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Sandbox Buddha by Mo Owen

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


A Voice Crying in the Suburban Wilderness

Things aren’t going quite as expected for Howard Powell, father, husband, and faithful church-goer. It all starts off on Halloween and he is doing what any good father would do: he is taking his children trick or treating. He’s gotten into the spirit of things: he’s wearing a vampire costume, and he’s gone all out, fangs and a “black cape and lips, white shirt and face, trickle of crimson from the corner of [his] mouth” (3). Matthew, his six-year-old, is a witch; Madison, his nine-year-old, is a Harem Girl. They’ve got the routine down: ring, the ritual greeting, collect the goods, onto the next house.

Then Howard knocks on the door of Sarah Tile, a woman who, as he puts it, “ignites in [him] an intense sexual desire and has since sixth grade” (3). She and her daughter go along trick-or-treating, and when at the end he goes back to her house, alone, things get really confusing. Howard thinks he is protecting her from what seems to be spousal abuse and Howard winds up getting belt-whipped by Sarah’s over-protective and possibly abusive brother.

Things are now set in motion. As Howard explains in a Preface to the Reader, “This is the personal testimony of how, I, Howard Powell, [was] transformed in my 43rd year from humble husband, father, and community college professor to modern-day John the Baptist… “(vii). But, don’t expect this transformation, fueled somehow by physical violence, to be a familiar trajectory to a conventional holy man. A few days later Howard is at a city park with Maggie, his three-year-old youngest daughter. Swings, slide sandbox, mothers with their children. And Howard winds up in bed with one of those mothers while the kids “watch Snow White on the TV downstairs” (15).

This assignation turns out to not be a one-time aberration. And Debra, his wife, has no idea what is going on with her husband.

These are not the actions of your typical holy man, a would-be John the Baptist seeking his messiah. Okay, maybe, maybe that Howard is a student of the martial arts, of karate, a discipline of mind and body. But somehow, the sex is part of it all. There is a disturbing Blood Dream, and a “monstrous priapismic episode at the nondenominational colossus” Howard and his family attend, and he has a vision of the head of John the Baptist in the offering plate. If that isn’t enough, a long lost cousin, Mitch, appears literally out of nowhere, to give his mission, complete with his holy uniform, a karate gi.

Howard is called to the city parks, to the sand boxes, to the suburban mothers and their SUVs. He is called to testify to his hapless English 101 students that “editing and proofreading hold the secret of life” (83). He is called to speak the truth.

His wife is not amused.

But the reader will be as Howard stumbles along, rescuing dogs, sleeping in the suburban wilderness. He discovers along the way that he is to baptize Adam, “an Amish teenager,” with “blue eyes, impossible to fathom blue … a tall lad, somewhere between boy and young man,” who is the new messiah. Howard, like his predecessor, is called to baptize this Amish messiah, and thus set even greater things in motion.

That Howard winds up setting free the dogs in the pound and getting arrested, is grist for the mill and more of Owen’s dark and light satiric humor and both a biting and a gentle commentary on the place of faith and belief in the life of the ordinary guy with a family and a job. This is the guy who wants to do the right thing, but, as Howard says in the Preface, “the trajectory of [his] call wasn’t exactly hallowed…” (vii). This novel may disturb some readers, but that's the point, we should be disturbed. Doing good isn't always easy or comfortable.

I came to the end and wanted to know what happened to next. When this Adam is baptized, what then? And is Howard right, could there be a call waiting for all of us, if we could just hear it, recognize it in the voice of a gi-wearing eccentric in a sand box?




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