Monday, Apr. 12, 1971

Gainful Godliness

By John Skow

LION COUNTRY by Frederick Buechner. 247 pages. Atheneum. $5.95.

Vagueness and insubstantiality are the qualities at hand when Antonio Parr wakes up in the morning. Parr is a man in his 30s who has a small private income and has worked without delight as a teacher, a failed novelist and a junk sculptor. "I resorted as little as possible to welding," explains the hero of Frederick Buechner's ruefully funny new novel, "but used balance wherever I could or the natural capacity of one odd shape to fit somehow into or on top of or through another--entirely autobiographical, in other words--the idea being to leave the lover of my art (of me?) free to rearrange it with love in any artful way he chose. Permanence was the enemy, and no one, least of all my poor, unwelded Ellie, could say I failed to live my faith."

Ellie? A chaste and timid rich girl with whom, nickel by nickel, Parr spends his time. She plays the piano in her Manhattan apartment while Parr lies on the rug listening: "It is this foot that I see most clearly, a rather generous-sized foot in a heelless brocade slipper working up and down on the soft pedal while I lie there on the floor watching it at eye-level. In answering Bebb's ad, I am sure that I was, among other things, hungry for fortissimo."

Bebb? A sleazy evangelist, the Lord's pitchman, the proprietor of an ordination-by-mail diploma mill. Parr sends Bebb the suggested love offering and becomes an ordained preacher by return post. Bebb himself appears shortly thereafter: fierce and shrewd and seedy, awash in the blood of the lamb--and in plans for beggaring the Internal Revenue Service. He is there, he says, to save Parr's soul and teach him gainful godliness.

Novelist Buechner (A Long Day's Dying) was ordained a Presbyterian minister and served for a time as chaplain of a boys' prep school. It may be that this professionalism allows him his easy way with the rigors of belief. Without satire or solemnity, he describes Bebb's religion--a life force as sleazy as its peddler. Bebb is, among other things, a sexual exhibitionist, and there is a memorable scene at the altar of his cinderblock church in which he restores potency to an oil-rich old Indian by raising up his own loins in thanksgiving. Eventually Bebb's more than comely daughter cures Parr of chastity. Nervously and without clear motives, like a man signing up for $400 worth of Great Books, Parr makes a commitment to life. Or to living in lion country. (One of Bebb's stunts is to walk unarmed among rutting lions at a local game preserve.)

In an odd way, the reader does not enter Buechner's rarefied world but stands outside admiring. Presently he realizes that Parr, the hero, and Buechner, who invented him, are standing there beside him too. So is all that is visible of Bebb. A conversation develops among the onlookers that is solid, witty and as full of profundity as one could wish for on a hot day. Disbelief is not suspended, but since things are so pleasant, there is no reason that it should be.

* John Skow

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.