A Bedeviling Tale of Suburban Mores

THE FAITHFUL NARRATIVE OF

A PASTOR’S DISAPPEARANCE

By Benjamin Anastas

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

288 pages, $24

*

The first chapter of Benjamin Anastas’ new novel is an act of arrogance, a thumb in the reader’s eye. It consists of a single sentence, impossibly convoluted, four pages long. Why Anastas (“An Underachiever’s Diary”) chose to do this is anyone’s guess. The facts he relates in those four pages are simple enough--that the Rev. Thomas Mosher, pastor of a Congregational church in a suburb of Boston, has vanished the day after he delivered an enigmatic sermon comparing God to an “infinite sphere” and that his parishioners are puzzled, then alarmed.

Nor does the forbidding tangle of that sentence--and its implication that all but the most serious readers should give up right there--match the playful tone of the rest of the novel. Anastas may have borrowed his title from the Puritan divine Jonathan Edwards (“A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God”) and his plot--Mosher was having an affair with Bethany Caruso, a married member of his congregation--from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter,” but it’s really John Updike territory that this story inhabits: an outpost of pioneer New England faith being eroded by modern materialism and self-indulgence.

The town of W--- dates to colonial times, but it’s also part of the high-tech strip along Massachusetts’ Route 128. Its politics are liberal, but most of its major employers are in the armaments business, and the selection of Mosher, an African American, to fill the pulpit of “An Historic Church With a Modern Message” has stirred up eddies of insularity and prejudice.

Anastas is less prone than Updike to couch his religious message in allegory. Nobody in “A Faithful Narrative” stands for Satan, for example, unlike Freddy Thorne in “Couples” or Webb Murkett in “Rabbit Is Rich” or the character Jack Nicholson played in “The Witches of Eastwick.” The closest thing to a villain Anastas gives us is a real estate agent named Margaret Howard, who runs church committees “like Joseph Stalin,” whose domineering personality has reduced her husband to imbecility and her son to hapless rebellion, and whose discovery of an unsigned but X-rated note from Bethany to the pastor precipitates a crisis, but Margaret trails behind her no whiff of brimstone.

On the other hand, Anastas’ descriptions of suburbia are more satirical than Updike’s. The latter would never draw a character quite as broadly as Anastas draws Bethany’s sex-obsessed husband, Bobby, whose efforts to put the spice back in his marriage involve building a “fornicatorium” (porn videos, leaky water bed) in a room over their garage.

Two surprises, then. The first is that we view Anastas’ characters more sympathetically as the novel goes on. (Updike’s, in contrast, tend to be diminished, unless he’s writing about his Pennsylvania childhood; the triviality of modern life flattens their tragedies, mocks their romances.) In Anastas’ case, sexual or doctrinal or dietary quirks, addictions to white wine or Zoloft, the mess his characters make of raising children and keeping up appearances--all the reasons to make fun of them--prove to accompany genuine spiritual longings. Mosher’s love affair with Bethany may be illicit, but it’s heartfelt on both sides.

The second is that Anastas does have a message, religious and allegorical. Mosher, as God’s representative, as a handsome, reclusive bachelor and as a man of a different race, is a blank tablet on which the congregation can inscribe its hopes--or, in Margaret Howard’s case, its fears. They treat him as if he is God, so he has to disappear, forcing them to make do with the choices--and spouses--they actually have. It’s a message we may miss when the novel fails to end with the bang it seems to be leading up to. Come to think of it, Anastas may have meant that first sentence to warn us of just such a difficulty.