A Handbook of American Prayer
by Lucius Shepard
(Thunder's Mouth Press, $22.00, 263 pages, hardcover; published in
September 2004.)
Many of Lucius Shepard's recent stories  deal
with masculinity, how masculinity is performed in different settings
and cultures, and what that means for men, women, and society. His novel
A Handbook of American Prayer continues to explore such themes and
concerns, this time through the travails of Wardlin Stuart, a violent
brawler and predatory womanizer.
After accidentally murdering a jealous boyfriend, Warldin winds up
in jail, where he develops prayerstyle, a secular method of prayer that
seems to bend reality to the supplicant's wishes. Wardlin assembles
his prayers into a book called A Handbook of American Prayer.
Following the book's publication, a much mellower Wardlin is granted
parole, and he becomes a media darling and the unwitting founder of
a new spiritual movement that rejects God and religion as irrelevant
-- for which the Christian Right brands Wardlin a tool of the devil.
The reformed Wardlin claims to want nothing more than quiet domesticity
with the woman he loves, yet he is a magnet for violence, which feeds
a part of himself that he cannot abandon fully.
In his prayers Wardlin evokes the metaphorical image of the Lord of
Loneliness, and soon a mysterious figure reminiscent of Wardlin's creation
starts haunting the edges of Wardlin's life. Is it a fanatical Wardlinite,
the true Lord of Loneliness, or Wardlin's prayers made flesh?
The narrative incorporates a few of Wardlin's poetic prayers, and it's
fortunate that it's only a few. Shepard's rambling and shapeless verse
-- this remarkable novel's only weakness -- fails to communicate the
vivid power attributed to prayerstyle.
Shepard's A Handbook of American Prayer is a testosterone-fuelled
yet rawly introspective exploration of the confluence of masculinity,
celebrity, and spirituality in contemporary US culture. Like its protagonist,
it is roguishly charming -- a fascinating collision of seeming contradictions.
Originally published in
The Montreal Gazette, Friday, 31 December 2004.
Claude Lalumière's Fantastic Fiction
is a series of
capsule reviews first published in the Saturday Books
section of The Montreal Gazette.
Elsewhere in infinity plus:
Elsewhere on the web:
|
