JOE, TONY, ANDREW & SAM:

REVIEW: of Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul by Tony Hendra (Andrew Sullivan, NY Times Book Review)

SAINTS are perhaps always best evoked by sinners. And it would be hard to think of someone more at ease in the world of modern sin than Tony Hendra. He is and has been a brilliant satirist, an alum of National Lampoon in its glory days, an architect of the peerless parody rock documentary, ''This Is Spinal Tap,'' a man who has known (and tells us of) serial sex and drugs and rock and irony. But this extraordinary, luminescent, profound book shows us something wonderfully unexpected and deeply true. These ideas of sin that we have are not really sin. Or rather: they are the symptoms of sin, not its essence. And its essence is our withdrawal -- our willful withdrawal -- from God's love. This book is about Hendra's slow, aching, hilarious but profound attempt to accept God's unconditional love for him. And this truly difficult acceptance is a consequence of one other man's quiet listening and faith. Of another's love.

That other man was the Rev. Joseph Warrilow, an English Benedictine monk, who spent almost his entire life in a monastery on the Isle of Wight, off England's southern coast. Hendra stumbled across Father Joe almost by accident. At the age of 14, Hendra had befriended an odd married couple near his hometown in Hertfordshire, north of London. The man was a hyperstrict Roman Catholic convert, the wife a lonely woman who came to fall for the awkward adolescent. Over several encounters, her passion unfolded, and the teenage boy found himself kissing and then, finally, fondling a married woman. That was when her husband caught them, and, as a consequence, whisked the miscreant teenager off to a monastery for spiritual discipline.

Young Tony was prepared for the worst. But he found something else. The old monk who turned up in his tiny visitor's cell is cartoonish in appearance -- big flat feet in sandals, ''big pink hands like rock lobsters sticking out from frayed black cuffs. . . . A fleshy triangular nose . . . gigantic ears, wings of gristle, at right angles to the rather pointy close-shaven skull. The long rubbery lips were stretched in the goofiest of grins.'' [...]

How did a man known for left-wing screeds and biting satire come to write a book that -- I'm not exaggerating -- belongs in the first tier of spiritual memoirs ever written? The answer is that Hendra resisted such an extraordinary achievement just as he resisted God's love. This short book therefore has the nature of a kind of surrender -- not to some new theology or doctrine or sensibility. It is the surrender of someone to himself as he was always meant to be, to the love he was destined to feel, to the God who refused to let go.

There's nothing surprising about a genuinely funny satirist writing a conservative spiritual memoir, but what is notable is the effect that the new NY Times Book Review editor, Sam Tanenhaus is already having, New N.Y. Times Book Review editor is a smart conservative (David Kipen, 4/13/04, SF Chronicle)

The conclusion that Tanenhaus is a man of the right can be reached by other methods besides jumping to it. A thorough reading of "Literature Unbound" discloses a thoughtful traditionalist whose conservatism isn't so much political as temperamental. Tanenhaus gently accuses James Joyce of "high-class doubletalk, " and doesn't admit until later that he stacked the deck with a quotation in which Joyce was parodying somebody else. It's a dodge unbecoming of a biographer of Whittaker Chambers, who in 1939 wrote Time magazine's cover story on "Finnegans Wake." Tanenhaus also brings in Thomas Pynchon for all of two sentences, just long enough to make a point about reclusive writers. It's rather like bringing in Joyce to make a point about nearsightedness.

But there's more to conservatism than a wariness of difficult prose -- or an admiration for the Victorian critic Matthew Arnold, which Tanenhaus also cops to here. More worrisome is when Tanenhaus plumps for the psychological novel by echoing, of all people, Ayn Rand. "There is much to be said for cultivating our selfishness, or, if the word still rankles, our 'selfness,' " he writes. I don't know what's scarier: that Tanenhaus sounds like a Randroid, or that he thinks anything could possibly rankle more than the word "selfness. "

Of course, background checks on conservatives often turn up a youthful flirtation with Ayn Rand's objectivism, much as background checks on liberals may reveal a flirtation with communism. Neither one should get anybody excommunicated. Yet Tanenhaus also writes that "our greatest triumph is usually not doing, keeping things in balance, refraining from the act we can't redeem." Is this the guy you want assigning the next FDR biography?

Still, Tanenhaus wrote "Literature Unbound" in his 20s. That's recent enough to make his smarts encouraging, yet old enough for us to cut him some slack for his less digested influences. Which leaves only the third question: whether he'll gut the fiction coverage. Here, too, there's fairly ample cause for optimism. About the only nonfiction writers he cites are literary critics themselves, such as Arnold, Aristotle, Northrop Frye, Samuel Johnson and Lionel Trilling.

While we're keeping score, it's also cheering to note how besotted Tanenhaus appears to be with poetry. This may be a good sign for poets who wouldn't mind getting reviewed even outside of National Poetry Month.

Women don't fare quite as well, though Tanenhaus does write appreciatively of Austen, Woolf, Doris Lessing and especially Emily Dickinson. As for the other kind of Western literature -- the kind west of the Hudson - - Tanenhaus actually respects Raymond Carver enough to quote him for half a page. Don't worry, the Times'll beat that out of him in no time.

On the basis of "Literature Unbound," then, if the Times wanted the book review dumbed down, they picked the wrong puppy. If they wanted a conservative, they got a good one, not an ideologue.

MORE:
-BOOK SITE: Father Joe (Random House)
-EXCERPT: First Chapter of Father Joe
-AUDIO INTERVIEW: Tony Hendra and 'Father Joe' (Scott Simon, June 05, 2004, Weekend Edition)
-REVIEW: of Father Joe (Carolyn See, Washington Post)

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 13, 2004 5:26 PM