The Review of Contemporary Fiction
The Faithful Narrative of a Pastor's Disappearance by Benjamin AnastasEvelin Sullivan
Benjamin Anastas. The Faithful Narrative of a Pastor’s Disappearance. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001. 277 pp. $24.00.
Benjamin Anastas’s first novel, An Underachiever’s Diary, is a sweet, sad, hilarious, and perversely triumphant "memoir," written from the single point of view of its hapless narrator. The Faithful Narrative of a Pastor’s Disappearance, Anastas’s second novel, is more complex, as Anastas handles with consummate skill half-a-dozen points of view. The characters are a congregation of liberal, suburban New England parishioners-among them Margaret Howard, formidable realtor and mother of the local drug dealer, and Artemesia Angelis, an alarmingly pious housewife-and their spiritual leader, a young black pastor named Thomas Mosher. Also present are faithless souls tied to the congregants by kinship. When the pastor disappears without a trace, the never very orderly world of the parish is thrown into a crisis. Questions multiply. Did Bethany Caruso-unhappily married to a man who, although banished from her bed, loves her to distraction, mother of two small children, functioning depressive when on Zoloft-have an affair with the mysteriously absent pastor? Did Mosher’s final sermon, "The Shapes of Love" (God is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere), have something to do with his disappearance? Are the parishioners right in fearing that their inability to make their pastor feel welcome is partly responsible? Is the voracious hunger for someone to love and for an end to loneliness to blame? Only one thing is certain: God moves in mysterious ways. If he exists, that is. Anastas’s novel is an unerring and very funny satire on life and mores in modern suburbia, a cautionary tale showing how unhappiness can seduce even the most upright heart, and an investigation of the blind search for a spirit that animates the universe. It is also a book of deep affection, affection for the good ship Faith and the good ship World-and for all who sail in them. [Evelin Sullivan]