Revelation:
Howe, Fanny
GOD SPEAKS: ALL HELL BREAKS LOOSE REVELATION Peggy Payne Simon and Schuster, $18.95, 314 pp. Fanny Howe A good read is hard to find. Revelation is one, if the reader is interested in a...
...The only child of cold and clever parents, since early youth Swain has longed for God's presence to fill up the emotional void in his personality...
...Unlike the ecstatic and mythic quality in Flaubert's story of that saint's conversion, however, this story is solidly built around the realism of its characters...
...God, of all the universe, heal this boy...
...It keeps on happening: the pulse in his brain turned into a pump, throbbing, each surge bringing something liquid, flammable into him...
...But in the end it seems that the same story could have been told without the voice of God...
...He is aloof and consistent (the two qualities seem to be conjoined...
...Swain involuntarily attempts a miracle cure which fails and reconfirms the congregation's earlier judgment on his sanity...
...The illicit rhythms of a Hopkins or the cosmic cartooning of Flannery O'Connor are perhaps more convincing by virtue of their snapping the margins of the usual...
...The Level goes higher...
...Payne is willing to try, nonetheless, as in the scene where Swain tries to heal the blinded boy, Jakey: Swain hears his own words slow, in a rhythm: "hea-ling power...
...Heal him, Lord...
...His head is filling like a gas tank, a dam-breaking reservoir...
...God literally speaks to him, sending out by voice one unfinished sentence and then an unsettling one...
...Peggy Payne has written this first novel with a lot of help from her friends (according to an extensive list of thank yous in the Acknowledgments section) and with an unflagging determination to be fair to every character in the book...
...Like her hero, the author has a good sense of balance and humor, and we are carried into Swain's world without a bump or hitch...
...Another dramatic event occurs immediately—the blinding of a child of a close friend (a woman for whom Swain lusts...
...I want to go...
...His hand is on Jakey's bare arm...
...Underneath his exterior, however, is a troubled psyche...
...We can trust the tones and tales to be just surprising and just predictable enough to make us relax...
...Swain, being the honorable man that he is, reports this experience to his congregation who immediately believe he is having a breakdown...
...Revelation is one, if the reader is interested in a con-temporary experience of conversion...
...A third dramatic event threatens to disrupt his marriage...
...Suddenly, as the book opens, he gets what he wants, and more...
...instead, an adulterous occasion or some other law-breaking act on the part of the minister, would have settled just as well the question of Swain's inability to feel...
...Conventional forms cannot contain unconventional experience...
...Let it happen...
...Then other words:' "Child, arise...
...He's going to explode...
...he is married to an attractive, loving, and intelligent woman, Julie...
...She tells the story of Swain Hammond, a Presbyterian minister in a church in Chapel Hill, North Carolina...
...All the force that was pushing against him is running through him, taking him with it...
...In fact the focus and language of revelation are not likely to be as tame as they are here...
...And throughout all this are his changing relations with the people in the community, some of whom turn away from him and even want him gone...
...Like Saint Julian the Hospitaller, Swain has to kill his parents before he can transcend their influence and wholeheartedly witness God in the world...
...This one thing out of everything I ever asked for...
...Make the boy open his eyes and look at me...
...However, Peggy Payne has taken on a challenge and met it with grace and charm, and her Swain was a rewarding companion to this reader...
...they have no children...
...Swain is the essence of a civilized man in white liberal suburban terms...
...It took courage to try to contain such a powerful moment in the framework she has erected, and up to a point it works...
...There is a plot, good-natured in its telling, and a message on the side of hope...
...The issues—both theological and psychological—of Swain's experience with God are neatly resolved, mostly on the side of psychology...
...It is conventional in form and style which has the effect of forcing a conventional resolution to its wild proposition...
Vol. 115 • September 1988 • No. 16
