Passage through Gehenna
Slavick, William H.
Passage Through Gehenna, by Madison Jones, Louisiana State University, $8.95, 270 pp. Among other virtues, Flannery O'Connor's published correspondence demonstrates a wholesome directness: ' 'The...
...Then she sets Jud about seducing the town "angel of mercy," Hannah Rice, who proposes love as an answer to mortality and loneliness...
...She was not there to appreciate the praise A Cry of Absence received in 1971...
...The now distant Salter calls him to prayer:'' Ain't the Lord's promise enough for you, boy...
...People do things "without punishment or any pains of conscience.'' They "believed terrible things...
...Hannah reminds him that he must ask for the freedom Christ offers...
...Jud is torn between conscience and Lily's appeal to "life...
...With Jud's choice of Lily's darkness, "Lonesomeness closed in like pain around his heart...
...Miss O'Connor's epistolary interest in the fate of Jones's novels became a minor theme...
...SLAVICK...
...The last, in a characteristic O'Connor hyperbole: "It's a shame about his books...
...In Lily's world, "There was no God, no devil...
...In the hidden "still place" of the Rices' Edenic garden he finds something of the peace he knew "up home...
...WILLIAM H. SLAVICKH...
...He finds himself in a lightless depth: "If he should die and go to hell he knew it would be like that-a kind of starving that never starves, and endless hopeless and desperate craving of all his bodily senses...
...But a long drought and the barking of a dog as accompaniment to Jud's evil moves indicate that the garden is not Hannah's private domain...
...Salter knows: "Open up your eyes, boy...
...Her preacher father sees "God's grace on it" when the sunset illuminates Hannah's hair...
...Hannah reminds Jud that he "can't just look at how it is in the world...
...Passage Through Gehenna will not be mistaken for O'Connor's...
...When Jud feels the sexual spell Lily casts, observes her "rounded breasts'' and the pitted skin of her cheeks "as if small worms had gnawed at them," and hears her mock everything he believes, we sense that it is, in truth, Helltown Jud has entered...
...What Madison Jones contributes is a perspective less interested than O'Connor's in the "grimly comic," the "ridiculous," and the strange workings of grace and more attuned to the implications in life of the sharp line Southern Baptists draw between the world which is Satan's-Lily and Meagher-and the faith life the sacrificial Salter and Hannah represent...
...Jud extends the long tradition from Augustine through Graham Greene to O'Connor's Hazel Motes...
...A shadowy and sinister schoolmate, Charles Meagher, whom he fears, and the festering Lily, who is bent upon winning him completely before cuckholding Luther- Salter calls her a witch-are his adversaries...
...Jud's crossings on the road to redemption chart the respective territories, even though his well-being in the end, after atonement in jail for his various wrongs, appears less a matter of faith than morals...
...When Jud, who has felt the hand of the faith healer, Salter, and would become a preacher, moves from the simplicity of the farm to Hallboro, he immediately recognizes its secular "air of godless-ness...
...Lily drives him to a prostitute, whom he uses to prove Lily's contention that even Salter is not pure...
...But once he gets beyond a clumsy and unnecessary identification of the narrator, Jones affords an unparalleled vision of the Southern world of Protestant salvation by faith, one probably impossible before O'Connor's fiction...
...He works in the hardware store kept by the dourly religious and crippled Luther Nunn and his wife, Lily, and soon lodges with them...
...It is a very fine book...
...it ain't no place to hide...
...Among other virtues, Flannery O'Connor's published correspondence demonstrates a wholesome directness: ' 'The Commonweal has a lousy review of The Innocents by Madison Jones...
...They are excellent and fall like lead clear out of sight the moment they are published...
...Soon, Jud's "prayers were futile, silenced by his blood...
...Jones lacks her ear for Southern speech, her eye for manners, and the clarity of perspective informed by a certain faith...
Vol. 108 • April 1981 • No. 7
