hardcover)

It does not do justice to this book to call it a collection of short stories, it's more a series of plunges into the same bracing swimming pool. I read it in one sitting and it played every variation of my laugh button. Ms. Lehner knows more about Saints than she needs to, but you don't have to be Catholic to enjoy the obsession. This book has enough family mustard so that in spite of the religion, the literary references and flawless punctuation you wonder at the end who might play each role when Hollywood gets it's crass teeth into it.