Inagaddadavida

Although I consider myself a non-practicing and creedless Unitarian, I have a strange attractions to Bible stories. David Maine's The Preservationist was one of the first books I reviewed on this blog, I'm a fan of the Brick Testament, and actually kind of dig Bob Dylan's born-again period. Some of my favorite people are gnostics, and at least one a seminarian.

(If I step back, what I'm actually fond of is the act of interpretation. Just as when Toots and The Maytals record their version of John Denver's "Take Me Home Country Roads," a story changes in the telling. Ten years ago, Reynolds Price wrote some vignettes about the life of Jesus for Time Magazine, including a haunting small-story about the resurrected Jesus watching -- and perhaps assisting -- in the suicide of Judas. "Make it new," said Ezra Pound.)

Interpretation is particularly fun with the books of the Bible, since the source material is so spare and minimalist to begin with. (Perhaps years from now writers will create new fables out of the 1980's stories of Raymond Carver and Grace Paley.) Since we're not told how Noah fit all the animals into a boat, since we don't know why Cain slew Abel, since it's hard to envision how a pebble might kill a giant, there's room for imagination and exploration in retelling.

Jonathan Goldstein does quite a bit of this in Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bible!, working through a good chunk of the Old Testament and up through, in the final story in the collection, mere moments before the birth of Jesus. You may know Goldstein -- as I do -- from a version of his "Cain and Abel" story which has become a staple on "This American Life." It's a strong and weird story about the first brothers, the invention of brotherhood and of jealousy and of murder. In "Cain and Abel," and throughout the book, Goldstein has a way of describing feelings or impulses that are common to us modern folk but which would be entirely new to the first (from a Biblical point of view, anywho) fellows. Characters struggle with an all-powerful and unknowable God, as well as the demands of family and tradition. There's a playful approach to anachronism, which lightens the load and makes each of these stories breezy and approachable.

"Cain and Abel" probably remains the strongest story in the bunch, although the final story -- "My Troubles (A Work in Progress, by Joseph of N-------)" -- ranks a close second, with it's presentation of a sensitive and understanding Joseph as he prepares for (and worries over) the divinely-touched baby his wife is about to birth:

And worry I did -- worry that the baby might not even look like people, that he might be born with wings. Or worse, be born with just one wing. The thought of Mary holding a one-winged baby on her lap was enough to get me all weepy and sick to my stomach. If that son of a bitch Ezekiel made even one little crack about my illegitimate one-winged baby, job or no job, I'd strangle him with my bare hands.

The book, in it's move from the Garden to the Ark to the Tower of Babel and so on, does get a bit same-samey after awhile, and I didn't totally jibe with Goldstein's reinterpretation of King David as an aspiring humorist, but throughout there's a tone and approach that mirrors both the alien weirdness and metaphysical cruelties one finds in the source material.

(There's also a preface story to the collection which seems to suggest that all of the tales that follow are the invention of a not-particularly-devout Jewish dad over lunch at the delicatessen, which -- to my mind -- undermines and deflates the tales that follow, highlighting their artifice where otherwise they might have held real force. Luckily, as the father himself says unto his son, "Who reads prefaces?")