Critics' choices for Christmas From the "Book of Nonsense" to the "Vegetarian Planet," the joys of "Hardboiled America" to "The Bridge on the Drina," our critics urge you to stuff your stockings with good books this Christmas
Morris, Charles R
Charles R. Morris Charles R. Morris's most recent book is American Catholic (Times Books/Random House). He lives in New York City. Cynthia Ozick's The Putter-messer Papers (Knopf, $23, 235 pp.)...
...Finke and Stark adopt a microeconom-ic lens on their subject, starting with Adam Smith's observation that people open their purses much more readily to upstart preachers than to the beneficed clergy of the established churches...
...In broad outline, Taylor follows that development from Plato's conception of the good as a higher, exterior, order, through the progressive interiorization of moral sources during the Renaissance, to the Protestant sacralization of the common life "God loveth adverbs" and finally through Romanticism to the "thin" proceduralist ethics of moderns like John Rawls, with their taste for the procedurally correct at the expense of the substantively good...
...It is one of the most important books on American religion I know...
...Finally, this year I reread, I think for the fourth time, Charles Taylor's magisterial Sources of the Self (Harvard, $21, 599 pp...
...And Puttermesser's own death gives us one of the most poignant, and ultimately despairing, visions of paradise in recent literature...
...Mason and Dixon is a gargantuan tale that leaps the globe from the East Indies to the wilds of colonial Pennsylvania, along the way sucking up minor characters and plot lines like some giant air-borne amoeba the mechanical duck, the Chinese court astronomers Hsi and Ho, the Jesuit Zarpazo (the "Wolf of Jesus"), a pot-smoking, kash-ka-eating George Washington...
...Current trends in American Catholicism map closely to those in Episcopalianism and Presbyte-rianism a half century or so ago...
...A golem naturally makes an appearance in Pynchon's woods as well...
...Successful churches in America have always been defined by opposition to the mainstream culture, and the history of American Protestantism has been one of "churches" giving way to "sects" Episcopalians to Methodists, Methodists to Baptists, intellectualized services to the emotional and pentecostal...
...Along the way, Finke and Stark, who presumably have no axe to grind, offer a number of cautions to liberal Catholic church reformers...
...No matter...
...Ominously, there are now fewer Episcopalians and Presbyterians in America than there are Catholics in Los Angeles...
...it's just the first time that the media have noticed...
...The recent upsurge of Pentecostal Protestantism at the expense of the mainstream churches, Finke and Stark argue, has been going on for two centuries...
...For anyone who enjoys the challenge of thinking systematically about moral questions, Taylor's book does splendid service in clarification and ground-clearing...
...Puttermesser becomes mayor with the help of a golem, who makes her the most successful mayor in the history of New York and then inflates to monstrous proportions, absorbing Puttermesser's lover and almost the whole city before Puttermesser kills her...
...Puttermesser is a slender volume whose eponymous heroine her name means "butter-knife" is a lonely Jewish intellectual lawyer-bureaucrat, who becomes mayor of New York and dies, an old lady, as the victim of a brutal rape/robbery...
...by two sociologists, Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, was first published in 1992, and has been reprinted continuously in paperback ever since...
...But both Ozick and Pynchon share an over-the-top authorial sensibility that leaps from the mundane to the mythic without so much as a gasp...
...If Sources has a flaw, it is that Taylor, while professing his unhappiness with the "prodigious subjectivity" of the modernist stance, does not attempt to formulate his own position, a failing he freely concedes...
...Our moral selves, he argues, are two-thousand-year-deep palimpsests, embodying layer upon layer of theories of the good, some so deeply entwined with our neural apparatus that we believe them to be instinctive...
...The Churching of America, 1776-1990 (Rutgers, $15.95,321 pp...
...Taylor calls his quest one of "moral ontology...
...and Thomas Pyn-chon's Mason and Dixon (Henry Holt, $27.50,773 pp...
...One can certainly disagree with this or that of Taylor's interpretations, but I have encountered no work of comparable scope, and ease, and fairness...
...And if the ramshackle structure of Mason and Dixon occasionally wears on the reader, it is saved by prose of breath-taking beauty more than once, as in the description of dawn in a mist-clouded wood, I found myself thinking of Keats...
...Taylor, who seems to have mastered all of Western literature and a good many non-Western sources as well, attempts nothing less than a comprehensive history of the Western understanding of the moral self, and carries it off brilliantly...
...are among the more dazzling fictions in such a fiction-rich year that Mason and Dixon did not even make the short list for the National Book Awards...
...In the same way, Mason and Dixon's line, plowing a Euclidean-straight swath hundreds of miles through virgin forest, becomes a living creature in its own right, a metaphor more powerful than any of its possible meanings...
...On the surface, the scope and pretensions of the two books could not be more different...
Vol. 124 • December 1997 • No. 21
