Deus Ex Machina

I decided to make another foray into the murky twilight world of Christian women's inspirational romance fiction when I noticed Mary Connealy's The Bossy Bridegroom on a display rack at the library.  Published by a Christian house called Heartsong in 2008, BB is the story of Jeanie and Michael Davidson, a Midwestern couple whose marriage fell apart a few years back.  Michael was emotionally abusive, Jeanie was a doormat; they got married because he was a controlling alpha male and she was cute, popular, and manipulable.  After she walked out on him, she was briefly homeless, but then found shelter and a vocation in a Christian shelter.  Having left their infant daughter with her sister Buffy, she eventually let Buffy adopt the child, but now she's living in the same small North Dakota town, juggling a few part-time jobs and volunteer gigs, and working through her new Christian identity.

The novel begins when Michael, who's also found God, knocks at her door, and begs her to join him in rebuilding their marriage, insisting that he's a changed man.  When she refuses, he goes to her pastor, who agrees with Michael that she should try, but also backs her up, warning Michael that if he tries to bully her he'll throw her out of her apartment himself.  So Jeanie decides to give him a chance, and the novel is the story of their rocky reconciliation.

The Bossy Bridegroom surprised me on several counts.  It's very critical of Michael's control-freak style, and presents a very realistic picture of how difficult it would be to rebuild a relationship from the ground up, as Jeanie and Michael do here.  Despite the novel's lip service to the supremacy of the husband in Christian marriage, it takes for granted that Jeanie can't be submissive in ways that Christian tradition has expected.  No Patient Griselda she!  Not only that, she seeks and gets the support of her equally Christian sister Buffy and another woman friend, Emily, who criticize her for failing to stand up to Michael; the novel complies with the Liz Wallace-Alison Bechdel Rule, which stresses female friendships and solidarity.  Instead of ordering Jeanie to return and submit to her domineering husband, her pastor and the men in her church and community back her in building and preserving her (Christian, of course!) personhood.  I don't think it will be a spoiler to add that the novel ends, not with happily-ever-after but with ongoing struggle and growth in the offing.  Not quite the Christian romance I expected.

The religion in the novel, as I've noticed in other samples of this genre, though surely sincere, feels rote and secondary.  Every so often Jeanie and Michael remember that they need to pray, that they've been neglecting their nightly joint devotions, and there will be a brief account of their practice.  Now and then when things get rough, Jeanie occasionally reaches for her New International Version Bible to go over her "courage" verses.  Fundamentalist / evangelical cultural critics often complain that even when popular culture makes some room for Christian characters and lifestyles, it isn't explicit enough about the importance of Jesus and Christian practice; I'm intrigued to see how little prayer and worship is enough to satisfy a publisher whose aim is evidently to correct the imbalance.  At one point in The Bossy Bridegroom, Jeanie remarks resentfully that Michael's ability to induce the townspeople into volunteering time and resources for his business projects (which he casts as purely for the good of the community, of course) resembles the tale Stone Soup, a story trope I often notice myself.  In this case, it fits with this book and with Christian fiction generally: the characters do all the work but give the credit to the Lord.

So I didn't find the story's religiosity particularly intrusive.  I don't know that I'd recommend The Bossy Bridegroom to anyone, though, or to whom I'd recommend it if I did.  It does indicate that radical feminism has influenced all but the most reactionary lay Christian women, even if they would deny that that influence, and so it might interest other people like me, who're interested in the state of gender politics in America today.  It counts against both Christians' and secularists' claim that religion is utterly rigid and unmoving: this is not the kind of Christian fiction for women that would have been published a generation or two back.  I think it supports my view that religion is not some external, autonomous force controlling people, but a social construction that people change to suit their needs and wishes, even or especially if they don't realize they're doing so.  And though it's thinner as fiction than other books in the genre I've tried, it's not at all a bad read; I'm tempted to check out another of Connealy's books: Clueless Cowboy sounds promising ...

The Scent of Lilacs

The Promiscuous Reader will try almost anything once, so it should come as no surprise that I recently made my first venture into the murky world of Christian women's inspirational fiction. I'm not sure why Ann H. Gabhart's The Scent of Lilacs (Revell, 2005) caught my attention in the library display -- maybe it's because we had lilacs in our yard when I was growing up -- but it did. It turned out to be a better read than I expected, too. There Be Spoylers ahead, but if you decided to read the book and couldn't see them coming, you'd be a less perspicacious reader than I.

The Scent of Lilacs is set in the little town of Hollyhill, Kentucky, in the year 1964. Forty-four year old David Brooke runs the local weekly newspaper and is an aspiring minister, due to a call he received while a submarine crewman during World War II. He lives with his thirteen-year-old daughter Jocelyn and his elderly aunt Love (short for Lovella). To make his ambitions more difficult, his wife Adrienne abandoned him seven years before, moving to California with their older daughter Tabitha, and getting a Reno divorce along the way. David is being considered for a semi-permanent position with a local church, but he's philosophical about his longterm chances given his history.

Jocie is a high-spirited kid, more of a help at the newspaper office than as a support to her father. Aunt Love tries to keep her in line with a barrage of Bible quotations, but with only fitful success. Abetting Jocie is the old motorcyclist and mechanic Wes, a relative newcomer to Hollyhill who claims to be from Jupiter and keeps the press going. He also keeps Jocie supplied with the science fiction and other books he reads. Jocie's first break comes when she finds a scruffy stray dog in a neighboring field; she'd been praying regularly for a dog, and for her sister to come home. She names the dog Zebedee.

Not surprisingly, Tabitha (now twenty years old) turns up on the porch one evening, without her mother but (spoiler, but really, can't you see it coming?) suffering from morning sickness contracted from a drummer she knew in California. Tabitha has refused the options of abortion (favored by her mother and the drummer) and adoption, and wants to keep her baby. (There are hints of even more serious transgressions in Tabitha's past, but only hints so far.) This causes less of a hullabaloo than you'd expect for small-town Kentucky in 1964. Even Aunt Love, who spotted Tabitha's baby bump right away, puts a lid on her Bible quotations. Only one person in the whole town is bothered by the prospect of their minister having a harlot for a daughter, and he's the villain of the book. The climax of the book is a bit melodramatic, with some more steamy revelations, but Gabhart is saving up her characters for the two sequels she will write in the next couple of years.

I'm not sure I believed any of this, though I'm sure things like it did happen from time to time. But I enjoyed the fantasy, just as I enjoy David Levithan's fantasies of gay teenagers coasting comfortably through high school with a minimum of hassle. The characters are likable, and their religiosity isn't intrusive; I admit I'd expected a lot more Bible beating than I found here.

It confirmed my feeling that religion itself isn't a separate category of existence or thought, for all that feeling puts me at odds with so many other atheists (and religious believers too). I don't quote the Bible, though I can do so for my purposes as well as many Christians, but I mine any number of other sources for proverbial wisdom: Heathers, Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Raising Arizona, the Butthole Surfers, and much more. I get as much mileage from these as Aunt Love gets from Scripture, and probably as much or as little effect on other people. Jocie doesn't seem particularly snowed by the Bible so much as by Aunt Love's great age and by her prodigious memory (failing though the latter is).

Prayer is similar. As I've indicated before, it feels reasonable and "natural", whatever that is, to want to thank somebody for good things that happen to us without visible human agency, and to complain about the bad ones. Prayer looks to me like talking to oneself, or thinking aloud; it's often a form of meditation, and often a sideways way to talk to other people. It's pretty overt when Jocie prays like this at dinner right after finding her dog:

Thank you, Lord, for Zebedee. I'd begun to worry you didn't mean for me to have a dog, but Aunt Love says the Bible says to keep asking, so that's what I did. And I thank you that you let Zebedee find me [17].

"David," Gabhart the narrator comments, "heard Aunt Love pull in a little puff of breath and knew her heart wasn't feeling a bit thankful."

It's more subtle but still clear when David prays later on:

Dear Lord, forgive us our sins this day and help us to be full of forgiveness toward others. Especially send down your loving-kindness on Aunt Love this night and help her make peace with her past. Give Tabitha courage and strength and love. Bless Jocie and help her to do what's right. Use me, Lord, in your service and help me know how to help others in their spiritual journeys [243f].

This translates easily into more direct address to Aunt Love, Tabitha, and Jocie, with God as the intermediary. And no doubt it's easier to communicate to them if you don't have to address them directly.

None of this means that I'm going to begin praying myself. If anything, understanding these functions of prayer strengthens my feeling that religion serves very mundane purposes. It doesn't make it more true, but I see why people continue to use it.

Gabhart's generosity to and compassion for her characters was very satisfying. I also liked very much Leigh, the thirtyish Elvis Presley fan who has set her cap for David. Again, I'm not sure I believe everyone's tolerance toward her musical tastes and her fondness for dancing, but that doesn't keep me from rooting for her. Those are qualities I appreciate in anything I read. Whether it's typical of inspirational fiction I don't know -- I've read almost none except for Frank Peretti's best-selling This Present Darkness and the first Left Behind book, both of which are notably short on generosity and compassion. But I think I might look at the sequels to The Scent of Lilacs.