Ordinary Time:
Toolan, David
The thickness of time in a hot Texas town Years ago, as a temporary resident in the Lone Star state, I had several occasions to drive across the west Texas Panhandle, a horizonless, sun-baked land...
...You imagine (if you are a New Yorker passing through on the way to elsewhere) that in a place like this the busiest industry must be the production numbers of its numerous evangelical churches, or maybe the cemetery...
...That's also the critical test...
...Not in the mighty wind, nor in the earthquake, nor the blazing fire, but in the murmuring breeze, the still, small voice...
...Except, maybe, for Father Gilvary, who just may be the most affect-ingly realized priest to appear in a novel since Bernanos 's Diary of a Country Priest or Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory...
...it's a place, guesses another, where people's "water, or money, or gas, ran out...
...The rivers of west Texas run underground, beneath dry beds of stone, until the winter rains fall- the season of Advent...
...Deftly, she takes in the contrast between the impending, suspenseful big sky and that harsh, flat, strangely beautiful prairie-and works it into the very bones of her characters...
...Don't worry, the novel's liturgical frame doesn't call attention to itself...
...None of their antics come across as any more exceptional than the region's severities of heat and cold...
...but she does...
...What could be easier...
...In the yeast working unseen...
...The thickness of time in a hot Texas town Years ago, as a temporary resident in the Lone Star state, I had several occasions to drive across the west Texas Panhandle, a horizonless, sun-baked land of pink shale and yellow schist cutting through the thin, dusty topsoil, of low-clinging sage and mesquite, virtually uninhabited except for the skeletal gantries of windmills, the isolated rancher's weather-beaten, tin-roofed bungalow, and yes, here and there in some desolate waste, a seesawing butterfly oil pump (which I would hope had enabled the owner to move without regret to a beachfront in La Jolla...
...Epic sacrifice...
...no need, then, to rush on to the next thing, to bypass the trivialities of the moment, or, for that matter, the seeming inertia of a small, hot Texas town-which, on examination, contains more than enough to go on...
...There's more want than work in Durance," thinks one character...
...Be here now...
...His parishioners dying out, eyes glazed with glaucoma, hanging in there despite his secret emptiness, he learns that "he was still what he had always been: himself, a creature among creatures...
...Anything-anything but the long laboring for the kingdom, the following through, the daily round...
...You would be wrong...
...Finally, in fact, she knows that she and "the Roman" are a pair who are finished waiting, "alive in the day together...
...In a town like Durance, as the golden oldie has it, "Ever'body waitin' for somefin...
...Waitin' for a prize from the big quiz show...
...Her lucid, minimalist prose concentrates the reader's mind for the task of reading variations of soul-weather...
...Anything sudden and vivid...
...Then, after endless miles of praiORDINARYTIME A.G...
...An unlikely but fully credible wisdom figure, she has the gift of discernment, has premonitions, can "see things she can't say"-for instance, that her former landlady, who pretended to be a good Christian, harbors demons...
...Nothing, you think, ever happens here...
...But to realize it, you would need to settle in for a bit to see the subtle action, and to develop an acute ear, as Ms...
...Never sure...
...Almost anything, actually...
...He is pastor of St...
...Having interviewed Mojtabai (Commonweal, Sept...
...Great occasions, miracles, rescues, tribulations, scourges...
...Assurance: At Home with the Bomb in Amarillo, Texas (Houghton Mifflin), I have been expecting something like this-and I haven't been disappointed...
...David Toolan rie, a sign like HE IS COMING IN GREAT POWER AND MAJESTY announces a town such as Durance, Texas, the perfect setting for Grace Mojtabai's austere, wonderfully crafted fifth novel-where, as in a story from the most ancient strata of the Bible, everything is fraught with background...
...A measure of Mojtabai's art is that it honors the thickness of time...
...Jude's, and in contrast to the triumphalism of Brother Shad and Brother Burch of the Rooftree Pentecostal Church (who in a hilarious incident try to shout Sister Willodene from her coffin), Gilvary naturally ministers to lost causes, never seeing the fruits of his action...
...26,1986) after the publication ofher remarkable non-fiction book, files...
...Extremes are not the focal problem here, however...
...Mojtabai Doubleday, $17.95, 223 pp...
...They, too, seem to appear out of shale and schist, their dreams, fevered, apocalyptic expectations, their visions of the Holy Virgin in a .frying pan (a wonderfully comic scene, that), and their quiet desperation conjured by a remorseless, infinite sky...
...And there's the widow, Henrietta, proprietor of a diner ("Three Square Meals" it's called) across from the cemetery, who knows a thing or two about training fleas to jump, secretly sleeps with her dolls, and with a sinking heart makes herself up fit to kill and dresses in screaming color like some Mafia moll...
...These lives, which at first seem but fragments of a broken mirror held up to a bleak, godforsaken landscape, tell quite a story-one that comes, at the end, as revelation...
...Now he asks only to be of use...
...The daily round, except for those with a sixth sense, is misadventure in the dark...
...Sitting in Henrietta's restaurant morning after morning, warming his hands on a chilled coffee cup, he does not know if his prayer is answered...
...Mojtabai taps those invisible rivers, turns water into full-bodied wine.ll-bodied wine...
...Yes, in a sense Flannery O'Connor would have understood, they're all a little grotesque...
...The motionless, in-between stretches of ordinary, uneventful time-that's the hard, nearly impossible part...
...Ordinary time, the Catholic priest in this novel reminds himself, is "the longest and hardest season of the liturgical year...
...Mojtabai does, for the silent suggestions in fragmentary speech...
...There's Val, the drifter from the east, everything about him "cold anger, cold calm," obsessed with trying to recover his shattered memory-that "he loved what he bought...
...He's trailed by the heartsick orphan boy, Cleat, who, spooked by trumpeting angels, goes around delivering messages of the Final Coming and plants his hope in stony ground-no not even that, "nothing so steady as ground, nothing but wind, cold wind, blowing in and blowing out the way he came...
Vol. 116 • October 1989 • No. 18
