Anglopressy

After having read Shopgirl a few years ago, I was giddy, when I saw another novel by the legendary Steve Martin. Martin seems compelled to create querky characters who have trouble connecting to the people around them.

This novella centers around the life of oddball extraordinaire Daniel Pecan Cambridge. A shut-in who was stranded in California by his inability to even cross the stree let alone get back to Texas. Daniel has what appears to be a rather debilitating case of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. He is unable to cross streets unless there are two scooped-out driveways directly across from one another.

He harbors a secret infatuation with a real estate agent who is attempting to rent out some apartments in a complex adjacent to his own. Every meeting with another person, except for his social worker/psychiatrist who stop by once a week, goes painfully wrong. Daniel can not seem to suppress his urges to do some unnecessary task that results in his being ostracized from everyone around him. If he were freed from the need to have human contact, this would be a painless thing to read about. But he is still very much dependent on some social interaction. He just happens to be completely unable to break free of a socially destructive mind.

In the end though community prevails, but not without heartache. Daniel finds the ability to let go of his need touch the corners on all of the machines at Kinko’s or making magic squares to calm himself whenever his cycle is broken. Steve Martin is, I believe, bringing North American literature into a new era. Read anything you find by him.

Grace and Peace,

Jared

I finished this book a while back and I’ve been working on other things, so I haven’t gotten around to reviewing it.

There’s not a lot to say about it though. Duffy’s writing is very easy to read and the book is not what I expected from a Catholic. I really did think that this would either be a work of Catholic propaganda or Protestant anti-polemic. It was neither. Duffy does his best to reliably recount the history of the papacy without going one way or the other.

Though this book was interesting, it took me almost a year to finish. It’s a must-read in the same way that Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. By that I mean it was interesting but I just kept putting it down for other things. I was really excited to see the transformation of western civilization cause a very reluctant change in the nature of the papal office chronicled. The blend of imperial/secular and ecclesiastical powers in the west were torn apart. The civilization of strong bureaucracies wherein historically civic institutions became a part of religious life, was torn from the control of the church. The most interesting portion of the book was the age of revolution and everything that followed. Seeing the church go from belligerently defying change to John Paul II’s quiet undertow of conservatism.

Sorry the picture is so small.

Grace and Peace,
Jared