Praying Drunk

This book by Kyle Minor is probably the most tragic and beautiful work of fiction I've read since last summer. I can't actually remember where I heard of it, but it's been sat on my shelf since February waiting for me to plough through it, which is exactly what I did in the last four days. Buckle yourself in for a long post, as I have a lot to say about this book.

   It's by no means an easy read. Apparently it's partly autobiographical, but the disparate patches of story and question and conversation and sorrow that comprise the book work so powerfully as a whole collection that that almost doesn't matter; it's written so well that be it based-on-truth or not Kyle Minor leaves the reader emotionally wrecked and ponderously adrift, not in a cruel cheap way but in a deep, thoughtful, and ultimately sad way. He prefaces the book with a note reminding the reader that though the book is not a novel and is composed of shorter parts, he has put these into a particular order for a very good reason, and therefore one should read straight through rather than skipping around. The rationale behind this order is, at least on my interpretation, a rough meta-narrative tracing the trajectory of some of the stories' shared themes - which I'll discuss later. His fragments of story are revealed in a variety of mediums; some collections of letters, some memoirs, some dialogue, some Q & A with an anonymous despondent quasi-angelic figure, a fifty-page novella, and several more typical-style short stories. They all seem to take place on the same broad stage as well, sometimes touching on the same events or characters or memories, from different angles and in different tones, connected by loose-stitched threads that show either an incredibly deep commitment to leaving parts of pictures unshown or that they are in fact biographical. It matters little to me.
   So, to the contents themselves.

• First, an account of an uncle's suicide, with questions of its causality leading further backwards into abstraction, a deterministic account of the narrator's uncle's life in universal perspective, the initial blame for the ultimately tragic end of his uncle's life, and by implication all of human suffering, lies at the feet of the supposedly benevolent omnipotent God.
• Second, a young boy endures torture at the hands of his high school bully only by clinging to the words of an old Jewish joyous song; later as a grown man, in times of great upset, he finds this victimisation internalised and that he cannot leave it behind, not even able to look beyond it to the Christian faith which he has long since lost.
• Third, a mother leaves her husband and child, who slip into a depressed and depraved lifestyle full of bitterness and anger, leading to horrific fallout, which even within vaguely miraculous elements of the story go to demonstrate how ultimately in control of our lives and our meaningless suffering we as human beings aren't.
• Fourth, several conversations occur between a passive but inquisitive young agnostic man and the charismatic enigmatic Christian woman he is trying to understand and to woo, revealing in many interesting angles the nature of faith as a mysterious crutch.
• Fifth, seven short anecdotes from a missionary in Haiti about a gregarious but untrustworthy acquaintance of his called Sebastian, which display the impotence of knowledge-based faith in inspiring works of love, and the emotional turmoil that results in actively persisting with such contradictions realised in oneself.
• Sixth, a hypothetical reader and an ethereal entity exchange Q & A about the uses of fiction and narrative in making our sensations of life somewhat more tolerable.
• Seventh, at the funeral of a young man who killed himself, the preacher tries to explain God's plan's involvement of suffering using the analogy of making sweet biscuits out of bitter ingredients.
• Eighth, the narrator accounts the disorderly trawl through life of his older brother, through rock bands and sweaty desk jobs and grudges and addictions and bereavements, and asks: how do we keep it together, how do we as people cope with this madness, what do we cling to in the face of our world's sheer insubstantial unreliable shifting sands of cause and effect?
• Ninth, we glimpse the inchoate misery of our bodily existence, especially as we age, as a young man ponders dependence and dignity while attempting to correct his dying grandfather's false teeth.
• Tenth, in the longest short story, comprised of a series of letters (all from different people and in different voices), we see criss-crossing lines across America and over to the distant country of Haiti of loneliness and desperation and selfish appropriations of relationships; a missionary in Haiti falls in love with a student visiting on a volunteer trip, and secretly arranges to marry her, much to the disapproval of her family and his fellow mission team; we see the pastoral and social consequences of this decision bloom all manner of emotional mess in the lives of the poor and beset-upon Christians on each side of this wreck, only accelerating once a violent uprising bursts out in Haiti, and friends and family back in America have their concerns reoriented by other developments. I think ultimately what we see from the story is the deep-rooted need for human companionship of some form, and that in the mess of a world of selfish people, even selfish Christians, this takes many surprising forms, but that all of them are something like clutching at straw; we can never keep or protect properly those we love or those whose love we adopt, and even within faith in a loving powerful God, we let ourselves slip away also.
• Eleventh, another Q & A, our ethereal answerer tells us how truly empty and meaningless and dull heaven is, therefore how faith as a crutch for the empty and meaningless and dull misery of earthly life is likewise but clutching at straw.
• Twelth, the ill-fated attempt of a boy to overcome his bully, and reflections on the hereditary misfortune of violent tendencies, a further meaningless inheritance to human suffering.
• Thirteenth and finally, a countryside-dwelling artist ponders his family and all the tragedy and darkness that has unfolded throughout his life, and how all he can do to keep his soul from crumpling under its weight is to focus on the people present, the work at hand, the pleasures available, the acceptance of misery as part of the way the universe is and a stoic dedication to living with and through it.

   Each component is immaculately written, with the pace and poise of Minor's prose flowing perfectly to suit the tone and point of each part, and with the varying voices of his narrators having their own life and weight. I've heard him described in some reviews as a 'writer's writer', given his inventive playfulness and abundant reflections on the purposes of his writings even within them themselves. In terms of telling a collection of stories well, and provoking a poignant series of thoughtful responses therein, I don't think Minor could have done better. Anyone who enjoys top-notch fiction, especially sad stuff, the weighty kind that every few pages makes you stop short and breathe in blinking back stunned eyewaters at the sheer distressing honesty of his words; read this book.

   However, in a much more personal (and yet much more objective) sense I found the book problematic and upsetting. Minor's characters are largely Christian, and of course, looming throughout the themes and tones and currents of his stories is God; though this god that he writes of is not good. He writes of a powerless, distant, uncaring, unknowable, even cruel god; the humans populating his stories struggle with and lose their faith in myriad sadnesses of circumstance and confusion precisely because this is the kind of god they believe in. I think this is indicative of the damage nominal faith can do; these people largely don't have living personal relationships with God, they are simply brought up into a conservative unquestioned set of doctrinal truths that have never endured trial or test, and so when these difficulties do arise, the grounding of what they think to be true dissolves, plunging them via their suffering into further misery and darkness. It's pretty bleak. The meta-narrative that I mentioned I thought spanned across his collection is one of an individual, who has grown up amid Christianity, seeking meaning and truth and goodness in a broken world. As you'll see by reading back through the descriptions of each piece, we start off by clinging to faith in hope of some abstract redemption, amid brutality and suffering, and unsettled by a vague awareness that God must know what's going on - why is he allowing this? This insecurity and mistrust and feeling of betrayal and absence is built up in leaps and spurts across the following stories, with layers of cynicism and loss further separating the narrator from the god they thought they could trust, before we reach the end, and question whether even if that god is really there and everything I believed about them were true, would it make a difference to me now? And the answer given is a plaintive "not really", leaving us with nothing to do but grin and bear it by ignoring the disjoints, like the artist in the closing story.

   This is, I think, sadly the reality of faith for many nominal christians, especially in America (which is where Praying Drunk's complaints and qualms occur), and it breaks my heart to think that many people may have had internal trajectories in their relationship with God similar to the ones expressed so accurately here. A proper understanding of God's character and the doctrine of the Fall would together remedy so much of these characters' inner turmoil, and could save the faith of many real persons whose lives bear resemblance to the stories. I'm lucky to have grown up in a church environment that is much more open to dealing with the hypocrisy and failure of Christians than in trying to deny or forget them, and also one with a far firmer grasp of the theology underpinning how we can stand in trusting God amid the wreck of this world. But worldwide, certain Christian socio-cultural tendencies will emerge, and so I do recognise with an uncomfortable familiarity a great deal of the internal ruins that seem particularly to plague those living in the Bible Belt, the more conservative types who can't quite reconcile their love-filled faith of fear and judgment against a broken world of human wrong and unanswered questions.

   Fortunately, I ended up reading this book alongside 3-2-1 (an excellent theologically and philosophically sound overview of Christianity), so was reminded persistently while I read onwards that the darkness and hopelessness of Minor's stories is not fully true to the God I know. Christian readers, I'd recommend doing something similar as an antidote to the pervasive persuasive negativity of the short stories. It reminded me of Gilead, the last fiction book I read narrated by a Christian, albeit one with much better-grounded reflective passages and thus a more substantial and encouraging output of its worldview and conclusions.

   Anyway, I've expended all my main points, if I were to start going into the smaller ones then this post may well be my first to exceed 2000 words. Ridiculous. I put so much time into writing these things, only to have no idea if there's a readership at all, but if there is, I hope you enjoy my ramblings, and I hope you enjoy Kyle Minor's stories - because there's no way you'll have read a post this long about a book that you're not planning on reading.