Sophia

Starred review from October 12, 2015
Bible’s (Cowboy Maloney’s Electric City) short, comic novel, which relates a bibulous Southern preacher’s perverse quest for sainthood, is full of small miracles. The Reverend Alvis T. Maloney is a Rabelaisian figure, the “lazy priest of town’s worst church,” whose irrepressible appetites lead him into distinctly unholy alliances with his parishioners and the Holy Ghost, about whom he has recurring erotic dreams that would make John Donne blush. Whether he is a man more sinned against than sinning is an open question, but his desire to follow his own unorthodox righteous path is undisputed. The plot is almost secondary, though there is an excess of it: a cross-country chess tournament tour with Eli, a prodigy and Maloney’s “redneck Virgil”; an attack on a suburban house involving a hot air balloon; and a game of wits with a blind bounty hunter chasing Maloney and his pregnant lover from “the great Southern Bohemia” to New York City. Bible shrewdly pairs his maximalist comic style with a minimalist form. The novella is composed of short, paragraph-long scenes that are variously poetic, bawdy, and zany; snippets of absurdist conversations on faith, love, and sex; and dispassionate accounts of various saints’ gruesome martyrdoms. These tales lend a necessary counterweight to the story’s antics as Maloney, a “holy fool on the hunt for something worthy,” hopes to glean from the martyrs some clue to consecrating his picaresque adventures.

October 1, 2015
Bible delivers an elliptical, provocative novella about the profane and the spiritual, all of it drenched in sweat, sex, and booze. In the American South, a reverend named Maloney (who also narrates) guzzles booze and indulges in sexual thoughts]not model behavior, surely. He spends a lot of time drunk at church and hangs with an assortment of down-on-their-luck types]most notably, his best friend, Eli, a chess genius whom one character accuses Maloney of using for money. Is this the case? Bible tells his story in short bursts, poetic and plainspoken; he shuffles readers from place to place, catapults them from nastiness to nastiness. Gradually a story develops, but this book is about tone: sometimes vulgar, sometimes romantic, always confrontational. In service to this tone, much of the book]characters, their back stories, their motivations]feels concealed. Certainly authors have done great work in such elliptical modes]marketing copy here cites Barry Hannah and Nicholson Baker]but the uninflected style and tone also recall newer books like Young God or Nowhere, not to mention plenty of brief, broken-seeming works emerging from indie presses. Bible wants to provoke]consider Maloney's recurring sex dreams about the Holy Ghost or a moment when he grooms his pubic hair into the shape of a cross or musings on whether or not Jesus had wet dreams]but his attempts at provoking are, well, sort of dull and conventional. Familiar in form and profane content, the novella takes no real risks. "Failure is the most interesting trait," Bible writes early on, and he has a point. Ultimately, this novella is too cloistered, too fashionable, too safe to do much failing, and Bible's ambition to be interesting and different disappears into the book's ellipses. An "experimental" novel that manages mostly to be conventionally unconventional.

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November 1, 2015

The Right Reverend Alvis T. Maloney lives on a boat because the bank took his home, was nearly defrocked for inappropriate behavior with female parishioners, and enjoys snorting heroin with chess buddy Eli. Clearly, he's not your typical reverend, and the provocatively named Bible is not your typical novelist, offering punchy little paragraphs that examine the collision of the sacred and profane in language that's sparkling and decidedly raucous. Soon he's taken Maloney and Eli out of the wicked South and sent them on a money-making chess-tournament tour that ends with a game played with live pieces in that modern Sodom and Gomorrah, New York. VERDICT Not for those easily offended and not just a hoot, either; we're all searchers.

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