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Buechner's later fiction reflects themes of this searching and its attendant longing and hopefulness. He focuses less on autobiographical incarnations at this stage (with two notable exceptions), instead capturing the faith journeys of historical, biblical, and even extrabiblical characters.

In Brendan (HSF, 1988), which followed Godric, Buechner teases life out of the sixth-century Irish seaman/monk of the same name. He renders him a crusty, squirrelly man, shaggy-bearded and weather-worn from months at sea.

Brendan, bearing his own sadness, leads a ragtag crew into unknown watery depths in search of Tir-na-n-Og, the place of eternal youth. "[We] sink into deep troughs [and] the swells loom over us," he says of his journeys at sea, and life's journey too. "They sweep in on us heaped to height of high hills by the wind blowing counter to the current."

Son of Laugher (HSF, 1993) is Buechner's re-creation of the biblical story of Jacob, whom he calls Heels. We all know how Jacob stole the blessing from his appetite-driven older brother, Esau. This in turn sends him on a journey of his own, and in this fictional account Buechner adds a dimension that is otherwise missed in the biblical narrative: the power of words and their potential for wreckage. Rebekah says to Heels before he hijacks the blessing:

A word can never be unspoken once it has been spoken. Do you understand what I mean? … If you speak a word with the strength of your heart in it, you can never get that word out of the ears of the one you speak it to and back into your mouth again. Once a word goes forth, it makes things happen for better or for worse. Nothing you do will ever make those things unhappen even though you live for a thousand years. Do you understand me?

On the Road with the Archangel (HSF, 1997) is a fictional version of the apocryphal Book of Tobit, set in Nineveh, woven with still more themes of searches and longings and hopefulness. In it the archangel Raphael disguises himself as a human named Azarias to accompany Tobit's witless but stout-hearted son Tobias on an important errand. Tobit thinks he will soon die and commissions his dewy-eyed son to retrieve two sacks of silver, which Tobit hid years ago in Media. Tobias says, "How will I know what roads to take to Media, which as far as I know is on the other side of the world? … It is confusing enough just to find my way through the streets of Nineveh to pick up the laundry for Mother." Raphael, as Azarias, aids and protects Tobias along the journey in ways unperceived by his companion.

Still, Buechner cannot resist autobiographical allusions, as borne out in two other recent novels. The Wizard's Tide (HSF, 1990) portrays the childhood of a young Teddy Schroeder, a green-eyed blondish lad whose hair needs combing and whose bewildering childhood includes the suicide of his father. In contrast stands Kenzie Maxwell, the protagonist in The Storm (HSF, 1999), modeled loosely on the plot of Shakespeare's Tempest. Kenzie is an energetic septuagenarian who winters in Florida, has visions of saints, and must come to terms with past sins and dreams that he never realized. Together, these novels oddly juxtapose the torments of the bookish lad and his older counterpart, who carries the scars of that same childhood.

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March 2003, Vol. 47, No. 3