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Wilson's publishers advertise this book as "the portrait of an activist as a young girl." It is undoubtedly that, but it is much more. It is that rare thing, a non-ideological memoir of a poor-white, evangelical childhood which is also a considerable literary achievement. Although Wilson now aligns herself with the "backslidden" men, her childhood identification was with the women and the church: her affection for her family and their whole way of life is palpable. Until the mystery of the deaths of Archie Don and his colleague Sambo gives an urgent shape to the story, the first part of her book mostly deals with the life of the women and children, and the church of Jesus Loves You.

The women and children do the backbreaking and filthy work of cleaning the shrimp catch as it comes off the boats, and Silver is an exception in also going shrimping with both her father and her grandfather, as if she were a boy. She is the fifth of her parents' brood of six, sandwiched between two sisters, worldly Shenna, "Queen of the Jungle," and baby Pill. It is Silver who takes the church seriously, so seriously that Sister Pearl has her picked out as a future missionary and probable martyr in the Congo. She loves the church, and "next to Abraham Lincoln and Jesus" she loves Brother Bob, the preacher who has a mission to shrimping folk, and even goes to the beer joints to preach to the men who won't come to church.

But Brother Bob is trounced by Brother Beller, who detects no evidence of the Holy Ghost in the church, no tongue-speaking, no prophecy, everything lukewarm, all the signs of occupation by devils who FAKE a good church. In turn, the arrival of Brother Dynamite is a challenge even to Brother Beller. Dynamite is a snake-handler, convertedin jail by the appearance of Jesus' face on a bologna sandwich just as he was sharpening a screwdriver with murderous intent. His appearance hots up both the church scene and the murder mystery. It also coincides with ten-year-old Silver's realization that the screen actor Anthony Perkins is her alter ego, even if he may be demonic. Her disenchantment with the Pentecostal world is barely hinted, but the signs are there to read alongside the clues to the murder.

We have too few memoirs of an evangelical upbringing of this vividness and excellence. Diane Wilson is a sad loss to Pentecostalism but a real literary find. It has often been noted that religion has far less to fear from science than from the seductions of the imaginative arts. Perhaps that is the real significance of Anthony Perkins in Wilson's story. If so, the term we are to guess in response to Machado's tantalizing challenge must, alas, be "the arts."

Bernice Martin is emeritus reader in sociology at the University of London.

Copyright © 2009 by the author or Christianity Today International/Books & Culture magazine.
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