published by Warren Machine Company
ISBN: 978-1-934866-05-4

reviewed by Debra Murphy

The Liturgy of the Hours (Office of Readings), the Seventh Week of Easter contains the following excerpt from a sermon by a sixth century African bishop:

The disciples spoke in the language of every nation. At Pentecost God chose this means to indicate the presence of the Holy Spirit; whoever had received the Spirit spoke in every kind of tongue….It was love that was to bring the Church of God together all over the world. And as individual men who received the Holy Spirit in those days could speak in all kinds of tongues, so today the Church, united by the Holy Spirit, speaks in the language of every people….

This was the way in which the Lord’s promise was fulfilled: No one puts new wine into old wineskins. New wine is put into fresh skins, and so both are preserved. So when the disciples were heard speaking in all kinds of languages, some people were not far wrong in saying, They have been drinking too much new wine. The truth is that the disciples had now become fresh wineskins, renewed and made holy by grace. The new wine of the Holy Spirit filled them, so that their fervor brimmed over and they spoke in manifold tongues. By this spectacular miracle they became a sign of the Catholic Church, which embraces the language of every nation.

I quote this passage at length because it expresses perfectly something of my own purpose in founding Idylls Press, as well as my broader hopes for a “new Catholic literary revival“—a revival befitting our age; one that would include fiction that radiates the Church’s eternal vision while expressing it in “manifold tongues”; one that embraces “the language of every nation”.

The passage also seemed a perfect introduction to Andrew McNabb’s exquisite little collection of short (sometimes short-short) stories, The Body of This. McNabb, bless him, a gifted young writer, is not afraid to speak the sometimes coarse and pungent language of his unchurched contemporaries. It is a language perfectly suited to the overarching theme of the collection, which is the mystery of the Incarnation: the stunning and seemingly inexplicable choice of God to enter into the often mucky and grotesque “thingness” of fallen bodily human existence…which in our own day seems to get more mucky and grotesque and more fallen by the week. Or, as a good friend of mine (and mother of eight) once said, “Life is so daily.”

No human language, as we know, is capable of expressing the fullness of the Glory of the Lord. Some languages are simpler, others far more complex; some have developed a brilliant literary culture, others haven’t even developed an alphabet; some are musical and poetic, others almost brutal to the ear. It reminds me of the joke that was going around my university’s Foreign Language Building back in the seventies: “Italian is the language of art, French is the language of love, and German is the language you speak to your horse.” And yet, as the passage from the Liturgy reminds us, whatever its gifts or limitations, the Gospel is capable of being preached in all languages, in all places and times and cultures. In my view it is the present task of Catholic storytellers to find a language—or rather “languages”, since each storyteller speaks a different one—that can be understood by the people of our own time and culture.

McNabb’s language is succinct and gently humorous, and sometimes appropriately coarse, since the vignettes in this collection are mostly about those daily “bodily” realities that none of us can avoid but few of us like to talk about; realities that some of us (I believe mistakenly) regard as unsuitable for Christian literature or contemplation: the penitential grace to be gleaned from cleaning up after a despised neighbor’s pooch; saying prayers to Jesus’s Shoulder; the mysterious “law of gradualism” that can, with grace and good will, bring a pair of young lovers out of a hurtful and sinful sexual relationship into a consecrated one; the beauty of sharing an aging spouse’s bodily humiliations. To eschew these subjects out of squeamishness or a misapplied sense of modesty or decorum is to leave the strategic field of the nature of bodily life wide open to the depredations of secular writers, many of them misanthropic materialists who have no concept of the Incarnation or hope of Resurrection; it is to follow the counsels of timidity and despair, and will not further a Catholic literary revival.

Having said that, McNabb’s stories will not suit every taste, and that’s alright too. If you think Walker Percy is crude, or Flannery O’Connor weird and grotesque, you will probably not like McNabb, who though a Yankee, is ploughing similar territory. But I don’t make the comparisons with O’Connor and Percy lightly: McNabb is very very gifted.

Take this disturbingly familiar bit from “Extrusion”, McNabb’s 700-word story about a man named Bent, seething but praying for grace (sort of), as he watches a neighbor letting her mangy dog poo in his pristine front yard:

This wasn’t the Balkans where neighbors turned murderous overnight, but Portland, Maine, where it was the case, as with any other place humans lived, that at a moment’s notice you could circle in and find what was easiest to despise about just about anyone. Bent knew her. And he knew her type. Of the three main kinds on this block, she belonged to the original–those living enclosed by tin or vinyl clapboarding on the outside and faux wood-paneling in. Defiant beside gentrified brick and stained glass, and living knowingly, gleefully, among a litany waiting for her death.

Deed done. There she went. Bent sucked on her first step away like a strychnine pop.

Or how’s this for a great opening to a sweet story (“Service”) about the Christian ideal of service:

So here it is: It was Terry Mulvaney’s lifelong desire to live the Christian ideal of absolute subordination and obedience, and so he got a job at The Home Depot in South Portland.

He was thirty-three now, and had lived enough of life to know that true callings rarely came at the pointed end of a thunderbolt.

That’s beautiful stuff.

Andrew McNabb, I believe, is one of our most talented young writers, and one whose career I intend to follow closely. I hope he tackles a novel one of these days, sooner rather than later.