Priestdaddy won the Thurber prize, was on many best books lists, and earned Patricia Lockwood all kinds of acclaim. So you’ve probably heard about it. I did when it was winning all those accolades, but I hadn’t read it. When I finished Lockwood’s novel, No One Is Talking About This, I decided to check it out. Like the novel, Priestdaddy is recognizably a memoir but uniquely its own thing, too. Parts of it read like poetry. It’s about Lockwood’s growing up, but the frame is a period of time when she and her husband moved back in with her parents in a rectory in the midwest, where her father is a Catholic priest. If you’re wondering how that works, he became a priest after being ordained as a Lutheran, and later converted. Under those rare circumstances, married priests are allowed to serve in the Catholic church.
Lockwoods’ parents are very conservative, and her father is very patriarchal, they denied her and her sister the opportunity to go to college, she describes several unpleasant moments in the family’s history, and yet she portrays her parents fairly affectionately (especially her mother). She writes almost as an observer of her own life, seemingly without bitterness even about the most difficult circumstances, including growing up near toxic waste that may possibly have caused a number of serious health issues in her friends family.
Those sections are written in a more serious tone, but there are funny parts of the book, too, funny in the same zany, slightly off kilter way that No One Is Talking About This is funny, where you feel as if the narrator is bringing you in on a private joke. And then there are thoughtful sections, where Lockwood is assessing how she came to be a writer and what has made her the person she is. For example, when she is talking with some teenagers exploring some coral off a beach on Key West, she observes,
“The girl stands very straight at the top of the pile and surveys everything around her with the fresh completeness of a discoverer, who has just felt the right key slide into her lock, the last piece pressed into her jigsaw. She stands and speaks with the sunlight fearlessly. Her ear, tilted up to it, is transparent. She bends toward the water, to get a closer look at some flashing silver school, and I watch her all the while in silence. Part of what you have to figure out in this life is, Who would I be if I hadn’t been frightened? What hurt me and what would I be if if hadn’t?”
One of the major themes of the book is how belief and unbelief have formed her. Towards the end of the book a monstrance her father ordered has arrived at the rectory. Her husband doesn’t know that that is and thinks he hears her father say it’s a “monster.” Lockwood writes:
“‘No, no,’ I tell him, ‘a monstrance is a sort of twenty-four karat gold sunburst that holds the body of the Lord.’ There’s a window at the center and a thousand rays reach out of it in every direction, so it stands on the altar like a permanent dawn. The word ‘monstrance’ means ‘to show,’ and when I read it, up rises that round image of the bread through the glass — bread that my own father has consecrated, at the climax of a metaphor that is more than a metaphor, at the moment where real time intersects with eternity. How to explain this moment to someone who never believed it, could never believe it? That bells ring, that the universe kneels, that what happened enters into the house of what is always happening, and sits with it together and eats at its table.”
That’s a pretty amazing description, isn’t it?
it’s hard to understand how someone could write so joyously about things that are still painful or troubling. But that’s the point, Lockwood explains:
“I know all women are supposed to be strong enough now to strangle presidents and patriarchies between their powerful thighs, but it doesn’t work that way. Many of us were actually affected, by male systems and male anger, in ways we cannot articulate or overcome. Sometimes, when the ceiling seems especially low and the past especially close, I think to myself, I did not make it out. I am still there in that place of diminishment, where that voice an octave deeper than mine is telling me what I am. . . . I did not make it out, but this does. Art goes outside, even if we don’t; it fills the whole air, though we cannot raise our voices.”
In her writing, she says, “I am no longer whispering through the small skirted shape of a keyhole: the door is knocked down and the roof is blown off and I am aimed once more at the entire wide night.”
An interesting, thoughtful, funny, tender, challenging, beautiful book.
A Month in the Country by J.L.Carr
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged A Month in the Country, art, book reviews, books, Church of England, classics, cultural history, English literature, fiction, friendship, humor, J.L. Carr, Michael Ondaatje, novels, reading, religion, social commentary, truth, veterans, village life, WWI on September 2, 2019| 1 Comment »
In more than one article where he’s asked about favorite books, Michael Ondaatje cites J.L. Carr‘s A Month in the Country. That was more than enough endorsement for me to add it to a list of books to look for . . . and then I found it on our ramble through the used bookshops of Portland at the beginning of the summer. I read it today and it was just the balm I needed after a tough couple of weeks of hard thinking at work about my research project and the new semester and at home about my project for my final year of grad school.
It was also the perfect book to read after The Secret Lives of Color. In A Month in the Country, the main character, Mr. Birkin, is a WWI veteran who arrives in 1920 in a northern English village called Oxgodby, where he’s been hired to uncover a medieval painting whitewashed over centuries earlier in the local church. As he works he notes various pigments, like ultramarine and hematite and verdigris, and as he commented on their richness, colorfastness, scarcity, or cost, I understood.
Both Birkin’s work and that of his fellow veteran and “southerner” Mr. Moon are funded by the recently deceased Adelaide Hebron, whose last wishes include hiring someone to uncover the artwork and to find the tomb of her ancestor Piers, who was excommunicated and so isn’t buried in the churchyard. Moon, an archeologist, suspects the meadow also holds even more ancient remains and the foundation of a much earlier church, dating back to the 7th century. He stays in a tent (and a hole he’s dug under it), Birkin stays in the bell tower, and between them they work and observe the locals and discuss the vicar, Rev. Keach and his lovely young wife, Alice, who seem mismatched. Which of course provides room for speculation, but there’s no sappy or simple love story here. Just tension, well told.
Birkin ends up being absorbed into village life as he is pressed into officiating local cricket matches and looked after by the stationmaster, Mr. Ellerbeck, and his family. As their teenaged daughter Kathy notes, “Mam says you’re over-much on your own and traipse around like a man in a dream and need to be got into company.” They are “chapel” rather than church people, and out of appreciation for their kindness and their generosity (Mrs. Ellerbeck feeds him regularly) Birkin ends up attending their Wesleyan services and helping with Sunday school. He even takes an uncomfortable turn at preaching in a nearby chapel when Ellerbeck is overextended, and helps his new friends shop for an organ for the chapel in the nearby town, in scene which is a hilarious send-up of sectarian snobbery.
The humor, the portrait of village life, the commentary on post WWI England’s cultural, social, and religious landscape, and the mysteries of Birkin’s and Moon’s work are all delightful. The story is certainly entertaining, but the deeper threads about healing from war wounds visible and invisible, and finding one’s way in a world that seems both completely changed in some ways and very much what it’s always been in others, make for a thoughtful read that explores the kind of “big T” truths that I enjoy in fiction.
Moon tells Birkin, as summer draws to a close and their work is nearly done, “You can only have this piece of cake once; you can’t keep munching away at it. Sad, but there it is! You’ll find that, once you’ve dragged yourself off round the corner, there’ll be another view; it may even be a better one.” Later than evening, Birkin reflects on this and thinks, “And he was right — the first breath of autumn was in the air, a prodigal feeling, a feeling of wanting, taking, and keeping before it is too late.”
That’s what A Month in the Country is about — that feeling, and how we respond to it. Birkin has decisions to make. Moon has plans. The story ends without our knowing precisely what they intend to do, but with a delicious sense of “a precious moment gone” as Carr writes. This is a book I’ll read again, and one that I picked up at just the right time.
Read Full Post »