This novel is what happens when a fine writer’s sensibilities are informed by a Christian world view.
New York publishers have given readers little reason to expect regeneration through Christ in their novels. But that is just what the reader finds in Farrar, Straus and Giroux’s recent Poppa John. Its author, Larry Woiwode, is no newcomer to New York publishing: his stories have appeared in the New Yorker, and his first novel, What I’m Going to Do, I Think (FS&G, 1969), won the William Faulkner Foundation Award.
His second novel, Beyond the Bedroom Wall (FS&G, 1975), was also critically acclaimed. Subtitled “A Family Album,” it chronicles four generations of North Dakotans, beginning with Otto Neumiller, a German immigrant, and his son Charles, a carpenter who comes to make his father’s coffin. The narrative moves on to Charles’s son Martin and his wife, Alpha, whose early death stems partly from being uprooted from North Dakota. As their children grow up, the family drifts away from the strength-giving center of their life in the Midwest.
Woiwode tells the story with such richly textured and unhurried details that the reader recalls events as if they were his own memories. The book established its author as an uncommonly intelligent and skilled writer. Then Woiwode came to faith in Christ.
What happens when a fine writer’s sensibilities are informed by a Christian world view? Poppa John is a first indication. Where Beyond the Bedroom Wall was an often beautiful, largely loving story, Poppa John is as cold and unrelenting as the December snow of the story’s setting. For a dozen years, Ned Daley, now nearly 70, played Poppa John on a popular television soap opera, a character who acted as confessor and counselor. Appropriating to Poppa John his own preacher-grandfather’s propensity for quoting Scriptures, Ned buys and studies a chain-reference Bible, aided by Spurgeon and Strong’s Concordance. The unspoken force that fidelity to Scripture gave Poppa John appealed to Ned, as did the anonymity the role afforded. He came to prefer being Poppa John:
He would slip into Poppa John, since the chances were good he’d meet somebody who knew him. And once a character of such continual standing, whose gaps and limits are known, is established as benign, he’s controllable; he won’t slip into the unpredictable pitfalls that can seize your entire attention in the blind and tortuous negotiations you undergo in a real self.
Ned knew those pitfalls. Throughout his adult life there had been times when it took all that was in him to stave off feelings of impending physical and mental disintegration, feelings precipitated by incursions from the past—particularly the appearance of the distorted face of his father, with whose violent death he had never come to terms.
Ned held this “cavernous anxiousness” at bay by becoming Poppa John where he was not faced with his self, the “private solitary sort of closeted retreat, where you were caught within the inescapable sack of the self that you’d been in since birth. Who or what indeed could free you from this body that bore your death?”
This is the question at the core of Poppa John. When Ned loses his role as Poppa John, there is nothing to hold back the past. Past and present, illusion and reality, threaten to coalesce. It is this unemployed, disoriented man the reader meets.
On December 23, with money running out, Ned and his wife make a gesture toward festivity: they go Christmas shopping. While shopping alone for Celia, the past overtakes Ned. Losing hold both physically and mentally, he finally collapses in an alcoholic haze. Then, in a remarkable passage where voices and faces from childhood, words and images from Scripture, and distorted perceptions of people and places around him fade in and out, he is brought to the moment of grace:
A stream of images went pouring from his eves … in flashing increments all the way back to his birth, and he thought: It’s this? This simple? Simple?… Then … the face from the basement came sailing up at him in full release, free of the tilted perspective it had always assumed and he saw his father at last as he’d looked when he was alive, and then the face flew on out the back of his skull, and in its fracturing aftermath he was staring at a pair of bare feet, tensed in their final tremors, crossed at the arches, twitching and tearing over an iron spike.
To ever have held up his head in the light of this was monstrosity. Unspeakable presump—
Amazing grace; remarkable writing.
Moments later oblivion overtakes Ned. He wakes two days later to the whiteness of a hospital room. The book’s last pages are dazzling, all the more so for the “dark strumming” that shadows the first part of the novel. Freed from the face and his fears of death, Ned sees in his bed sheets “the mountainous snows that would cover his grave.” Death indeed has lost its sting.
One of Woiwode’s convictions is that writers who are Christians must, as Scripture instructs, rid themselves of false tongues. He tells the truth in Poppa John: he does not draw back from the central and indisputable truth about fallen man. He does not deny the depths of man’s darkness, and consequently he does not diminish the power of light, the Light that came into the darkness.
Like Walker Percy, Woiwode couches prophetic comments in his story. He writes of Christians who, like sacrificing pagans, tempt God to perform; of theologians who are as much psychologists and social theorists as men of God; of people who want God only as syrup—if at all. Woiwode says that in becoming a Christian he was freed from fear. Because God is with him, he can go to the edge in his writing.
Though not unflawed, this novel is one of the few recent books that is literary and Christian. Larry Woiwode deserves the attention of Christians who care for both literature and orthodoxy.
Mrs. Baker is a free-lance writer living in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.
