Stories on the Side of Grace
If, as Paul Elie suggested, fiction has lost its faith, then surely it has also lost its grace. What self-respecting literary wannabe in the year 2021 would entertain supernatural grace as a legitimate (and unironic) literary theme? Surely Flannery O’Connor and her thrown books, stolen prosthetics, and goring bulls are long dead. We live in the age of technological magic, not supernatural grace and miracle.
Not so fast, says Alexander Theroux. Best known for his maximalist and linguistically challenging novels, two of which were long-ago nominated for the National Book Award, Three Wogs in 1972, and Darconville’s Cat in 1981, Theroux has also authored a newly released short story collection, Alexander Theroux: Early Stories. Theroux, who began his adult life as a Trappist monk (and dedicated Three Wogs to the “Spiritvu Sancto”), said during a 1991 interview with literary critic Steven Moore, “I believe that writing continues the work of the Evangelists. The Church gave me an interest in miracle, mystery, and ritual, and imprinted its visions on me. It also shaped my nightmares. I believe in grace.” I believe in grace. A strange claim, but perhaps not surprising coming from the man who claimed in the same interview, quoting one of his own works, that “no man ever rose to any degree of perfection but through obstinacy and an inveterate resolution against the stream of mankind.” If the stream of mankind is decidedly against grace, then it makes sense that Theroux would be on the side of grace.
But one who reads Theroux’s wild, hilarious, and wonderfully diverse collection may wonder: what exactly is the nature of this grace? At first blush, Theroux’s characters seem, overall, to be decidedly lacking grace. Like the arrogant feminist gourmet magazine editor in “Scugnizzo’s Pasta Co.,” who believes the entire male world—including God the Father himself—is in a conspiracy against her, and who finds “everything paternalistic and patriarchal patronizing, paternal, pathetic, and perverse.” Or the conceited New York autograph collector in “Watergraphs,” who despises all things Bostonian, and is thus fittingly brought low by an aristocratic Bostonian whose parrots diarrhea on a rare and priceless autograph of an American Founder.
Even those characters more attune to spiritual matters, to wonder and awe and mystery, are seemingly crushed by life. Like clubfooted high school teacher James Querpox in “Summer Bellerophon,” a romantic stargazer who puzzles over dark matter, mathematics, and the nature of the universe—and falls foolishly and hopelessly in love with a student, but then hangs himself after deciding that “the final truth is that life is suffering.” Or the sensitive, bedwetting eleven-year-old Alexander in “Blackrobe,” who desires to “sleep in the open air without a blanket, live in the woods, eat berries, and find mushrooms” and who gets goosebumps from contemplating the night sky. Alas, even mystical Alexander is crushed. He wets the bed at summer camp and is mocked by the tyrannical camp counselor Monsky, learning that “what hurt most in nature” was not jellyfish, or poison ivy, or even thorns, but people.
No one, however, is as crushed as Leon Noel, another bedwetter and the titular genius in “Genius,” narrated by Stonesthrow, Leon’s mentor and friend. Leon was a “self-reliant, unparalleled, and extraordinary child, irresistibly bright as a penny.” At the age of eight, Leon “would carry a crucifix about him at times, wordlessly hold it up toward you,” and “desperately wanted to know the facts of St. Paul.” Unfortunately, Leon’s own genius and high ideals became something of a curse. He longed to discover the “green stick” that Leo Tolstoy’s brother said was buried in a ravine, that tells of the perfect world, but alas, he never found it, the gulf between the what is and the what should be impassable.
It is unclear if a specific event or series of events disillusioned Leon (there are hints that he may have been a victim of abuse). Whatever the cause, Leon does fall, and fall hard. After high school, Leon dropped out of Columbia University, became addicted to drugs, was convicted of assault with a deadly weapon, and sent to Rikers Island where Stonesthrow visited him. Filled with pity, Stonesthrow earnestly tells him, “When God asks Ezekiel ‘Can these bones live?’ the answer was ‘Yes.’” To which Leon replies, “Except Ezekiel was living in a valley filled with dry bones.” Leon then says he had “been looking into your friend, St. Paul, struck off his horse—without a warning, I believe. Remember? . . . Heard a voice?” Then cynically, “From on high?” And finally, “I have been looking for the green stick . . . the one that tells about the perfect world . . . I never found it.” Soon after, Leon dies alone, “in a sad abandoned building with its windows boarded up,” alongside hypodermic needles, vodka bottles, filthy crack pipes, and “lots of religious pamphlets scattered on the floor.” Born with so much promise, he dies a “low bottom addict,” buried in an “unmarked pauper’s grave in a potter’s field on desolate mile-long Hart’s Island.” The story ends with Stonesthrow “angry at God.” For “He giveth, yes—but also taketh away.”
I believe in grace. Really? One might be forgiven for thinking, instead, that Theroux agrees with Hobbes that “the life of man [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” But not so fast. For now Chosen Locksley enters the scene in the concluding story, “Chosen Locksley Swims the Tiber.” We are told that Chosen “was a highly precocious and extremely sensitive girl” who “always entertained strange and wonderful dreams beyond her telling” and “had the visionary soul of a solitary.”
Chosen’s parents both died when she was twelve years old, and she is raised by two wealthy High Anglican great-aunts in Boston. From a young age, she was “transported by the books she read” and “fascinated by subjects on nature, on the beauty of birds, on skies, mountains, flowing streams.” She aspired to be a contemporary Isabella Stewart Gardner, who was the “embodiment of a strong and indomitable identity.” At seventeen, Chosen decides to become a fashion model, against her aunts’ desires, again finding inspiration in the “daring and eccentric” Gardner. She moves to New York, where she is hired by Faleen York, “all exoskeleton,” who runs a powerful agency and “lived only for her job and the power it gave her.”
Chosen (now going by “Yarrow”), soon becomes a famous model. However, something of her innocence and poetic sensitivity remained. She is mocked for stopping shoots in front of churches so she can enter and say a prayer, for “she was a free spirit” who “was always pure of heart and body.” But can Chosen maintain her innocence in the frivolous, pretentious, dissolute, and grossly sexualized world of high fashion? As Faleen reminds her, “You’re selling the pelvis.”
Yet, somehow Chosen does maintain her innocence, at least for a time. In one extraordinary moment a photographer tries to convince her to take her off her clothes during a shoot. She declines. The photographer persists: “Come one, oh come on, sweet Yarrow. For me? Spogliati, Deshabille-toi. It’s for art. Sweet Jesus, are you a prude? . . . Come on, get naked as night.” Again Chosen refuses, chastising the photographer to “not use the name of Our Lord in vain again.” In this profound scene, Chosen’s refusal to go topless in a world where one cannot buy a bottle of milk at the grocery store without being bombarded by breasts, butts, and, in the words of Faleen, pelvises, exemplifies an inveterate resolution against the stream of mankind.
Soon after, however, Chosen “began living it up again. . . . She danced and drank, smoked and caroused . . . She took cocaine and smoked pot and, laughing, drank full of Mephisto’s wine until it turned into fire.” What happened? Did the experience of being utterly objectified send her into a tailspin? It is unclear. But we are told she “felt untamed”; she experienced “verve, such levity, perfect glee, unending mirth, jocularity, amusement, and glorious pleasure.”
Lucas Cranach the Elder, Law and Gospel (Law and Grace) c. 1529, in Herzogliches Museum, Gotha, Germany.
And yet, she is not happy. On the one hand, she is living “a high life, indeed.” Yet, “she often felt low. Hollow.” As she looks out the window of a resort hotel at the crashing breakers of the ocean below, she stands and listens. “What exactly was she listening for? More importantly, what was she hearing beyond the crashing waves, the gray solitude, the pounding sea?” What she was hearing was a call, calm, quiet, almost imperceptible. But then the whispered call becomes a shout. Her pathetic high school teacher, Mr. Warmouth, shows up at her hotel. He accosts her getting out of a taxi, claiming he has come to save her from the churls and perverts who want to use and abuse her, and he asks her to return home with him to star in his plays. As Chosen stands there, not knowing what to say, Warmouth steps back to admire her, and “was immediately walloped by a truck, bow-knifing into the air, and was instantly killed.” Shocked, Chosen looks up to see that the New York delivery truck has a “full-scale perfume photo-advertisement color poster of herself wearing that black Azzedine Alaia femme fatale with a 1990s vintage sexy leather cut-out hip slash D-ring buckle pencil skirt!”
Not since O’Connor herself has a moment of grace been so violent, so comical, and so powerful. Realizing “Fashion is fakery, striving artifice,” she staggers back to her hotel room and suddenly felt a “terrible darkness,” and “now realized with a sudden intuition that without God she was never happy, never satisfied, never at peace, and, along with that, the brevity of life hit her—in thunderous shock—like an earthquake.” Back in her hotel room, Chosen picks up a Gideon Bible and at random turns to Romans 2:4 and reads: “Or do you despise the riches of His goodness, forbearance, and long-suffering, not knowing that the goodness of God leads you to repentance?”
She begins to tremble all over, “her entire body shuddering now with an unquenchable thirst for closeness with the Lord and the comfort of his saving grace.” In desperation and confusion and deep longing, she prays:
Grant me a change of heart that I may refrain from what I was so hungrily, so greedily flying to. In your blessed mercy alone is my salvation. Preserve me from the extravagant infirmities into which I have fallen and please redeem. Amen.
Chosen then disappears to a Trappist Convent in Massachusetts where she tells the Mother Abbess, “I have hearkened to a voice that was the softest I’ve ever heard”; and further, that “I am such a failure. I have failed my aunts, I have failed myself, I have failed God. I have become so vain. Please tell me, what has become of me? Where can I find peace?” The Abbess responds, “Seek the interior. Be not vain. Failure is nothing; only sadly ceding to it is.” The story (and the entire collection) ends on Candlemas Day, with Chosen making her vows, now “purged of all her follies,” feeling “white and wild as the withy wind,” kneeling on the floor of hard stone just as her heroine, Isabella Stewart Gardner, had done so many years before.
What are we to make of grace and the possibility of faith in Theroux’s collection? Like Balzac, or Flaubert, or Cervantes, and yes, like O’Connor herself, Theroux seeks to crush our illusions and fantasies. He pulls back the veil and shows humanity in all its arrogance and cruelty and, yes, stupidity. While grace is possible, it is not guaranteed. Indeed, the stream of mankind seems overall opposed to it. But are we thus hopeless? According to Theroux, no. In a 2020 interview, he stated: “The barbarians are at the gates, no question. But I hold out hope for the godly, the merciful, the good, the kind and charitable.” What is the nature of that hope? Only submission, like Chosen Locksley, to the grace and mercy of God. For failure is nothing; only sadly ceding to it is.
Jeffrey Wald writes from the Twin Cities.