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The Body of This
An elderly couple finally discovers the essence of each other after a lifetime together; a Sudanese immigrant uncovers the beauty in the simplicity of a new way home; a seminarian adrown in Guinness questions his calling; an eccentric muses on the existence of a prayer to a wound. These are but a few of the storylines in Andrew McNabb's ethereal debut story collection, The Body of This.
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First published April 1, 2009
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August 14, 2016
The Liturgy of the Hours (Office of Readings), the Seventh Week of Easter contains the following excerpt from a sermon by a sixth century African bishop:
I quote this passage at length because it expresses perfectly something of my own purpose in founding Idylls Press, as well as my broader hopes for a "new Catholic literary revival"—a revival befitting our age; one that would include fiction that radiates the Church's eternal vision while expressing it in "manifold tongues"; one that embraces "the language of every nation".
The passage also seemed a perfect introduction to Andrew McNabb's exquisite little collection of short (sometimes short-short) stories, The Body of This. McNabb, bless him, a gifted young writer, is not afraid to speak the sometimes coarse and pungent language of his unchurched contemporaries. It is a language perfectly suited to the overarching theme of the collection, which is the mystery of the Incarnation: the stunning and seemingly inexplicable choice of God to enter into the often mucky and grotesque "thingness" of fallen bodily human existence...which in our own day seems to get more mucky and grotesque and more fallen by the week. Or, as a good friend of mine (and mother of eight) once said, "Life is so daily."
No human language, as we know, is capable of expressing the fullness of the Glory of the Lord. Some languages are simpler, others far more complex; some have developed a brilliant literary culture, others haven't even developed an alphabet; some are musical and poetic, others almost brutal to the ear. It reminds me of the joke that was going around my university's Foreign Language Building back in the seventies: "Italian is the language of art, French is the language of love, and German is the language you speak to your horse." And yet, as the passage from the Liturgy reminds us, whatever its gifts or limitations, the Gospel is capable of being preached in all languages, in all places and times and cultures. In my view it is the present task of Catholic storytellers to find a language—or rather "languages", since each storyteller speaks a different one—that can be understood by the people of our own time and culture.
McNabb's language is succinct and gently humorous, and sometimes appropriately coarse, since the vignettes in this collection are mostly about those daily "bodily" realities that none of us can avoid but few of us like to talk about; realities that some of us (I believe mistakenly) regard as unsuitable for Christian literature or contemplation: the penitential grace to be gleaned from cleaning up after a despised neighbor's pooch; saying prayers to Jesus's Shoulder; the mysterious "law of gradualism" that can, with grace and good will, bring a pair of young lovers out of a hurtful and sinful sexual relationship into a consecrated one; the beauty of sharing an aging spouse's bodily humiliations. To eschew these subjects out of squeamishness or a misapplied sense of modesty or decorum is to leave the strategic field of the nature of bodily life wide open to the depredations of secular writers, many of them misanthropic materialists who have no concept of the Incarnation or hope of Resurrection; it is to follow the counsels of timidity and despair, and will not further a Catholic literary revival.
Having said that, McNabb's stories will not suit every taste, and that's alright too. If you think Walker Percy is crude, or Flannery O'Connor weird and grotesque, you will probably not like McNabb, who though a Yankee, is ploughing similar territory. But I don't make the comparisons with O'Connor and Percy lightly: McNabb is very very gifted.
Take this disturbingly familiar bit from "Extrusion", McNabb's 700-word story about a man named Bent, seething but praying for grace (sort of), as he watches a neighbor letting her mangy dog poo in his pristine front yard:
Or how's this for a great opening to a sweet story ("Service") about the Christian ideal of service:
That's beautiful stuff.
Andrew McNabb, I believe, is one of our most talented young writers, and one whose career I intend to follow closely. I hope he tackles a novel one of these days, sooner rather than later.
The disciples spoke in the language of every nation. At Pentecost God chose this means to indicate the presence of the Holy Spirit; whoever had received the Spirit spoke in every kind of tongue....It was love that was to bring the Church of God together all over the world. And as individual men who received the Holy Spirit in those days could speak in all kinds of tongues, so today the Church, united by the Holy Spirit, speaks in the language of every people....
This was the way in which the Lord's promise was fulfilled: No one puts new wine into old wineskins. New wine is put into fresh skins, and so both are preserved. So when the disciples were heard speaking in all kinds of languages, some people were not far wrong in saying, They have been drinking too much new wine. The truth is that the disciples had now become fresh wineskins, renewed and made holy by grace. The new wine of the Holy Spirit filled them, so that their fervor brimmed over and they spoke in manifold tongues. By this spectacular miracle they became a sign of the Catholic Church, which embraces the language of every nation.
I quote this passage at length because it expresses perfectly something of my own purpose in founding Idylls Press, as well as my broader hopes for a "new Catholic literary revival"—a revival befitting our age; one that would include fiction that radiates the Church's eternal vision while expressing it in "manifold tongues"; one that embraces "the language of every nation".
The passage also seemed a perfect introduction to Andrew McNabb's exquisite little collection of short (sometimes short-short) stories, The Body of This. McNabb, bless him, a gifted young writer, is not afraid to speak the sometimes coarse and pungent language of his unchurched contemporaries. It is a language perfectly suited to the overarching theme of the collection, which is the mystery of the Incarnation: the stunning and seemingly inexplicable choice of God to enter into the often mucky and grotesque "thingness" of fallen bodily human existence...which in our own day seems to get more mucky and grotesque and more fallen by the week. Or, as a good friend of mine (and mother of eight) once said, "Life is so daily."
No human language, as we know, is capable of expressing the fullness of the Glory of the Lord. Some languages are simpler, others far more complex; some have developed a brilliant literary culture, others haven't even developed an alphabet; some are musical and poetic, others almost brutal to the ear. It reminds me of the joke that was going around my university's Foreign Language Building back in the seventies: "Italian is the language of art, French is the language of love, and German is the language you speak to your horse." And yet, as the passage from the Liturgy reminds us, whatever its gifts or limitations, the Gospel is capable of being preached in all languages, in all places and times and cultures. In my view it is the present task of Catholic storytellers to find a language—or rather "languages", since each storyteller speaks a different one—that can be understood by the people of our own time and culture.
McNabb's language is succinct and gently humorous, and sometimes appropriately coarse, since the vignettes in this collection are mostly about those daily "bodily" realities that none of us can avoid but few of us like to talk about; realities that some of us (I believe mistakenly) regard as unsuitable for Christian literature or contemplation: the penitential grace to be gleaned from cleaning up after a despised neighbor's pooch; saying prayers to Jesus's Shoulder; the mysterious "law of gradualism" that can, with grace and good will, bring a pair of young lovers out of a hurtful and sinful sexual relationship into a consecrated one; the beauty of sharing an aging spouse's bodily humiliations. To eschew these subjects out of squeamishness or a misapplied sense of modesty or decorum is to leave the strategic field of the nature of bodily life wide open to the depredations of secular writers, many of them misanthropic materialists who have no concept of the Incarnation or hope of Resurrection; it is to follow the counsels of timidity and despair, and will not further a Catholic literary revival.
Having said that, McNabb's stories will not suit every taste, and that's alright too. If you think Walker Percy is crude, or Flannery O'Connor weird and grotesque, you will probably not like McNabb, who though a Yankee, is ploughing similar territory. But I don't make the comparisons with O'Connor and Percy lightly: McNabb is very very gifted.
Take this disturbingly familiar bit from "Extrusion", McNabb's 700-word story about a man named Bent, seething but praying for grace (sort of), as he watches a neighbor letting her mangy dog poo in his pristine front yard:
This wasn't the Balkans where neighbors turned murderous overnight, but Portland, Maine, where it was the case, as with any other place humans lived, that at a moment's notice you could circle in and find what was easiest to despise about just about anyone. Bent knew her. And he knew her type. Of the three main kinds on this block, she belonged to the original--those living enclosed by tin or vinyl clapboarding on the outside and faux wood-paneling in. Defiant beside gentrified brick and stained glass, and living knowingly, gleefully, among a litany waiting for her death.
Deed done. There she went. Bent sucked on her first step away like a strychnine pop.
Or how's this for a great opening to a sweet story ("Service") about the Christian ideal of service:
So here it is: It was Terry Mulvaney's lifelong desire to live the Christian ideal of absolute subordination and obedience, and so he got a job at The Home Depot in South Portland.
He was thirty-three now, and had lived enough of life to know that true callings rarely came at the pointed end of a thunderbolt.
That's beautiful stuff.
Andrew McNabb, I believe, is one of our most talented young writers, and one whose career I intend to follow closely. I hope he tackles a novel one of these days, sooner rather than later.
March 17, 2013
I was drawn to this book after hearing the author read one of his stories, "Their Bodies, Their Selves," on an older podcast of the Maine Humanities Council (http://mainehumanities.org/podcast/ar...). Online, I saw the stories called spiritual and illuminating, informed by a Catholic sensibility. The book's title certainly alludes to the sacred centerpiece of the Catholic mass, when the priest offers the host, saying, "The body of Christ," and the person standing before him receives it. As a lapsed and conflicted Catholic myself, I was curious.
I would say these stories are spiritual in the way that the sacred is present in the profane, and the profane present in the sacred. In these pages there are farts, erections, urine, dog shit, grey pubic hair, paunchy skin, sagging breasts, rotten teeth, spider veins, and rolls of fat. It can be a little off-putting. But it seems the characters, and the author, are seeking grace through acceptance, acceptance of all that life flings our way, including all the depredations of our bodies, and the effluvia those bodies produce. The body of this, indeed.
Most of these stories take place in Portland, Maine, and most of them are brief, sometimes exceedingly so. Some stories function more as concise vignettes, with little character development and almost no plot at all. I found some endings to be abrupt to the point of frustration. Yet perhaps that's the point: that life is lived in moments, that lives move forward without much happening for much of the time, that things don't always conclude in a satisfying way.
I read a lot of short fiction. I'm keen on character development, and like a story where something imperative happens. The story mentioned above does this, where an elderly couple learns a new way of being when the wife witnesses her husband's naked humiliation, and transforms it to a thing of grace. Or when a man holds a million dollar lottery ticket, and does something surprising in an attempt to hold onto a woman he senses is drifting. Not coincidentally, these are longer stories in the collection. With page space, the stories have room to expand in a way I like very much.
So while some of these stories "didn't work" for me, the collection coheres in theme and voice. McNabb is a gifted writer, and I'll be looking for more of his work.
I would say these stories are spiritual in the way that the sacred is present in the profane, and the profane present in the sacred. In these pages there are farts, erections, urine, dog shit, grey pubic hair, paunchy skin, sagging breasts, rotten teeth, spider veins, and rolls of fat. It can be a little off-putting. But it seems the characters, and the author, are seeking grace through acceptance, acceptance of all that life flings our way, including all the depredations of our bodies, and the effluvia those bodies produce. The body of this, indeed.
Most of these stories take place in Portland, Maine, and most of them are brief, sometimes exceedingly so. Some stories function more as concise vignettes, with little character development and almost no plot at all. I found some endings to be abrupt to the point of frustration. Yet perhaps that's the point: that life is lived in moments, that lives move forward without much happening for much of the time, that things don't always conclude in a satisfying way.
I read a lot of short fiction. I'm keen on character development, and like a story where something imperative happens. The story mentioned above does this, where an elderly couple learns a new way of being when the wife witnesses her husband's naked humiliation, and transforms it to a thing of grace. Or when a man holds a million dollar lottery ticket, and does something surprising in an attempt to hold onto a woman he senses is drifting. Not coincidentally, these are longer stories in the collection. With page space, the stories have room to expand in a way I like very much.
So while some of these stories "didn't work" for me, the collection coheres in theme and voice. McNabb is a gifted writer, and I'll be looking for more of his work.
Read
February 25, 2009Andrew McNabb penetrated the heads of dozens of characters, discovered their thoughts, and reports his findings in “the body of this.”
Often, it’s brilliant.
It’s writing filled both with humanity and a sense of place, descriptive in a way that refuses to ignore who and what we pass by everyday but fail to see.
Especially who.
The setting for most of the often very brief short stories in McNabb’s collection (published in paperback by Warren Machine Company) is Portland, Maine – and the old portion of Portland. The people whose minds McNabb has invaded are God’s people – church-going, Catholic people – and for the most part believable and real.
Meet some faith-filled folk
Take Terry, the central character of one short story who takes the approach to customer service that “could only, only be provided by loving your neighbor with all your might.”
Meet Lydia, the immigrant trying to dress well and fit in at high school.
There's Frank, the lonely senior citizen serving food to the needy in the church basement who feels misunderstood.
And that young couple who decorated the baby’s room in anticipation of their first child only to…no, you’d better read that one yourself.
Lots of winners, but not all
McNabb writes some pretty weird stuff, too. When someone can bring together both reality and a sense of imagination the way he can, a reader has to wonder why he stoops to vulgarity at times.
It’s offensive. And unnecessary.
I say unnecessary because the empathy McNabb has for what some might call the least of God’s people is truly eye-opening, a blessing for his readers.
His insight into America’s obsession with losing weight is gorgeously brought out in the little more than four pages of the tightly written “Habeas Corpus.”
And the first-person story about a lottery winner – “It’s What It Feels Like” – is a marvelously-told piece of work that’s more about marriage – and the sometimes one-sideness of marriage – than about winning millions.
Is it what it looks like?
Or is it what it feels like?
And how about us?
What are all those people thinking, the ones we live with, the ones we work with and study with and volunteer with – and love?
What's really on their minds?– bz
Often, it’s brilliant.
It’s writing filled both with humanity and a sense of place, descriptive in a way that refuses to ignore who and what we pass by everyday but fail to see.
Especially who.
The setting for most of the often very brief short stories in McNabb’s collection (published in paperback by Warren Machine Company) is Portland, Maine – and the old portion of Portland. The people whose minds McNabb has invaded are God’s people – church-going, Catholic people – and for the most part believable and real.
Meet some faith-filled folk
Take Terry, the central character of one short story who takes the approach to customer service that “could only, only be provided by loving your neighbor with all your might.”
Meet Lydia, the immigrant trying to dress well and fit in at high school.
There's Frank, the lonely senior citizen serving food to the needy in the church basement who feels misunderstood.
And that young couple who decorated the baby’s room in anticipation of their first child only to…no, you’d better read that one yourself.
Lots of winners, but not all
McNabb writes some pretty weird stuff, too. When someone can bring together both reality and a sense of imagination the way he can, a reader has to wonder why he stoops to vulgarity at times.
It’s offensive. And unnecessary.
I say unnecessary because the empathy McNabb has for what some might call the least of God’s people is truly eye-opening, a blessing for his readers.
His insight into America’s obsession with losing weight is gorgeously brought out in the little more than four pages of the tightly written “Habeas Corpus.”
And the first-person story about a lottery winner – “It’s What It Feels Like” – is a marvelously-told piece of work that’s more about marriage – and the sometimes one-sideness of marriage – than about winning millions.
Is it what it looks like?
Or is it what it feels like?
And how about us?
What are all those people thinking, the ones we live with, the ones we work with and study with and volunteer with – and love?
What's really on their minds?– bz
May 1, 2009
Short stories., some very short (2 pages). All stories are set in Maine, mostly in Portland. He is a self-proclaimed Catholic whose religion has shaped some of his stories. This didn't bother me at all, being a fallen away Catholic. Those characters who are Catholic are much more human than anything.. A 1st year seminarian praying in front of a crucifix who can't get rid of his erection under his cassock. This is not the Vatican talking here, but a guy who is exploring, in some of his stories (maybe 5 or 6 out of some 30)where his beliefs fit in the real world around us.
Most of his characters are middle class, which also makes them accessible to most of his readers.
I'd give the stories, in general an A- (Some of his shorter stories are difficult to understand on a first reading).
Most of his characters are middle class, which also makes them accessible to most of his readers.
I'd give the stories, in general an A- (Some of his shorter stories are difficult to understand on a first reading).
February 12, 2012
I'm trying to read more short stories but must say it's tough. I read this book because so many of the stories are set in Portland, ME, which I know fairly well. Some of the stories I liked, but some were just too grim for me -- not the setting but the people. Most are just short snapshots of time and place, while a few encompass a period of time.
July 11, 2009
Religiously and architecturally themed, although subtlety so on both counts. A lot of very good and very short stories. Aesthetically pleasing in design and appearance. A surprising pleasant find and read.
November 19, 2009
A short, weird collection of people portraits, undistinguished from any of a thousand like it. McNabb deals in the sort of short story I find so irritating: those vague "vignettes" that use the medium as an excuse for not saying anything at all. Odd, brief and pointless.
recommended
March 22, 2009Thanks Steve! From your review (and knowing your high standards) this sounds great!
April 7, 2009
This book was written by my brother-in-law. It's his first book and is a collection of short stories.
May 4, 2009
Andrew McNabb is a brilliant writer. I'm looking forward to his future publications!
October 17, 2010
Andrew McNabb is a solid writer. Some seriously good short fiction in this collection.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews