The Divine Comedy of John Venner

by Gregory Blake Smith

John Venner, a thirty-five-year-old doctor of divinity at a small New England college near one of America's last Shaker outposts, becomes obsessed with a shapely Shaker virgin and battles the conflicting emotions brought on by the yearnings of the flesh and the spirit

272 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Gregory Blake Smith is the award-winning author of four novels, including The Maze at Windermere and The Divine Comedy of John Venner, a New York Times Notable Book. His short story collection, The Law of Miracles, won the Juniper Prize and the Minnesota Book Award. He has received a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University and the George Bennett Fellowship at Phillips Exeter Academy and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bush Foundation, and the Minnesota State Arts Board. Smith is currently the Lloyd P. Johnson-Norwest Professor of English and the Liberal Arts at Carleton College.

Reviews

[Ron · Rating 4 out of 5]

An offbeat, humorous narrator with insights that cut sharply into society and poignantly into the narrator himself. Four and a half stars for a summer read.

[Monica · Rating 2 out of 5]

Relentlessly clever. I got tired of it and quit after 50 pages.