A World that Doesn't Matter

...And he can make the reader intensely aware of Mother and Father...

...I was wrong . . . wrong to care about all that...

...All I ask is that, wherever you may be, you should remember meat the altar of the Lord.' " The best parts of the book are McConkey's ruminations on Nature...

...The business goes sour during the Depression, though, and the happy family is forced to move to the mainland...

...the thought that his parents might have experienced anything like physical attraction seems quaint and touching...

...There is some good writing as well, but this isn't enough: Wanting more, the reader sees how little the novel is prepared to give...

...The passage is full of the essayist's generalizations...

...Michael ran away from a home dominated by his Lutheran, druggist father who put lithographs of the Passion on the walls of his shop and home, and who beat his wife with religious fervor...

...She leaves him, and Peter raises their son Tommy with the help of his second wife, Ann...

...In Book IX, Chapter IX, Monica tells her son: " 'It does not matter where you bury my body...

...If nothing matters, then there is no need to create characters, to worry about falling into bathos, or to avoid bombast...

...Tommy dies while on a vacation in British Columbia...

...This is a long way from "nothing matters...

...After the death of their first son, Peter came into the world—a world "Edenic" in its isolation from almost everything except Mother, lather and Nature...

...She didn't even want to be buried in the family plot: " 'Burn it,' my mother said...

...The Tree House Confessions reads like a suppressed novel as well—but the critical difference is that Augustine was talking to God, while McConkey is talking to us and, unlike God, we want to be entertained...

...It is revealing, in this respect, to compare the book to its Augustinian model...

...All that changed when Michael and some friends took a boat ride on the lake, stopped at a remote island and saw a beautiful, mysterious woman in mourning ask for a bar of Fels Naphtha in the drug store...

...Novelists must convince themselves that the world matters, or they have nothing to write about...

...a common ground not so high as the stars, but like the stars a point that spread light however faint on all that lay below"), platitude ("A remote island can nourish a faith more than a theology"), and the jargon of sensitivity ("Luckily, luckily I had a wife who understood, and who supported me in every way during my withdrawal...

...The life we live on earth," the Great Doctor wrote, "has its own attractions as well, because it has a certain beauty of its own in harmony with all the rest of this world's beauty . . . . All these things and their like can be occasions of sin because, good though they are, they are of the lowest order of good, and if we are too much tempted by them we abandon those higher and better things, your truth, your law, and you yourself, O Lord our God...

...So much less bother, so much less cost...

...Peter Warden, the narrator—who has been trying to explain to his wife why he has been living in the tree house he built for his son, since dead—offers his ultimate revelation: "Nothing matters;' he informs her, "everything I have just labored to reconstruct for you is without significance...

...At the beginning of the book, the narrator tells his wife: "We do have a responsibility for our visions, I think...

...he can respond through a kind of banter that takes on some of the qualities of courtship itself...

...Aren't these clumsy words...

...The glory passes from the earth: Peter grows up to be an intellectual and marries his unintellec-tual girl friend, Sally...

...The father wanted Michael to be a druggist, but the son rebelled, and decided to pursue a career as a dairy farmer instead...

...Specifically, he is disturbed by the ecstasy he experiences at the event—ecstasy apparently provoked by his mother's renunciation of the world before she died, including the world of memory she cherished...

...This is the way it was with my mother and me, in Catawba...

...Yet he can never show his characters acting: "To the child...

...He writes beautifully, for instance, about a child's apprehension of trees, flowers, stars, insects, the smell of creosote on a wharf...

...Michael opens up a florist shop and subsequently runs away with his partner's wife...

...the narrator plunges on to even more clumsy words...

...The dead.' " This scene can be traced directly to Augustine's Confessions...

...As much as Augustine hated literature—it is important to remember that unlike Peter Warden, he was not a very nice man—he was a writer: Those wonderful, tantalizing details of life in the twilight empire make the reader want to hear more about this fallen world and less about Augustine's soul...

...Augustine...

...indeed, he accepted the responsibility and helped to found a church and form the intellect of Christian Europe...

...Perhaps worse, after politely excusing himself for his clumsiness ("It was a kind of happiness that swept grief right up into it, like a vacuum cleaner...

...And the teasing works both ways: for an interval mother and son, father and daughter, react to each other much as if they were the lovers...

...The novelist's minute particulars are absent, however, and the conversation that follows is wooden and perfunctory—as far from the rhythm of ordinary speech as it is from the elegance of stylization...

...It is not, however, Tommy's death that sends Peter up into the tree house, but his mother's, years later...

...for another kind of reader, who has put up with this novel that often seems impatient with the decencies of prose fiction, it explains a great deal...

...Do not let that worry you...

...The past...

...Reviewed by Theodore Iacobuzio At the end of this strange and uneven book, James McConkey lets the cat out of the bag...

...When he was a child, Peter and his parents, Michael and Theresa, lived on an island in Lake Erie off Catawba, Ohio...

...Augustine would have agreed...

...Inside the Confessions is a suppressed novel...

...What he has just labored to reconstruct is his life...

...Michael offered to make the vineyards a working proposition, proposed marriage and was accepted...

...This was Theresa, whose father and brother had died, leaving her a house surrounded by vineyards gone to seed...

...Peter Warden descends from his tree house having accepted responsibility for —what...

...Moreover, it is pretentious for the author to invoke obliquely Augustine's sanction for the novel's insights into mystical experience and life in general...

...or of a child's intimations of death on seeing a sunken Studebaker below the ice of the lake...

...Peter Warden's autobiography sometimes parallels and sometimes intersects with the Confessions of St...

...How the parents met forms a substantial part of the story...

...For the reader who takes The Tree House Confessions as a serious statement about life, this is something to think about...