Cirque du surreal

PADRE PIO, the 20th century Roman Catholic priest and healer said to have manifested Christ’s wounds, was asked whether his stigmata were a result of concentrating so intently on the Crucifixion. “Go out to the fields and look very closely at a bull,” he answered. “Concentrate on him with all your might and see if you start to grow horns.” Frankka, the 28-year-old heroine of Ariel Gore’s beguiling first novel, “The Traveling Death and Resurrection Show,” is no saint. A college dropout raised by her devout grandmother, she travels the country as the star of a ragtag, countercultural, religious-themed circus. At the show’s climax, she steps into the spotlight, draws on the force of a self-imposed fast and performs one awe-inspiring trick: Blood wells from her palms and drips onto the stage.

Frankka’s bleeding arrived spontaneously in childhood, after a day in which her depressed Nana neglected to feed her, and proved a good way to get Nana to break away from her prayers and lamentations long enough to make dinner. Frankka (born Frances Catherine) held out her arms, in imitation of the Crucifixion, and felt her palms open and bleed. It’s a complicated gift to which Frankka has never reconciled herself.

“Doesn’t every child deform herself somehow in order to get what she needs,” she reasons: “Real saints get the stigmata because they identify so totally with Christ’s suffering. I just learned to do it for attention.” When she collapses onstage after her performances, her troupe gathers around: The levitating drag queen, the trapeze artist, the bearded lesbian and the Italian fire-breather all revive her with a red juice concoction, the equivalent of Nana’s belated repasts.

The author’s taste for the charmingly odd suits her circus theme (devotees of Katherine Dunn’s “Geek Love” will relish some of her images), but it can lend a surface shimmer that doesn’t serve her larger purposes. Only a few characters aside from Frankka are seen in the round -- her grandmother and some other ministering angels. We’re given enticing sketches and back stories for the troupe members, but they remain sparkling figures who slide in from the wings when needed, like actors in a paper theater. The young lesbian, in particular, seems to have been included only to bridge the carnival and the canon, to recall the figure of Saint Paula, a woman who begged God to make her unappealing to men and was rewarded with a lustrous beard.

The novel opens as Frankka begins to seriously question why she bleeds and what it means to earn her living showing it off. Then, when a reporter steals a snapshot of her tiny pink scars and publishes an article on her in the Los Angeles Times, she loses the protection of ambiguity and becomes a target of religious fanatics who feel she is being sacrilegious. Her next show is mobbed, and a bomb is found under Frankka’s car. The young woman never claimed to be a saint. In fact, she never claimed that her bleeding was anything more than a clever stage effect. Or did she?

Caught among belief, denial and incense-heavy Catholic guilt, she becomes a supple vehicle for the author’s investigations into faith.

Gore, a feminist activist and founding editor of Hip Mama magazine, seems no stranger to zealots and hate-mongers. But Frankka’s enemies are seen in soft focus, a faceless, angry blur of outstretched arms and waving signs -- the way the religious left often envisions the right. The characters who spring to life are those who emerge to help Frankka out of her crisis -- a retired minister who once sheltered draft dodgers and a mountain woman whose cabin door reads, “Hospitality.”

In countless run-down motels and greasy spoons along the highway, Frankka records the lives of the saints in a book -- not just the canonical versions, but also the stories they whispered to her as she walked home alone from Catholic school: the early affairs, wrong turns and eccentricities that could comfort a girl who’d earned the epithet “Freaky Frances” after a classmate decided her eyes were set too far apart. Therese of Lisieux, for example, was “a hippie chick before her time,” Frankka writes. Intent on doing everything, even the dishes, with love, Therese “had no grand plans -- just the radical belief that she could fulfill her destiny simply by being herself.”

Is it sacrilegious for an ordinary woman to summon blood to her palms or a sin to conceal what may be a gift from God? This is a brave and heady question for a first novel and one that the author answers -- both conventionally and through the miraculous. What is sure by the end is that Frankka, like the rest of us, has to follow the path of Therese of Lisieux, the “Little Flower,” in just being her quirky self. Or maybe all she needs is to learn how to cook herself dinner. *