The Review Revolution: Improving Culture through Kvetching

A New Career Direction

Well, after nine years as the Religion Reviews Editor at Publishers Weekly, I've decided that it is time to move on to new challenges.  July 18 will be my last day at PW, right after the International Christian Retail Show in Orlando.  I'm glad I'll have a chance to say good-bye to some of the special people from evangelical Christian houses I've worked with over the years, because in my new job I don't think I'm going to be attending ICRS. 

I am very excited about my next step!  I will be working 3/5 time as an acquisitions editor for Westminster John Knox Press, which is a great fit for my academic background and my interests in biblical studies, theology, and religion & popular culture.  (These are the people who brought us Mark Pinsky's The Gospel According to the Simpsons and other fine books.)   WJK is a terrific and stable company with super people who love books.  I am honored to be joining their team, and also glad that I can continue working from home less than full-time.  (I am beginning work on a new book of my own, a major study of Mormon adolescence in America.  It's going to take a good deal of time and travel to conduct the surveys and interviews.) 

I have been itching for several years now to get into acquisitions or agenting.  I want to be part of nourishing good books from the very beginning of the process.  I have loved my work with PW, but it's time to take Andy Crouch's suggestion and stop merely critiquing culture and start actually creating some.  (BTW, check out his new book Culture Making.  It's fantastic, and I say this as a completely impartial bystander, not at all swayed by the fact that Andy sang at my wedding.) 

I'll have three weeks off to rest, catch up on scrapbooking (as if), get over-involved in Olympic spectating and work more on my book proposal before I start my new position in August.  Thanks so much to all of you who have been nothing short of inspirational to me in my PW job.  I am privileged to still get to work with many of you and see you at trade shows and conferences.  After nearly a decade in the business, I still can't believe we actually get paid for this.

Five Summer Beach Reads . . .In Religion?

When I was at the beach last week (wonderful!), I did a taped radio interview with Interfaith Voices on religion beach reads.  Not sure there really is such a thing, but I tried to choose five spring and summer religion books that were entertaining as well as informative.  The interview was carried on radio stations this past week but apparently can still be heard at the show's website.   (My own beach reads last week were 2 YA novels, lots of home improvement magazines, and Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union, but I haven't gotten very far with that yet. I guess I go on vacation to get away from religion books.)

The lone novel was Anne Rice's Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana, which as I've blogged before marks a huge step up from the debut novel in this series.  It's as though she is now able to step away from the extensive research she has done on the life of Jesus, and can let her imagination take flight.  The story does what the best historical fiction aims to accomplish: to make the people of the past just as complex, just as frail and human, as anyone we know today.  All writers of historical fiction seem to believe they do this, but so few actually manage it that sometimes I despair of the whole genre.  Biblical fiction is especially susceptible to wooden and stilted characterizations, as authors bend over backwards not to offend.  Kudos to Rice for breaking the mold.  I am looking forward to her fall memoir Called Out of Darkness about her reconversion to Catholicism, which should give some background to her decision to write only religious novels.  (Although anyone who thinks her earlier horror novels weren't also deeply religious is not reading them very carefully.)

I also recommended a funny and surprisingly engaging biblical studies book The Uncensored Bible: The Bawdy and Naughty Bits of the Good Book.  I never thought I would see a book successfully cross biblical studies with bathroom humor.  Scatology meets eschatology?  Whatever it is, it's quirky and unusual and actually very well-reasoned.  These chapters delve into both 1) the stories your Sunday School teacher hastily glossed over or liked to pretend weren't there, or 2) the stories you spent quite a bit of time on but never looked at in quiiiiiiite this way.  (The first chapter, which makes a linguistic argument for Eve being created from . . . wait for it! . . .Adam's missing penis bone is just the opening salvo.)  This book concentrates on the OT, so here's hoping for an NT sequel in the future.  I can only imagine what these authors will do with Paul's declaration that he counts everything as skubala save knowing Jesus as Lord.

Summer at the beach is often a time when people are thinking more consciously (or self-consciously) about bodies and sexuality. So pick 3 is Donna Freitas's new Oxford book Sex and the Soul, which looks at the disconnect between college students' spiritual beliefs and their sexual behavior, and the loneliness that often accompanies their choices.  I am moderating a panel at Sunstone in August where Donna is speaking, and we are so thrilled to have her coming.  The book is based on extensive, fascinating interviews.  (On a personal note --after reading it, I decided that the medieval chastity belt needs to be revived pretty soon here, as my 9-year-old is coming up on those scary puberty years.  Apparently these can now be purchased at lockmeup.com.  Awesome! Or, uh, bizarre  Who ARE these people?)

The other body-related book is Jewish Choices, Jewish Voices: Body, a collection of essays on different aspects of the body.  I was especially interested in the tattoo section.  There are so many strong feelings about tattoos in the Jewish community, partly based on levitical proscriptions, partly based on Holocaust memories, and of course partly based in cultural and social norms.

And finally, I very much liked Tony Jones's book The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier.  In my mind it is the best introduction so far to the Emergent movement, mostly because it is written by an insider who has been with the movement since the beginning. Here's a link to the PW review, which I did not write, but with which I wholeheartedly agree.   One of the best aspects of the book is that it is grounded not just in theological discussions (which are generally very well argued -- check out his startling and wonderful idea of the church as a wiki!) but also in concrete Emergent communities.  I read this book on a plane to Kansas City, and was intrigued to learn of a vibrant Emergent church there.  I wish I had had time to visit it.  (Incidentally, Martin Marty was also on my flight, just by coincidence, and while we were riding together from the airport into town I told him a little bit about the book.  He seemed very interested in some of the questions raised by Emergent folks.  Please, someone, when I am eighty, will you make sure that I am still as intellectually curious and excited about new ideas as Martin Marty?!  Wow. Love him.) 

Back to The New Christians.  My only real complaint about it is one I've lodged at other Emergent fare, most notably Brian McLaren's A Generous Orthodoxy: these guys have got to stop shadowboxing so much.  At times they come out swinging, and at other times (like in the first 30 or so pages of McLaren!) they apologize all over themselves for not being sufficient experts in theological questions.  I know the Emergent folks receive an obscene amount of criticism--Emergent has even been added to some cult watch organizations as a dangerous religious movement that's out to snatch the bread of life from our children's very mouths, etc.  But I don't read books by Emergent folks to watch them fence their opponents; I read them because I love their new wine in old wineskins.  As Jones says, the gospel is simply too beautiful not to be true.  Let's have more of that.

Incidentally, Tony Jones has a terrific blog here. I am amazed by these folks who blog so often.  How do they find the time?  He is a very talented writer.

Short Takes on YA Fiction

I have an article in this week's Publishers Weekly  about the growth of YA fiction for Christian readers in the 12-18 set.  (Which means they are being read by kids as young as 9, which is the new 12.  As the mother of a 9-year-old, that scares the pants off me.)  Personally, I have some serious reservations about the idea of doing "Christian knock-offs" of Gossip Girls and the like (and I am always disturbed by cover art that objectifies women's bodies at the expense of oh, I don't know, their faces).  How "Christian" is it to continue glorifying shopping, glamour, and materialism, or to suggest that some people have "it" and the unlucky ones simply don't?  My own read of these books is that Christianity is a veneer of niceness and good citizenship; the Christian girls don't have sex or do drugs, but their faith is "In Prada We Trust" more than in any recognizable biblical deity.  However, as usual I'm in the minority here.  Christian girls are eating this stuff up.  They love the clothes, the hair, the elite private school setting.  And if I'm being honest with myself, I have to admit that I probably would have loved this series too when I was fourteen.

But there's a lot of other interesting stuff out there these days.  I read an absurd amount of secular YA fiction just for fun, so here are some short takes on three I've read recently.

HERO by Perry Moore; B-

This is a fun read that came out last summer.  It seems aimed primarily at GLBT youth, but just about anyone enjoys a good superhero story, so it's worth checking out.  The story is about Thom, a high school student with unusual healing powers and a strange set of parents: his dad, an aging ex-superhero, is bitter and evasive about the past, and his mom has mysteriously skipped out on the family.  Thom joins a League of superheroes-in-training (shades of Sky High), with some of the most entertaining scenes introducing these characters and their various powers.  Moore uses the traditional superhero-secrecy/double identity thing in tandem with Tom's gradual and uncomfortable coming out as a young gay man, which I thought was sensitively handled.  There's a very cute boy-meets-boy love story, complicated of course by the fact that both boys are sub rosa superheroes.  Thumbs up on this one, with my only complaints being that the plot is occasionally too derivative of other superhero sendoffs (e.g., The Incredibles and Heroes), and that I thought we all could have done without a certain Internet porn sequence.

THE LUXE by Anna Godberson; D

I wonder how many readers bought this book only for its sumptuous cover?  I picked up this galley at BEA last year and was hoping for a Jennifer Donnelly-type read.  I also wanted to like it simply because the author went to Barnard, where I used to teach.  But -- Ugh.   If you took Melrose Place and Beverly Hills 90210 and set them in 1899 Manhattan, you would have this book.  Godberson gives us the usual array of  stock victims and stock victimizers, throws in some sex and the Gilded Age equivalents of drugs and rock-n-roll, and mixes it all up with a hackneyed cast of clueless, unreasonable parents.  It's well-researched from a historical perspective, and I appreciated the attention to period detail.  The trouble is that there is simply no one to root for here.  Not one character is well-rounded enough to make a discerning reader care. There is also no moral center, no real conflict.  These characters are so silly, shallow and self-centered that I almost didn't finish the book, which is rare for me with fiction.  I made it to the all-too-predictable ending, but I will be avoiding the sequel no matter what the cover looks like.  That designer deserves a raise and a corner office.  Godberson deserves both a year in an MFA program and a remedial course in basic humanism. 

THE MYSTERIOUS BENEDICT SOCIETY by Trenton Lee Stewart; A

What tremendous fun this is!  My friend Lil Copan of Paraclete Press gave me a copy at the Calvin Festival in April.  I brought it with me on a visit home and read the first 100 pages aloud to my mother after she had surgery.  Then the book got so compelling and engaging that I had to race through silently and leave poor Mom to fend for herself.  (I gave her a copy of her own for Mother's Day.) This novel is for a slightly younger audience than the other two, more of a middle reader audience -- although great children's lit is always enjoyable to adults.  At nearly 500 pages, it's a hefty doorstopper for that market, though a certain boy wizard has already repeatedly blown through our expectations about desirable book lengths for middle readers. 

The story centers around four gifted children who respond to an ad promising "special opportunities" for select applicants.  The application process is fun in and of itself (with riddles the reader can solve right alongside the characters), and then the adventure begins as these  unlikely kids set out to save the world.  One thing I liked about the story is that three of the four are unheralded poster children for the schoolage afflictions du jour: ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder), ODD (Oppositional Defiant Disorder), and PAD (Pervasive Anxiety Disorder).  Part of the fun of the novel is watching these kids realize that their quirks and disabilities are actually assets.  Another wonderful aspect of the story is their teamwork and cooperation; each child contributes something unique and essential to the mission. The novel is clever, funny, and warm-hearted. I have just checked the sequel out of the library (after waiting for nearly three weeks, as every middle school kid in Cincinnati had signed up first). 

From Book to Movie, Part III: A Review of THE CHILDREN OF MEN

I think Al hit the nail on the head with his comment: only bad books seem to improve in their film versions.  Good books--which, thankfully for me, are legion!--almost never get better on screen.  And here's a case in point: P.D. James's astonishing novel The Children of Men.

I have been a fan of James's detective fiction since college, so I was intrigued when my friend Lauren Winner loaned me a copy of this 1992 sleeper at AAR last year.  (Lauren, if you're reading this, I do intend to return the book to you.)  Some aspects of the story are certainly what we expect from James: the careful, detached but dead-on observations about human behavior, the peerless vocabulary.  But the subject matter is a radical departure from her detective fiction.

The first half of the novel is the first-person diary entries of Theo, a pompous Oxford don who is plying his historian's trade even as he writes his journal entries: no one, he knows, will be around to read them in the future.  It's 2021 and the human race is dying, felled by a global infertility pandemic.  Since there have been no live births since 1995, British society is in a quiet turmoil, with a government that wishes to appear benign but is actually a steely dictatorship run by Theo's cousin.  Theo records all the quotidian details of his isolated life in this society, where depression and suicide are commonplace and people negotiate custody settlements about their pets, who have come to replace children in human affections.

Theo's sober life is interrupted by Julian, an idealistic young woman who seeks his help getting an audience with the government to hear grievances about the underside of this government's policies.  Without giving away much more of the plot, suffice it to say that Julian has an especially compelling reason for wanting to ensure a just society for the future, and when Theo learns her motivations, he is finally galvanized to begin living the life he has so far only been recording.  The second half of the novel is more traditionally James, with third-person narration and a fast-moving plot.  Theo is a participant, even a leader, and not merely an observer.

It's the second half, of course, that provides the guns-blazing trajectory of the movie.  Whereas in the book, outright war is kept just at bay by the government's uber-British concerns for civilized conduct, the film misses that tightrope walk entirely, degenerating into shoot-em-up action to compensate for its lack of finesse.  To say that the film lacks subtlety is a violent understatement. 

What was so chilling about the book is this future society's inherent plausibility. I could easily picture the dystopia James created because it was such a logical extension of the way things are now: in the book, the infertility crisis only exposes fissures that are already evident around issues like immigration, class struggle, and fear of aging.  The movie, which should have been helped by strong performances by Clive Owen and Julianne Moore, prefers to depict an all-out war zone.

Book: A

Movie: D

From Book to Movie, Part II: A Review of The Jane Austen Book Club

The Jane Austen Book Club
Book: A-
Movie: B

How much fun is this?  A whole book about women who love to read Jane Austen--a book filled with coy plot allusions, character references, settings and themes.  What's more, it's a book that's filled with humor and hilarity.  Fowler--dare I say this?--is almost as observant about the foibles of human nature as Austen herself.  If I weren't getting enough of an Austen fix this year from the all-Jane-all-the-time marathon on Masterpiece, Fowler's book would be a happy alternative supplier of Austen's crackest crack.

And--the fun abounds!--the movie is strong too.  My husband, who had not read the book (and who, I am sorry to admit, has read no Austen at all, though he has so few other serious faults that one might overlook this), enjoyed it thoroughly.  It's a movie that is a party in its own right, and I would see it again, despite the fact that so many interesting subplots had to be cut to shrink the book to a filmable length.

Of course, much of the fun in the book is the slyness of Fowler’s emulations of the six Austen plots in the lives of her six characters.  You realize fairly early on that Jocelyn is the efficient and matchmaking Emma, but it takes more time to understand that Sylvia’s decorous restraint makes her a dead ringer for Elinor Dashwood.  Grigg’s childhood experience of being near-abandoned at a strange castle run perfect counter to Catherine Morland’s fanciful dread of Northanger Abbey.  I loved the book’s wily use of Austen’s plots and characters.

And then there is the book’s delicious back matter, absent of course from the movie.  Fowler has more appendices than the trio of endings to Return of the King, including, most entertainingly, a chronology of reviews and comments about Austen from the turn of the nineteenth century to the present.  Austenites can puff up with righteous indignation at Mark Twain’s infuriating comment that he would like to dig up Austen’s shin bone and smack her skull with it (!), or Sir Walter Scott’s scathing, patronizing review of Emma.  (Scott later changed his tune.)  And we can all cheer at E.M. Forster’s confession that he was “slightly imbecile about Jane Austen,” who was his favorite author.  I always knew there was a reason I liked Forster.

Also great fun are the discussion questions for book clubs, brilliantly presented in each character’s voice.  (“In The Jane Austen Book Club, I take two falls and visit two hospitals,” writes Allegra.  “Did you stop to wonder how a woman who supports herself making jewelry affords health insurance?  Do you think we will ever have universal health care in this country?”) Definitely worth checking out.

In short, this one is a winner either way.  The book is better than the movie--though as we've already said, that's an almost universal rule--but the movie is awfully amusing on its own, with great comedy, strong performances, and the obligatory Austenish happy ending.

From Book to Movie, Part I: A Review of The Other Boleyn Girl

This is the first of three blog reviews on recent movies, compared with their book counterparts.  Not to give away the store, but in all three instances, I felt the book was better than the movie--it differed only by how much better.  This whole exercise has made me ponder the issue of movie adaptations. (And by the way, if you’ve never seen the movie Adaptation, do rent it; it’s wonderfully clever and has hilarious asides about postmodernism, POV, and the writing process.)  Most film adaptations are so inferior to their book predecessors that I am hard pressed to think of examples the other way around.  Are there movies that improve upon the books they adapt?  The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, maybe.  Callie Khouri took an overwrought and schlocky D novel (sorry, but it’s true) and made a rather brave B film out of it.  But that is the only example I can think of, and it seems to be the one that proves the rule.  It certainly helps if you’re starting out with a rotten book—there’s no place to go but up.

The Other Boleyn Girl
Book: B
Movie: C-

I enjoyed the smutty novel The Other Boleyn Girl, a fat, satisfying yarn of sibling rivalry, palace betrayals and scheming clans.  I should have known that a two-hour movie would barely be able to contain all of the historical details that made the 660+ page tome so intriguing.  If the novel is a doublet-ripping guilty pleasure, the movie just is a mess.

I can forgive many of the necessary changes that were made to the plot, such as eliminating minor characters and accelerating the storyline so that Mary and Anne can be played by adult actors throughout. (In the book, and possibly in history, Mary was married off to William Carey when she was just twelve, and dispatched to the king’s bed not long after.)

What is harder to forgive is the movie’s total overhaul of the book’s characterizations.  All the bad guys get to remain bad, but the bad girls get a makeover.  In the book, Mary is one of the only characters we can root for, because every person around her—her parents, uncle, sister Anne and brother George—is scheming to get ahead, though George at least is an ally.  Anne in the film is almost unrecognizably human, even kind, speaking gently to her servants (would any Tudor queen have thanked her servants in that wholly American way?), showing maternal affection and concern for her daughter Elizabeth, and loving her sister Mary.  In the film, they begin as best friends whose relations are temporarily fractured by their competition for the king’s bed, but in the much more interesting book their relationship is tortured from first to last.  And in the book, their mother is one of the most calculating and ambitious members of the family, showing no love to any of her children and thinking of them only in terms of how they might push the family forward.  In the film, the mother (played by a too-little-seen Kristin Scott Thomas) is a constant, if wholly ineffectual, moral compass.

The movie takes the safe route by making nice whenever the book is more complex.  The Tinseltown version makes Anne more of a victim and Mary more of a courageous heroine than the book ever does.  At the end of the book, Mary does not plead for her sister’s life or visit Anne in prison, as in the movie, nor does she risk her own life to take care of little Elizabeth.  She wisely keeps her head down—and so is able to keep her head.  And in the movie, the incestuous incident between Anne and her brother stops short of anything really nasty, while the book darkly hints at their mutual guilt.  A whitewash all around.

My husband, who has not read the book, enjoyed the movie more than I did, and it certainly does have some merits.  Natalie Portman puts in a very credible performance as Anne, especially considering the bipolar manner in which the character is written.  The scenery is lush and the costumes are gorgeous.  But even if taken as a film in its own right, without reference to the book, too many aspects of it don’t work.  Mary’s first husband William Carey, after reluctantly turning his wife over to bed the king, entirely disappears from the movie.  At least the book has the decency to let the poor bloke die of a fever so that Mary can move on with her life.  In the movie, he just quietly vanishes and Mary remarries at the end of the story—an especially ironic editing oversight when you consider that this entire saga is about the intense difficulties of dissolving one 16th-century marriage in order to contract another.  (Henry, take notes on the ease with which this accomplished.)

What Do Publishers Mean By Emergent?

I had an op-ed piece in this week's edition of PW Religion BookLine, kvetching about the overuse of the term "Emergent." If you're interested, the article has sparked a nice discussion here and a notice in an Austin newspaper here.  (Thanks, Kelly, for making me aware of this.)

BTW, I'm especially pleased that the edited version kept my shout-out to Russell Rathbun's book Post-Rapture Radio.  What a ride that book is.  It's like the Being John Malkovich of evangelical Christianity. As a reviewer, I'm not even sure how to describe that book, and find myself in the unusual position of being lost for words.   It's like crawling into someone else's head.  It's fascinating and discomfiting.

Enough of this enthusiastic praise!  On with the kvetching.

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by Jana Riess, Religion BookLine -- Publishers Weekly, 3/12/2008

I got another one of those press releases today, the kind that hypes a book submission as fresh, edgy and pioneering. Nothing unusual there. Only nowadays, Christian publishers are latching on to a new term for such books, whether or not they deserve it: "Emergent."

"Emergent" or the emerging church is a group of Christians—primarily but not exclusively evangelicals—who share some common characteristics. They're interested in postmodernism, and want to explore how to be Christian in today's pluralistic world. They are especially keen on rethinking the Christian gospel through story and experience rather than dogma. They want to reach out to the unchurched (though, like many Christian movements, seem to have their best success among the burned-out "postchurched"), and are well-connected to new technologies, especially the blogosphere. They want to simplify Christian trappings, sometimes foregoing buildings in favor of small house churches that take communion al fresco by downing grape juice in Styrofoam cups with the homeless. You get the idea.

But many of the books I'm receiving that bear the coveted label "Emergent" are not, to my thinking, Emergent at all. Some are authored by megachurch pastors, and since Emergent folks are to megachurches what locally grown organic vegetables are to fast food, I've learned to be suspicious of the label "Emergent." What it should mean is some of what I discussed above. What it increasingly means is this: The following book was written by a Protestant male under the age of 40. He probably has a goatee. He definitely wears eyeglasses that are much cooler than yours.

Part of the problem rests with the porous boundaries of a group like Emergent. As Tony Jones helpfully points out in The New Christians (Jossey-Bass, Mar.), the emerging church is not an institution so much as a conversation. And a conversation is by its nature permeable, which is helpful when you're trying to avoid church-as-usual and generate some new ideas. Yet this conversation's very openness has left it vulnerable to friendly exploitation, as the Establishment quietly co-opts the iconoclastic, anti-Establishment label Emergent. In the end, readers wind up feeling like they've been enjoying a terrific tête-à-tête with someone at a cocktail party until a brash and self-promoting interloper butts in.

Ironically, some of the books that casually brandish the label "Emergent" seem distinctly at odds with the liberal, often radical, political action espoused by many Emergent authors, including Brian McLaren (Everything Must Change, Thomas Nelson, 2007), Tony Jones, Shane Claiborne (Jesus for President, Zondervan, Mar.), or Will and Lisa Samson (Justice in the Burbs, Baker, 2007).

What I fear will be next is a trend of blurring Emergent ideas with self-help. It's easy to see how publishers would find this marriage irresistible: why not join an appealingly edgy hipster ethos with those stock-in-trade Christian books that promise improved prayer life, more effective parenting, and better abs in 30 days? But Emergent folks deserve more than becoming the book equivalent of a glossy infomercial. I'm not the only one who's uncomfortable: I can, in an utterly un-postmodern appeal to an Authority Figure, quote Brian McLaren on the subject: "It's not about the church meeting your needs; it's about joining the mission of God's people to meet the world's needs."

The thing is, I care about this issue. I know it's trendy for the literati to scoff at the emerging church conversation and show their own bona fides by pointing out that there is nothing truly new about it from a theological perspective. (Bonus points if you can drop the names of one or two early church fathers who championed some of the same ideas.) But that been-there-done-that attitude in no way explains how Russell Rathbun's Jossey-Bass book Post-Rapture Radio (which will release in paper in June) knocked the wind right out of me, why I mark up my copies of Brian McLaren's books with arrows and exclamation points, and why I get excited whenever I discover a fresh Emergent voice. There is something special going on here, which is why the growing co-optation of the label Emergent for the same-old-same-old Christian books is so annoying. Here's hoping that publishers (and authors) can restrain themselves before the label becomes meaningless.