From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Having made his reputation with literary SF and fantasy set in the jungles of Central America (
The Jaguar Hunter), Shepard embarked on a second phase in his career, exploring the back roads of America (
Two Trains Running). Mixing the tropes of fantasy and noir fiction, Shepard has cobbled together a beguiling tale. Wardlin Stuart, spinning his wheels as a bartender just off of Puget Sound, gets into a drunken brawl that ends in death for his attacker. Convicted of manslaughter and imprisoned, he concocts something called "prayerstyle" as a way to survive institutional violence. To Wardin's surprise, prayerstyle works; it even brings him the love of his life. Word gets out, and other inmates ask him to create and chant prayers for them. Wardlin puts together a book of prayers, and
A Handbook of American Prayer is published, resulting in parole, unwanted fame and hundreds of pleas from across the country for help. Wondering if the religion he inadvertently created is a blessing or a curse, Wardlin tries to lay low with his lady love in Arizona. But his growing popularity results in a violent encounter with a fundamentalist Christian preacher from Phoenix. And just as he's planning to give up prayerstyle, Wardlin discovers that his fictitious god may be real. This well-paced meditation on the nature of faith and our national obsession with the cult of celebrity finds Shepard at the height of his powers: poetic and pugnacious; metaphysical, yet down and dirty as a back-alley brawl.
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--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
From Booklist
Not since Laurie Foos' hilarious send-up of the contemporary American media obsession with unlikely celebrity,
Ex Utero (1995), has there been such dead-on fictional scrutiny of what is news. And in this case, what news: the crossing over from pop best-sellerdom to religion to cultish sociopsychology of the titular volume, a collection of pragmatic prayer-poems for specific things but to no particular god save "the God of Loneliness" that murderer Wardlin Stuart develops while in stir. Fortunately, Stuart is paroled in time to pitch the book; not, however, before a prison chaplain marries him in jail to a woman he met via "prayer-speak." It's a pop-lit publicist's dream, and Shepard's arresting tale of a cult celebrity in spite of himself has an elegiac, dreamlike quality. Though filled with introspection, it is punctuated by the kind of sinister edginess and violence that only underlay
Ex Utero as it shows an admittedly shallow and indifferent murderer become the focus of sociological, political, and religious pundits, and a cult hero.
Whitney ScottCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
