Faith and Good Works

OPEN HEART

by FREDERICK BUECHNER 276 pages. Atheneum. $5.95.

As usual the substance of the book is Frederick Buechner's amiable conviction that the hound of heaven is a wet spaniel, apt to shake himself at any moment and shower a man with faith and grace. What is also unsettling, in this successful sequel to Buechner's Lion Country, is the considerable attention but negligible weight that this gifted and amusing writer gives to earthly matters.

The hero of Open Heart, for instance, a moony young teacher named Antonio Parr, runs up and down his emotional scales several times when he learns that his wife has slept with his young nephew. But there is no real danger that he will follow his impulse and in revenge take his 17-year-old student Laura to bed. In fact there are no real dangers of any kind in Buechner's gentle world. Death, pain and anxiety exist, but are seen small; the hideous, wasting illness that kills Antonio's twin sister at the beginning of Lion Country is worth little more than a sad smile.

In the earlier novel, with a dim notion of writing an expose, Antonio became involved with the formidable Leo Bebb, a sleazy but possibly genuine faith healer who cranked an ordination-by-mail divinity mill in Armadillo, Fla. It turned out that Bebb was quite capable of exposing himself. After he did so, raising up his loins in thanksgiving at the climactic moment of a healing ritual held to restore the sexual potency of a wealthy Indian chief, he had to leave town one jump ahead of the law. But by then Bebb's daughter Sharon had an occasion to cure Antonio of his chastity.

The humor of Open Heart runs less to slapstick (perhaps because Bebb already has done most of his turns) and more to De Vriesian one-liners: "I knew that I had to get away that day--their fresh-faced guilt was too great a reproach to my shifty-eyed innocence." Antonio, the narrator of both novels, is five years older in the new one, and he has coalesced to the point where sometimes it is possible to get a look at him. He travels west, returns home, encounters an acquaintance of Bebb who just may be a demon. He accepts cuckoldry, the inevitability of middle age, odd scraps of joy, the possibility that Bebb once raised a man from the dead.

Through it all, Antonio remains essentially an equivocal but clever device to help the author work things out in his head. Given this undisguised sketchiness in a central character, it is something of a mystery how Buechner has produced a live, warm, wise comic novel. And yet that is exactly what, in all shifty-eyed innocence, he has done.

An impression of raffish knowledgeability is what a writer tries to establish when he lists his accomplishments for the inside back flap of his novel's dust jacket. It is thus very good to be able to put down, as Novelist Barry Hannah did on the jacket of Geronimo Rex, "troubleshooter in a turkey-pressing plant." It is not so good to write "Presbyterian minister," and Frederick Buechner, who interrupted his writing career for several years to take a degree at Union Theological Seminary and become a minister, admits that he has thought of publishing his novels under an assumed name. As things are, he says some reviewers tend to review not the novels but the sermons they are sure must be hidden inside.

No suspicious secularist would be reassured by Buechner's working habits. He lives in a comfortable white frame house on an unfarmed farm in southern Vermont. For discipline, the author knots on a necktie and travels a few miles to an office in the parish house of the Manchester Episcopal Church. For three months last winter, when the church was without a regular pastor, he preached the Sunday sermons. He feels sure that none of his temporary parishioners, most of whom are elderly women, has read a line of his fiction.

Discovered in the late afternoon, lugging a bale of hay into his new horse barn, the author bears no trace of the morning's necktie. He is fairly tall, fairly well on into his forties (6 ft., 48 years). He looks like a prep-school teacher, and was once; he established the religion department at Exeter, and taught there for several years. Buechner has eight horses on the payroll, apparently the minimum for a city man who moves to the country with a wife and three young daughters. The girls also have a goat, a tribe of chickens, and a pig which Buechner brought home in a sack last fall, and which has since grown to the girth of an alderman. "Get a pig," he recommends. "Friendly, well-mannered, clean, follows you anywhere." He is working now on a kind of devil's dictionary of religious terms, and doesn't know whether there will be another novel about Antonio and Bebb. "Maybe; I don't really know the truth about Bebb -- I see him only through Antonio's eyes, and I'm curious."

So are Buechner's readers likely to be. His career clearly is moving through one of those second acts which are supposed not to occur in American lives. His first novel, a mannered, Jamesian confection called A Long Day's Dying, had a splashy success in 1950, when Buechner was barely out of Princeton. He wrote another novel without really consolidating his reputation as a bright boy who had scored early. Then, "somewhat to the astonishment of my family and friends," came the decision to study theology.

For a good many years Buechner's religious experiences did not seem digestible, at least in literary terms. His fourth novel, for instance, The Final Beast, published in 1965, was an embarrassing attempt to deal with the strangeness of being a pastor. Buechner, however, seems to have found an acceptable way to deal with religious mysteries in fiction. His stratagem is to leave the I very existence of such mysteries an open question. As a faith healer Bebb is certainly half a fraud, and possibly two halves of one. But Antonio accepts Bebb without worrying much about his genuineness, and the reader is left with the lightest and least insistent of uncertainties. Another question is left, too: whether this indefiniteness is merely tact, or a measure of the author's own uncertainty. However a reader may decide that, Frederick Buechner is a talented writer clearly bound somewhere, and an interesting man to watch.

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