Books: Faith and Good Works

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OPEN HEART

by FREDERICK BUECHNER 276 pages. Atheneum. $5.95.

As usual the substance of the book is Frederick Buechner's amiable conviction that the hound of heaven is a wet spaniel, apt to shake himself at any moment and shower a man with faith and grace. What is also unsettling, in this successful sequel to Buechner's Lion Country, is the considerable attention but negligible weight that this gifted and amusing writer gives to earthly matters.

The hero of Open Heart, for instance, a moony young teacher named Antonio Parr, runs up and down his emotional scales several times when he learns that his wife has slept with his young nephew. But there is no real danger that he will follow his impulse and in revenge take his 17-year-old student Laura to bed. In fact there are no real dangers of any kind in Buechner's gentle world. Death, pain and anxiety exist, but are seen small; the hideous, wasting illness that kills Antonio's twin sister at the beginning of Lion Country is worth little more than a sad smile.

In the earlier novel, with a dim notion of writing an expose, Antonio became involved with the formidable Leo Bebb, a sleazy but possibly genuine faith healer who cranked an ordination-by-mail divinity mill in Armadillo, Fla. It turned out that Bebb was quite capable of exposing himself. After he did so, raising up his loins in thanksgiving at the climactic moment of a healing ritual held to restore the sexual potency of a wealthy Indian chief, he had to leave town one jump ahead of the law. But by then Bebb's daughter Sharon had an occasion to cure Antonio of his chastity.

The humor of Open Heart runs less to slapstick (perhaps because Bebb already has done most of his turns) and more to De Vriesian one-liners: "I knew that I had to get away that day—their fresh-faced guilt was too great a reproach to my shifty-eyed innocence." Antonio, the narrator of both novels, is five years older in the new one, and he has coalesced to the point where sometimes it is possible to get a look at him. He travels west, returns home, encounters an acquaintance of Bebb who just may be a demon. He accepts cuckoldry, the inevitability of middle age, odd scraps of joy, the possibility that Bebb once raised a man from the dead.

Through it all, Antonio remains essentially an equivocal but clever device to help the author work things out in his head. Given this undisguised sketchiness in a central character, it is something of a mystery how Buechner has produced a live, warm, wise comic novel. And yet that is exactly what, in all shifty-eyed innocence, he has done.

An impression of raffish knowledgeability is what a writer tries to establish when he lists his accomplishments for the inside back flap of his novel's dust jacket. It is thus very good to be able to put down, as Novelist Barry Hannah did on the jacket of Geronimo Rex, "troubleshooter in a turkey-pressing plant." It is not so good to write "Presbyterian minister," and Frederick Buechner, who interrupted his writing career for several years to take a degree at Union Theological Seminary and become a minister, admits that he has thought of publishing his novels under an assumed name. As things are, he says some reviewers tend to review not the novels but the sermons they are sure must be hidden inside.