5 For / 2 Against: The Patron Saint of Unmarried Women

5 for:

1) Very good, funny, light, quick read about Jack Townsend who just recently broke up with the woman Nina Lawrence that he was about to marry. Set in Washington, DC, Jack is a freelance landscaper who plays weekly basketball, loves opera, and never leaves home without his dog Dan. For a novel written in the early 90s, it has aged well.

2) Jack is a great guy and a great character and about halfway through the novel you begin to feel that he is the patron saint of unmarried women: he's a great, passionate catch, and good with kids. But he seems real at the same time.

3) There is very little angst here. Jack has a brother who died, but the majority of the novel is very funny. You can see in the author's photograph on the back of the novel the same humor in the eyes that I imagine Jack would have.

4) Great writing: I'm surprised that Karl Ackerman only has two novels and that I can't find a picture of him on the web (as it is, I had to scan the cover of the copy of this book):

Ellen [Jack's sister] and I are sprung from the same genetic supermarket, but from different aisles altogether: she is Lean Cuisine and flavored seltzer water; I'm Gravy Train and bulk laundry detergent. (20)

The fact is, I miss that kid [Jack's brother Ray] in more ways than I can explain. Once he said to me, "Jack, you need me. This whole goddamn family needs me. I'm the fuck-up. If you didn't have me around, no one would know whether or not he was on the straight-and-narrow." He was right; events proved that. Every family has a reference point, and Ray was ours - at least he was mine. (51)

For some reason, male-bonding activities, like one-night stands, seem to benefit from a measure of anonymity. (57)

She [Liza, Jack's ex Nina's sister] is dead wrong. Intuition is the voice of the godhead inside us. It is the manifestation of grace. Without intuition we are plodding, dull creatures. I would like to explain this to Liza, but reconstructed Catholic that she is, she would never buy it. She is too deeply entrenched in the process of integrating religion and modern science. Her Catholicism is a stripped-down, supremely rational dogma. Religion as metaphor. No Jesus literally walking on water, no water actually becoming wine, no Red Sea parting, no Lazarus rising from the dead. Heaven, she once told me, should not be seen as a never-ending succession of days on an extraterrestrial, PGA-quality golf course. Rather, it is the eternal life in Christ. Another word for this, she explained, is bliss. Bliss is ephemeral - it comes and goes in a nanosecond. Thus, she believes, entrance into the eternal life in Christ begins with the acceptance of the ephemeral nature of life. Here she is talking about coming to grips with death.

To be honest, I prefer the golf-course imagery. (77-8)

If you ask me, each of us is born with a great reserve of spirituality, which we bury as we grow older. The task isn't to create spirituality but to recover it - to get back to some true sense of ourselves. (136)

A soul laved with holy water over the course of twenty or thirty years looks different from one that has been recently dry cleaned. (152)

It seems to me that at some level all human relationships are unhealthy. Which is what makes them so interesting. Anyway, what's the alternative? The folks who carry on about the joys of solitude have always seemed to me to be a pretty grim bunch. (208)

Maybe we can't change the past, but we can stomp all over it like a barrel of grapes and pack it away in an oaken vat and pray that someday it will be transformed into something wonderful. We can become obsessed with the people who once meant the world to us, thereby forsaking the formation of new relationships. Forget what the duly accredited helping professional might say about whether such behavior is healthy. In this crazy world, fidelity to one's character should count for something. (209-10)

5) I was happy with how natural the conversations were. Many writers (I'm afraid I might be included in this someday) have difficulty carrying off a natural sounding conversation between characters. Mr. Ackerman does not have this problem; which is good, because quite a few chapters are long conversations between Jack and some other character. This is after-all a novel of relationships. (The following example also explains Christmas for the homeless during the Reagan/Bush I years.)

Jason [the young son of Kate, the woman that Jack dates for a portion of the book], too, is quiet. This sneakered boy of many questions asks just one the entire trip. At Constitution Avenue, the brightly colored lights of the [National] tree come into view and Jason leans forward. "Do the people who live outside get the presents that are under that tree?"

Kate gamely tried to explain the difference between that tree and all the trees that people have set up inside their houses, but Jason is more interested in determining if the people who live outside have Christmas trees, and if they don't, just exactly where Santa leaves their presents.

Soon Kate gives up. She grips the top of the wheel with both hands and squeezes it. "Jack, why don't you explain it to him."

"This year the people who live outside don't get any presents," I say.

"Jack!"

The lights of a parked car in front of us come on. Kate pulls to the side and brakes sharply, throwing me into the seat belt strapped across my chest.

"Were they bad?" asks Jason.

"No. But the President spent all of Santa's money buying guns, so Santa couldn't buy any presents for the people who live outside."

"Why'd he do that, Mr. Townsend?"

"Because he likes guns more than he likes people."

"Honey, Jack is teasing you."

Jason says, "They don't look like they got any presents last year either."

Not for the past twelve years anyway. Not so much as a lump of coal. (197)

2 Against:

1) Some of the religion in the novel seemed over-the-top. This could be because the character Jack is sort of a converted Catholic but not really. I wonder if this is a reflection of the author. Or it could be because I read about a quarter of the novel in a small Episcopal chapel across the hall from the last 20 minutes of a service on Sunday February 14th. It was religious overkill but also the best part of my Valentines.

"I want to throttle the two of them. Of course I won't. I'll probably just butt my head on a tree stump. Wait it out. Once the deed is done, the show will be over between the two of them."

"How can you be sure?"

"A little bird told me. A little bird with the wingspan of the Holy Spirit." (83)

That last line is Jack's, which seemed to me a bit cheesy; but later, Jack and the author seem to try and balance this out: in a rather equally over-the-top religious scene in which the matriarch of the Lawrence family invites a priest Father McLucas to the house for their own private Christmas Mass, Jack has this to say...

I could quote the entire warm-up homily, but what's the point? There is no escaping the feeling that McLucas stitched together this little talk on the drive over here. It probably started with an ad on the radio for Raleigh's or Sears. (216)

We're off. The Mass has begun...Not understanding a word of the proceedings stimulated within me a peculiar enjoyment of the ritual, for the same reason, I suspect, that a shouting match in the streets of Naples, Italy, would seem more interesting than, say, a restaurant spat in Georgetown...

Joan, on the couch next to me, can't resist the occasional comment: "This is like something out of Brideshead Revisited." A moment later: "Make that Monty Python." And later: "Might have a new fella, Jack. Met him at the Bethesda Food Co-op. He runs an organic farm in Pennsylvania."

"A match made in heaven," I whisper.

"Except that his name happens to be Josh Cohen."

...

"So what's with this Judeo-Catholic attraction?" I ask. "Some sort of Old Testament/New Testament thing?"

"The oddball factor," Joan whispers. "Two sides of the same coin, Plus, both camps are raised on bizarre rituals and strange smells and weird food rules. And don't forget that our guy used to be one of theirs, so there's the rivalry aspect, too."

"A Harvard-Yale thing?"

"More Redkins-Giants," she says. (216-18)

2) It took me a while to buy that Jack, a fairly blue-collar individual, was also a lover of opera. From the beginning of the novel, Jack thinks the occasional Italian quote and I was like "What?" until it was finally explained that he actually loves opera. I will catagorize this more as my failing rather than the novels.

The "Against" part is hard. If I can say more than a couple of things against a novel, I start to wonder why I'm even reading it.

I however do feel bad for this book in general. Not only did I have to scan the cover of the copy I have, I may have to do the same for the author picture, though I doubt it'll happen until I finish his next and only other book. But this copy isn't much longer for the library world: it's spin is broken, causing a chunk of pages to start pulling out and the outer spine is faded from sitting too long on the shelf in the sun. But do not worry, fair reader, when it is withdrawn, I'll probably take it for my shelf at home.

Images: The objects are details or full views of The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations' Millennium General Assembly by James Hampton. It is featured quite prominently in one chapter of the novel.

The performances are of Lucia Di Lammermoor - one of many operas mentioned throughout.