One Way or Another/The Piano Tuner/Success Stories/The News from Ireland:
Long, J. V.
of modern relationships. They are char- New collections, new...
...of liv- cent children...
...Spiritual Life teachers alike a creative altempt to pul an entire mood or pattern of familial inliberation theologies in dialog with first teraction, as when the Vincents arrive for world perspectives' -Encounter Thanksgiving dinner, an inter-gener$7.95 paper ational gathering: At bookstores of from the pubs Shey They talked without looking at ORBIS BOOKS each other, their chairs all facing Maryknoll, NY 10545 VISA and MC orders accepted...
...a reader might become impatient with the predictability of the ominous...
...The expletives of children - "shut up" or "gross" - are balanced by deTHE PRAXIS COMMUNITIES OF scriptive richness: "the echo of water OF SUFFERING RESISTANCE AND slaps...
...One Way or Another is an impressive debut...
...nor would I wish to deny that, in In "Memorial Day" a sixteen-year-old any grouping, William Trevor's The Russell Banks retreats into silence from his mother and News from Ireland would be stunning...
...6.95 Stories its real strength...
...The energy and pathos in differing points of view in our political the Painter chronicles give Success Word and spiritual lives...
...There is a breadth of feeling Psalms teach us, in specific ways, how to The image of God requires the and subtlety in these stories that give meditate on Holy Scripture...
...Peter Cameron the pleasures to be discovered in each of Most of the stories are first person narHarper & Row, $15.95, 181 pp...
...Minot's first novel demonstrates a keen understanding of the perceptiveness of children who overhear and knowingly interpret parental actions and exchanges: [Sherman] got up, all at once aware The Challenge of himself, and scurried to his mother...
...L DALE RICHESIN hon theology...
...Reconciliation is Meditating on the beliefs, but by opening ourselves to merely detente...
...In the former a twelve-year-old boy publicizes (cut Bt& mail) the family's misfortune, following his father's desertion, in a series of letters SciA€a&e 'oz `aaaxtrg...
...Name: . acters are located inside the conse- I 2. Circle titles you wish to receive...
...Confronting our hidden street, past houses like their own...
...But the eight other skill- dings, funerals, and daily dinner convering...
...Trevor's The News from Ireland Gender & God These previously untranslated is a book which is particularly easy to devotional writings inspired by the by Rachel Hosmer recommend...
...16.95 caper vase of fresh flowers, and "stopped lisLIBERATION THEOLOGY Survey/Reader Set...
...aranos I benefactor before tragedy engrlls his life.To my mind, the most satisfying story in the collection is "Bracelet," an account of an American archaeologist VANAUGH doing research in Nigeria who surrenders A Ncle1 by the author of Leaving Home the critical distance available to observW&R1 iii .%' '%''p $ ers and foreigners and is gradually assimilated over the years until she Commonweal: 570 achieves the kind of integration and wis- ered and faded in adolescent intensity...
...were in competition...
...Like O'Connor, Mr...
...The story is a hard- icturing edged, sad account of reliance, hope, and disappointment...
...the rescue of a distressed motorist on an empty coastal road in France...
...Weil re-educates Christians on The Sidelong Glance ity between them that passes for com- the form, development and function of collective prayer which liesat the heart of Richard Holloway munication, but the scar tissue, which the Christian experience...
...it1u Mhe~c• dYcear3ts...
...Earl Painter is Gathered To Pray grown and reconciled, up to a point, with by Louis Weil his alcoholic father whose burdens and For many of us the collect of the liturgy memories lie thick as the New Hamp- is merely a prayer "performed" by shire snow...
...of the mr immigrani who becomes Rosemoxore c chief .Ihiasm¢lh...
...a child's-eye view of thirteen years of The stories in this collection draw a In brief family life...
...In lean prose, Susan Minot map to an ordinary world whose entang- conveys the intimacies and estrangelements are no less demanding for being ments that suffuse this world of family...
...T,%eological Semi ^a'y THEOLOGIES ever present bottle of Bourbon, is "never $12.95 paper by DEANE WILLIAM FERM satisfied" with his own work...
...It's dark, though still God late afternoon, and cold, almost cold by Ann Belford Ulanov enough to snow, Earl thinks, which In a religious tradition which reveres the makes him think of Christmas, which in Word of God, Ulanov reveals the importance turn makes him cringe and tremble inside of our pictures of God...
...rays wheeled by through An Interpretation of Liberation SOLIDARITY pleated shallows...
...His work is ing the stained wooden sticks, that I will in one a standard against which the vari- heartfelt and ironic and, in his...
...Aunt Fran addressed her remarks to the one spot in the room where no one sat or stood...
...Minot's ear for dialogue is impeccable...
...father had suggested it to him...
...Trevor...
...They are charNew collections, new pleasures acters who want and wonder and regret as they figure out whom (among their siblings, parents, and grandparents...
...How Condon was a salesman of women's unBanks's collection, Success Stories, odd to meet here, she says knowing it is dergarments, regularly traversing five several focus on one New Hampshire not odd at all, since everyone's a tourist counties with his samples and his order family, the Painters...
...The stepfather 1. V. L.asg ronments of young, educated, middletries, unsuccessfully, to make an overclass people who are coping with the ture with popsicles to the mute teenager O CCASIONALLY it is tempting to review conventions and demands of personal who reflects, "I have this feeling, holdseveral volumes at once by isolating and professional ambition...
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...The arrival of a piano tuner for an afternoon's work...
...a late night dominated by the school's gathering of some foreign exchange stulounde s Sister Lou ise Magtire, s .ezUe+stomooid AdWw a nun whose worldly dedica- dents: in each instance there are innotion to Rosemoore's success cents who become victims and are ttundL'QIF $ArAEHIBgiit„txf~elrr conflicts with her religious vows, ~rr~c-aff ~samomo~ ar~r Mrhtrtetrt and by Connolty Moore...
...These perceptions, often of yearning, emptiness, and conflict, furnish the tension that melts each separate story into one long tale that, one senses, will go on for generations...
...her new husband, who have found themPeter Cameron's first collection of TEE NEWS FROM IRELAND short stories, One Way or Another, is selves, and met each other, through a self-help seminar run by "this guy withWilliam Trevor wonderful...
...Happily, in this cacy and ambiguity inherent in the world Finally, Cameron's stories seem to be about the necessity and uncertainty of commitment, and the hard costs of fidelity and infidelity...
...these collections of short stories are more rations, and all of them include a precise apparent and more memorable than any THE PIANO TUNER attention to concrete detail...
...The chair went on rockof Liberation Theology ing...
...MONKEYS, by Susan Minot...
...10.95 well by the winter cold...
...of memory and feeling with the reality ure in Dubliners...
...On the other hand, I attentiveness to the objects that surround Peter Meinke don't mean to suggest that it is not possithe characters' lives provides a solid University of Georgia, $13.95, 156 pp...
...10.95 paper "warmblooded," always keeps a small THE CHALLENGE OF A Reader...
...remembrances...
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...24.95 A First World Response tening to the pope" after .the seventh The two books together make up the best Edited try BRIAN MAHAN and English language introduction to libera...
...a rags-to-riches brutalized...
...In these stories violence is an ordinary, even an expected, intrusion...
...wives, ONE WAT OR ANOTRER case, such book-bashing is unnecessary...
...Rba,ynuareRnooregirler Peter Meinke teaches writing and has received The Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction for his collection The Piano Tuner...
...skin cracked like and Political Theologies A Feminist Theology of Liberation by REBECCA S CHOPP rice paper...
...The scene shifts from Ireland to incomplete at his death...
...and "a cloudy smudge that oy SHARON D. WELCH An:nterpretation of Chrls:ia-my asa praxis was the ocean...
...that of another accomplished young wriof the mouth of this lady and tells you ter, David Leavitt - the lives and envihow to fix your life...
...proposing his mother's candidacy to the unspeakable 1950s television program "Queen for a Day...
...He had obediently tional investment and clarity in them, like this...
...There is an uneasy familiar- clergy...
...ADRIS Newsletter In one or two sentences Minot sums up . a rich resource for students and An invaluable resource...
...She wishes they had not met book in a Ford Fiesta...
...Commonweal: 572...
...There is an emo- nowadays...
...ble to draw distinctions among the collecgrounding for the fictions' truthfulness...
...fully crafted episodes continue to exhibit sation...
...husbands, and lovers) and how to love...
...Address...
...His literary turf is similar to out a body who speaks out of the corner Viking, $16.95, 285 pp...
...7.95 England to Italy, and everywhere char- I 1. Cut out advertisement...
...Rocking empty, it meant something to her...
...Only by the Chopp-s The Praxis of Suffering -- - National Ca rholrc Reporter $7.95 paper end do we realize the impact of what we RANCIS SCHUSSLER FIORENZA I he Cal hoi ~ Ur -ersdy o! Ame':Ca THIRD WORLD have been both shown and told - that -Rebecca Chopp has produced an un- LIBERATION Dad "barely feels the cold," clings to an commonly clear and passionate book.'-- V. DO JGLAS MEEKS Eder...
...6.95 Challenges us to search for truth in life other stories have marked out, is too not by clinging to our self-assured thick not to thwart love...
...Ma stared at it...
...Not also and every Friday Justin returned to rest of the stories don't carry...
...Harper & Row, $15.95, 183 pp...
...by Dietrich Bonhoeffer Mr...
...At thirty-three Justin Among the twelve stories in Russell and disappointment of maturity...
...in...
...His father stories, "Queen for a Day" and It is especially easy to recall James in his day had been a commercial traveler "Firewood," that give them a weight the Joyce while reading Mr...
...Culminates relationship of the two sexes which are in Bonhoeffer's great last work-an opposite yet complementary...
...connection influencing style, tradition, Trevor's characters make do more than Only the first story, not chapter really, and expectations - around the universal they make choices, in order to achieve, in is told by Sophie, one of the seven Vin- rhythms of birth, games, holidays, wedJoyce's phrase, "the stern task...
...images-both good and bad-pulls us "Firewood" provides a conclusion of beyond our private pictures of God toward a sorts, and its inner weather is affected as truer view of the living God...
...why could not Margaretta just accepted this role, agreeing when his especially in the book's first and last have seen her and let her pass by...
...Virgins," for example, begins with a chance meeting after many COWLEY PUBLICATIONS years, in the Cathedral in Siena, between 980 Memorial'Drive Cambridge, MA 02138 two women whose friendship had flow24 October 1986: 571 the house his father had returned to...
...Sexuality evidence of a writer absolutely sure of his extensive meditation on Psalm 119, left reflects the love of God in the craft...
...They are about knots of domes- Dutton/Seymour Lawrence, $15.95, Events unfold naturally against a tic arrangements which are loosened 159 pp...
...only do they share a certain Irish geogdom which is an even deeper foreign- The story recounts the old friendship and raphy, but also Trevor has the same gift ness...
...Indeed, this of their deficiencies...
...Meinke has a taste for the grotesque, though in his fiction (as opposed to hers) it is generally unrelieved by grace...
...We!ch wants to reclaim the Christian of solidarity with !nose who suffer ideal of liberating people from every form And character is created and sustained If I had one book to recommend asa gen- of oppression .(and) challenges us to often through a single phrase left as a eral introduction for adoption as a text- think through our beliefs and ways those book in courses on political or liberation beliefs must shape the decisions and clue, added bit by bit to the overall action theology then it would be Rebecca values by which we live.- with great cumulative effect...
...quences of their memories and mis- 3. Enclose prices of selected books...
...From early childhood and turn quickly back to now, to this very we form internal images of God which moment, to walking with his tiny, strongly affect-often unconsciously-how we pray, how we relate to others and how we brittle-bodied mother down the quiet view ourselves...
...baby...
...New England setting, with a Harvard without being entirely smoothed out...
...SUCCESS STORIES tions...
...Mum is An Introductory Survey...
...The story is understated and haunt- its dissolution and juxtaposes the fullness for allusive parody that gives such pleasing and graceful...
...best keep them for a long time, and come ous deficiencies and pleasures of the stories, has real depth as he makes characross them one day, and remember this others can be measured, as if the books acters who are forced to explore the intrimoment, incorrectly...
Vol. 113 • October 1986 • No. 18
