On the back cover, author Ron Hansen erupts, “a true page-turner that superbly explains Hopkins’s conversion to Catholicism, his poetic genius, and his intellectual daring, while correcting earlier misconceptions that Hopkins was a failure as a Jesuit.” Having read this description I was primed for a book that not only explained these things but did them “superbly.” Further, I was expecting a narrative that would keep me up to the wee hours. Not only that, I didn’t think that the work would have to reach too high a standard since I knew next to nothing about Hopkins’s life, and I was greatly interested.

Sadly, the book does none of what Hansen claims. It’s not that the book doesn’t explain these things well; it simply doesn’t explain them. Yes, Mariani’s biography shows us a young Hopkins struggling with his decision to abandon the Church of England for the Church of Rome. It shows Hopkins seeking counsel and fearing the repercussions within his family. But that showing does not explain. I read the chapter three times. We are not made privy to the issues driving Hopkins away from Anglicanism to Rome. We are not told what specific aspects of the church made Hopkins believe that Rome was the “true” church deserving of his lifelong devotion and sacrifice. There are references to the Oxford Movement, and Hopkins’s connection to Henry Newman is well-documented, but for all the talk around the conversion, there is nothing here to help one understand what exactly it was that convinced Hopkins to make such a radical, sacrificial decision.

Likewise, the biography presents numerous quotes and explications of Hopkins’s poetry, showing how the poems echoed the concerns and feelings of the poet. The book charts the friendship between Hopkins and Robert Bridges and their individual development as poets. Yet, the book does not “superbly explain…his poetic genius.” The book narrates the troubles that kept Hopkins’s poems from being published, both the barriers that Hopkins erected against pride and the difficulty editors had in understanding what he was about. The book also sketches out the artistic differences Hopkins had with his friends, especially Bridges. It is here that the biographer is faced with a conundrum. If Mariani were to truly explain superbly the arguments between the two, the narrative force of the biography would most likely come to a shrieking standstill. However, by not digging in too deep, the reader is left with a sneaking suspicion that the tension between the two was caused mainly by Bridges “not getting it.” The same could be said for the lack of elucidation of Hopkins’s intellectual prowess.

However, I’m sure I would have felt none of this negativity had I not read the back cover.

Had I simply ignored the back cover foo-fer-all, I would have been left to enjoy what this biography actually is: an insightful meditation on a committed Christian struggling with the path God has asked him to walk. After years of following all the rules in his Jesuit order—and performing poorly on one examination—Hopkins found himself basically performing interim pulpit-fill duty in various remote locations in England until he was asked to be part of the faculty of a new university being established in Dublin. While the post of professor at a Jesuit university sounds prestigious today, Hopkins’s tasks were anything but glamorous. His main duty seemed to be the creation, administration, and grading of interminable Latin exams taken by prospective students. Hopkins wrote his mother in July, 1888, “It is a great, very great drudgery…a burden which crushes me and does little to help any good end” (394). As someone who has taught a great deal of Freshman Composition, I can easily imagine the scene. One of the world’s most spectacular poets strives for hours to indicate carefully the errors in grammar and style of hundreds of students who haven’t a clue as to what they are doing. After interminable hours of analyzing dreadful writing, the poet’s brains have mushified into gloppy wallpaper paste, unable to render even the least poetic of images, let alone work that deserves to be published. All the while, the poet knows he has been given a gift that is wasting away, yet he trusts that not only God but also His servants know what is best for eternity, and he bows humbly to their will. Hopkins asserts that he is “only too willing to do God’s work and help on the knowledge of the Incarnation,” and he is certain that Christ came for the his own “salvation and that of the world,” but he also feels that the God’s work is carried out by “a great system and machinery which even drags me on with the collar round my neck” (411). In his darker moments, he acknowledges that he is “unwilling enough for the piece of work assigned me, the only work I am given to do, though I could do others if they were given” (411). Yet, even with these doubts and misgivings, he carries on without complaining to his superiors.

Which is not to say that his struggle is not expressed. In one of his final sonnets, Hopkins cries out to God, “Wert thou my enemy…How wouldst thou worse”. Mariani writes

This is the incredible, mystifying paradox at the heart of it all: that one should keep on, in spite of it all. That, when one gives oneself over to Christ, Christ provides the victory as well, and in such a way that we know—if we know anything—that it is God’s working in and through us. Still, like Christ, however much Hopkins understands all this, he is finding it “an intolerable grief to submit to it.” Yes, he “left the example,” and that “is very strengthening,” but, he has to admit, “it is not consoling.” (367)

And it is in these words, in his struggle, that Hopkins speaks to me. Numerous sermons remind us of Christ’s command to take up your cross and follow him. Bless the pastors who try to warn us that the path of discipleship is not an easy one, that the gate is narrow. Yet, in most of these sermons, the focus is on the spectacular struggle, the noticeable persecution, the dolorous passion. How often are congregations encouraged to gut out the grinding perseverance of pouring all of your energy into the drudgery of everyday service to the kingdom? How many times have you heard the brilliant research scientist commanded to give up discovering the next medical miracle in order to minister by tending the church grounds? How often do we raise as an example the gifted musician who plays the same familiar hymns week after week after week to a tiny congregation in a small rural town?

So while Mariani’s book does not do the things touted on the back cover, it does superbly illuminate a devoted Christian struggling to be content with the work set for him to do.

Erinn Batykefer’s Allegheny, Monongahela may be her first collection of poetry, but it displays a mastery of form and content that underscores the awards and publications listed in the book’s acknowledgements. “Dog Poem” begins the collection with an image of what it means to be a poet: “I’ve been known to drag old bones with me for miles./If I bury them, the only question is how long/ till I’m clawing the ground to feel them under my teeth again.” From there Batykefer launches into explorations of death, love, and identity. While the collection features some more open poetry, Batykefer’s talents shine brightest when working in the formal modes. The sonnets “Red Hills with White Cloud,” “Pittsburgh as Self-Portrait I & II,” and “Haute Couture” demonstrate that the poet is comfortable working within the strictures of the form but also feeling the freedom to stretch the edges of the form to meet the poetic needs of the material. “Allegheny Love Letter” teems with earthy anthropomorphic imagery that sketches not only the many moods of the mighty river but also provides a chilling profile of the kind of love that cannot help but destroy the beloved. The most successful of the free verse works dwells on an extended anatomical metaphor to describe the speaker’s experience with opera—“The palate lifts like a curtain; the skull a dome for resonance.” This is not the only poem to dwell on what is going on under the skin of the body. “X-Ray” describes the portrait produced by the medical device, while “Horizontal Horse’s or Mule’s Skull with Feather” evisions a future “When my face is scoured clean, sun-whitened, / when my vulgar skin has been stripped / from my body.” “Egyptology” outlines the mummification process “because grief requires compartmentalization.” Lest you think that Batyfefer’s collection is nothing but dark tropes, “Heirloom Recipe” provides a touching—not sentimental—tribute to the power of a peach cake to remind us of our history. While Allegheny, Monongahela does have its weak spots, the delights far outweigh them.

There’s much to like in Stephen March’s Strangers in the Land of Egypt. The protagonist is that likable high-schooler who somehow is much more self-aware and wise than his peers but who still has lots to learn. The crises in the story don’t stretch our credulity. And the epiphanies in the end are profound, but they don’t promise to solve everything in a neat little package.

What keeps me from loving this book is that it doesn’t seem to know who its audience is, whether it’s aiming for a traditional Young Adult crowd or a literary adult audience. It’s the difference between Cecil Castellucci’s Beige or Sara Zarr’s Story of a Girl and Robert Clark’s Love Among the Ruins, between a coming of age story in which the narrator is developing along with story and one in which an adult narrator—with adult understanding—looks back on youth. Where this comes out most strongly to me is in the exposition. After passages of deep understanding probing the emotions and psyche of our main character, we’ll get expositions of the basics of Judaism or the Holocaust that might be fitting in an After School Special. Castellucci’s Katy learns things she doesn’t know in natural interactions with her environment; Jesse listens to the kind of lectures I’d like to give the teens in my life but know they’ll never hear.

Blurbs pasted on the back of my reviewer’s copy praising March’s previous work claim that “March has successfully captured the feel of Southern angst as only…Faulkner or Flannery O’Connor can.” I generally ignore blurbs, and its probably unfair to compare anyone living to the crown royalty of Southern fiction. I can certainly see how an overzealous blurber could make the connection. Does Strangers feature an agnostic protagonist being confronted with a moment of supernatural grace? Yes. Does the story take place in a small town where everyone knows everyone, and everyone has a colorful backstory? Yes. But for my money, this town could have been placed in any of a number of struggling Northern towns. Maybe the hegemony of consumerism has erased some of the unique qualities that made the South of Faulkner and O’Connor distinct from the Hawthorne’s New England or Sandberg’s Chicago.

I began this review saying there’s much to like in Strangers in the Land of Egypt. What made me keep turning the pages was the developing relationship between a self-aware, clueless boy and an odd Jewish Holocaust survivor. That Jesse (as in “the tree of”) is redeemed by the ministrations of a man named Ebban, the helpful stone carved with holy text, perhaps puts too fine a point on the transformation of the teen, but it is perhaps the only heavy-handed aspect to a subtle conversion in which we don’t see a fully renewed soul but rather a man set on the path of grace.

“All the publishers are interested in selling books and if you say something about sex and being a nigger then you got a bestseller” (206).

C.S. Lewis writes that fiction allows you to be a thousand men whilst always maintaining the integrity of your own person. In today’s impoverished lingo, he argued that fiction allows us to walk in another person’s shoes. To be honest, the world of Brown’s classic novel of an African-American navigating the gigolo world of Copenhagen is one I didn’t want to stay in for very long. The rawness of the sexual encounters that make up much of the book at first seemed to be little more than the kind of meaningless encounters strung together by thin plot lines that are the hallmark of run-of-the-mill porno. I found myself repeatedly referring back to the insightful, new introduction by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. to reassure myself that something worthwhile was going to come of this odyssey through the sordidness of late-60’s Denmark.

However, as the novel progresses, the increasing bizarreness of the protagonist George Washington’s encounters with women wear on him as much as on the reader. Upon entering the bedroom of his last encounter, he sits on the sofa, head in hands, wondering “What is beauty, Mrs. Hamilton?” When Washington realizes that “everybody in this town, every black person, seems to be living off someone or something else. Everything but their insides” (203), he decides to go back home to the U.S., back to where “the battleground is a bit more familiar” (206).

In his introduction, Louis Gates, Jr. recalls that among his friends at Yale Brown’s book was “a required text on our veritable ‘Quest for Blackness’” (x). I don’t pretend to know or understand what lessons he derived about African-American identity from Life and Loves, but the return of Washington to America where the battleground is familiar might be one. The gigolos in Brown’s book are all expatriates escaping the racism and violence of the South, of America. Yet, what they find in Europe is not essentially different. The white women do not desire them for their persons but for their color. The existentialism of Europe seems to Washington to be just another way for whites to get in touch with their blackness. America may be a place that doesn’t allow him to write a “serious book,” but it’s a place where he understands the situation.

I also stayed with the book because while George Washington is careering through women left and right, he displays a self-awareness and understanding that is endearing. At first, his knowledge makes him appear the rapacious player, but as you watch the emptiness dawn on him, a core of inner humanity peeks out. Mr. Jiveass might be a slick negotiator, but he can’t jive himself for too long, and in the end, not at all.

Gates calls attention to the postmodern epilogue in which Brown tells his character “All is jive” (212) and encourages him that in the end, after “the intellectuals [pick] through your soul….You will have them understand what you mean by jive” (213). In a new preface written for this edition, Brown suggests that “Jive is a philosophy, for sure, but it is also a door. Open it and enter” (xxii). Brown certainly opens a door into a world of experience alien to me racially, but it’s also a world that is not entirely foreign. It is a world in which people’s self-serving behavior robs them of humanity, a world in which escaping from overt oppression leads to a more insidious, creeping imprisonment, a world in which freedom from does not lead to freedom in. And the kind of life that leads to that world and may be required in that world is certainly something I could understand as jive.

When one reads “modern-day fairy tales for grown-ups, reimagined from Jewish folklore” on the back of a book, one is prepared for ironic tales in which that which we see the good side of the bad. We’ve been prepared for these ironic fairy tales from the spate of post-modern spate of books that tell us that what we’ve been shown thus far isn’t the whole story. What I wasn’t prepared for in Jonathan Keats’s The Book of the Unknown: Tales of the Thirty-Six was the storyteller pushing through the idea that irony is good for its own sake to show us the truths that irony reveals in its opposition.

Tet the Idler, who lives in a world without sleep, not only discovers the value of rest, but in doing so, he also rediscovers the joy of work. Dalet the Thief, whose thieving becomes toothless when the traditional items he steals lose their worth in a booming and developing economy, returns the town to their humanity by stealing those baubles by which the neuveau riche now measure their worth. And so it goes in each of the 12 tales.

The tales are framed with a mysterious tale of a student collecting these stories of secret Jewish saints. Sounding almost Buffy-like, we’re told that in every generation there are 36 saints roaming the earth. The catch is that the saints don’t know it. The narrator suggests that it is in the “quotidian” that we find holiness rather than in the special. The tales themselves suggest that not only is holiness found in the quotidian but also that it is found in those who do not seek it. None of the protaganists know that they are saints nor are they much interested in seeking out spiritual truth. Each blithely goes about their lives simply trying to live. It is as they try to make sense of thier lives that their search reveals to their communities the truths they didn’t know they sought.

Performing this sort of ironic morality instruction would be engaging in a single story, but Keats pulls off a thoroughly wondrous set of 12 tales, each one rendered in a natural voice that while echoing the patness of a fairytale never condescends to either the material nor the reader. While the inclusion of only 12 tales in a book whose subtitle is “Tales of the Thirty-Six” may smack of marketers setting up a sequel, it’s a sequel I would gladly welcome.