The End of the Straight and Narrow
Readers of David McGlynn’s debut collection The End of the Straight and Narrow should put aside any assumptions they may have about religious fiction and its sometimes evangelical qualities. The stories in this book break away from the generic conventions of Christian literature both in form and content. This is due to the often complicated, expansive nature of each story’s unraveling and the many struggles the characters face regarding faith and morality in a secular culture. Reading this book, one gets the sense that these are stories about pathetic people rather than some allegorical world vision. Unfortunately for McGlynn’s characters, there is no clear difference between right and wrong, good and evil, and this confusion often leads them through some of the darkest moments of their lives.
Readers of David McGlynn’s debut collection The End of the Straight and Narrow should put aside any assumptions they may have about religious fiction and its sometimes evangelical qualities. The stories in this book break away from the generic conventions of Christian literature both in form and content. This is due to the often complicated, expansive nature of each story’s unraveling and the many struggles the characters face regarding faith and morality in a secular culture. Reading this book, one gets the sense that these are stories about pathetic people rather than some allegorical world vision. Unfortunately for McGlynn’s characters, there is no clear difference between right and wrong, good and evil, and this confusion often leads them through some of the darkest moments of their lives.
McGlynn has split the book into two parts: Part I consists of four unrelated pieces, the last of which is the story “Seventeen One-Hundredths of a Second,” my favorite of the collection. At fifty pages, it is the longest story in the book and the most intricate, allowing McGlynn to complicate the sacramental act of baptism, to incorporate elements of the Old Testament whale story, and to work in some good, Christian sinning. In the story, Jonah, a pharmaceutical rep and swimming instructor at Vacation Bible Camp, cannot escape the memory of pulling Charlie, his dying buddy, out of the pool after a friendly but competitive swim session. Jonah’s guilt at perhaps causing Charlie’s heart attack sends him to Abby, Charlie’s pregnant widow.
A subplot of sorts appears when Jonah, at his pastor’s urging, finds himself the reluctant mentor of a fatherless, prescription drug-addicted kid named Titus. The two storylines collide when Jonah can no longer control his guilt-turned-hatred for Charlie, which manifests as a disturbing sexual act and then a questionable incident of child abuse. As the story ends, Jonah returns to the same pool in which Charlie died to work as a high school swim coach, hoping to somehow make up for his past actions. What he finds isn’t “grace” or “forgiveness either, but it was something close to both, an echo from long ago.”
Part II opens with “The Eyes to See,” a story that both introduces the remainder of the collection’s characters, all members of a dysfunctional family, and dramatizes how the wife’s blindness works literally and figuratively in their lives. The following four stories carry on with the family, trace its slow disintegration, and end at the “brown and frothy surf” of the Gulf of Mexico, into which the mother disappears, probably of her own volition. Ultimately, this family’s story is not a happy one, at least not in the traditional sense of the word: the father finds God after having an affair with his wife’s caretaker; the daughter Jill, because of the affair, suspects she is not her mother’s biological daughter; and Rowdy, the son and nearly constant narrator, looks on in wonder. Of his father’s conversion, he says:
A testimony is a story that relies upon an awful past. At the very least the arrangement of past events in an awful way. If Jesus is to rescue us from ourselves, and heal our necrotic hearts, we must leave behind who we were. Burn every bridge between now and then. In Christ’s mercy our sins are forgotten, but so is the person who committed them. In Christ’s mercy my father tries to forget that for fifteen years he was happy – that despite my mother’s blindness, and her silences, and every bold plan that drifted away, he had all he wanted and hadn’t wanted any more. Every time my mother laid her hand against his chest he felt located in the world. It was this kind of touch Jesus could never give, and had my mother given it again, Jesus wouldn’t have stood a chance. My father would have spat the name of God from his mouth. Shaken the dusk of Jesus from his feet.
In telling us about the father, McGlynn, through Rowdy, also tells us a little bit about how these stories, or testimonies, work to explore the struggles his characters face in their yearning to achieve both human and spiritual connection. Although Rowdy seems to suggest that his father could not have both, I suspect McGlynn believes otherwise. Rowdy says that in order to be rescued from our sins, we must forget the person who committed those sins. But isn’t the act of story-telling a way of recording that very same person in the moments before he or she changes? Isn’t a testimony an historical account of how one became a Christian, of one’s maturing as time passes? This, to me, seems the most moving aspect of these stories: the tension between forgetting and remembering, between emphasizing that human contact and erasing it from our minds.