Categories
Book reviews

Claire Coughlan’s Where They Lie (Harper Perennial, 2024)

Image credit: Goodreads.com

Cataloged as a novel concerned with abortion, Claire Coughlan’s Where They Lie serves the functions of being a good historical and crime fiction read and a thought-provoking condemnation of men who use women for their sexual pleasure.

The plot of this novel is relatively simple.  Nicoletta Sarto, a journalist, discovers that her mother was a disgraced midwife and an abortionist.  The development of this simple plot, however, is complicated by a byzantine collection of characters (I recommend developing a flowchart to understand the connections between the characters since there are so many names to juggle), long passages of questions from Nicoletta the journalist and answers from the people whom she interviews, and hints which are explained many pages later.

There is some enduring value in what is essentially a casual read.  Since Coughlan’s work is not an abortion apologia or mere pro-abortion propaganda like some contemporary fiction (one thinks, for example, of the ultimate in current preachy abortion novels, Deb Caletti’s Plan A [Labyrinth Road, 2023]), readers will appreciate the situations of women used by men as mere sexual toys, becoming pregnant, and not knowing how to care for themselves and the unborn children whom they carry.  The novel is set in Ireland in 1968, the year in which Birthright had just been organized in Canada, so contemporary readers must assume that, unlike today, the options for care of both the mother and unborn child may have been limited in Ireland besides the exemplary facilities sponsored by the Catholic Church.

Moreover, instead of advocating for changes in abortion laws to allow for the killing of the unborn or some other disastrous anti-life feminist notion, the various abortion-related references should make contemporary readers turn on the men who abandoned the women whom they used merely for sexual pleasure.

For example, Nicoletta, who became pregnant by a former lover, gave birth to the child; although the baby died, the anguish which she must have felt is compounded by the falsehood that the family created to prevent her shame (Nicoletta’s mother led everyone to believe that the child was her own and not her daughter’s).

Similarly, Nicoletta’s father abused several women for his own sexual gratification, including Gloria Fitzgerald, Nicoletta’s real mother.  The despair which these abused women felt over their unplanned pregnancies should bring shame to him and not the mothers themselves.

Even Nicoletta’s shame on engaging in an adulterous romance with another journalist on her newspaper’s staff is obscured by her own unplanned pregnancy by that lover.  Nicoletta goes from seeking an abortionist, to discarding the abortifacient pills he gave her, to thinking that maybe she could carry the baby to term and raise him or her, and eventually to feeling anguish at miscarrying the child, and this range of activities and emotions demonstrates that even a young woman who is devoid of religious faith feels the abandonment and despair of every mother when she is not supported by the father of the child, the man who should most support her in her time of need.

No doubt pro-abortion zealots would read this novel and argue a non sequitur claim like “See!  This is why abortion laws should have been relaxed in Catholic Ireland years ago—and should be legal throughout the world for all time!  Irish men can’t be trusted.  Women must have the power and the right to kill!”

Ordinary readers, who just want to curl up with a detective novel between donating to pro-life pregnancy groups and engaging in right-to-life political action, will appreciate the novel as a young woman’s adventure into discovering that her mother was a criminal abortionist and a murderer.  The girls among us will enjoy the novel as a bit of a romance: Nicoletta eventually becomes engaged with the father of her miscarried child, a man who loves her.

The boys among us will also appreciate the novel as an opportunity for catharsis, because beating the shit out of men who ignore their responsibility to care for not only the women whom they make pregnant, but also the unborn children who could be generated by their sexual activity is neither legal nor polite.

But real men, pro-life ones, already know that.

Categories
Book reviews

Deb Caletti’s Plan A (Labyrinth Road, 2023)

Photo credit: Goodreads.com

While she may have insulted women who get abortions by making her teen protagonist so stupid, Deb Caletti masterfully depicts how abortion zealots can indeed be STOOPID.

Granted, the novel is a tedious read.  Even the author herself (speaking through the narrator, of course) notes that the novel is “long.  Very long.  Four hundred and two pages long.  Thirty-nine chapters” (401; italics in original).  Many more interesting things began occurring in the world when I started to plow through this work: the massive election win of President Trump, the beginning of the overthrow of the useless and anti-American Democratic Party, the elimination of racist programs like DEI in the federal government, etc.  However, read it I did, if I want to be faithful to my duty as a pro-life English professor.

The plot is a standard, tired abortion story, a pattern used by Hemingway a century ago and Faulkner and Brautigan decades after him.  Sixteen-year-old Ivy DeVries becomes pregnant, is helped in her quest to kill the unborn child by a boyfriend, accomplishes the killing, and thinks she’s freed from the “burden” of being pregnant (when, as everyone knows, she is, post-abortion, merely the mother of a dead unborn baby).

Caletti’s contribution to this standard abortion plot, however, has two nuances.  Ivy becomes pregnant not by means of regular sex, but because another teen “stuck his penis near enough my vagina for sperm to make their unwanted journey to my egg” (253).  That’s about the only raw, if not salacious, sexual element in the novel, Ivy’s first episode of sex with her boyfriend being a typical encounter that perhaps was meant to arouse teens but which adults in a marital covenant would find ridiculous.

The second nuance which Caletti makes to the standard abortion template is much more important: Ivy is a first-class idiot.  I mean, the girl be dumb.  Stupid, as in stoopid.  If her first sexual episode with her boyfriend is laughable, then the stupidity which Ivy manifests throughout the novel would move the reader from chuckling at her ignorance as mere teenaged innocence, to scornful eye-rolls at her ignorant distortions of life-affirming feminist principles, to guffaws at her STOOPIDITY, especially when she illustrates how her pro-abortion distortion of feminist thinking blinds her to the logical fallacies and ironies of her own words.

Thus, this calculus makes the novel not only a joy to read, but also a literary tool which can be eminently useful for pro-life activists in their effort to study the myopic thinking of abortion zealots.  The morally blind pro-abortion characters may even help pro-life activists dissuade women from the practice of abortion (which harms them, kills unborn babies, and alienates fathers) because nobody would want to be so ignorant in life as the main character.

For example, Ivy’s innocence, the first step in the calculus, would make any reader smile or laugh lightly as when she illustrates her incredible ignorance about how she became pregnant: “I don’t even really understand how I’m here [in the state of thinking about being pregnant]” (8; italics in original) or “I didn’t even know you could get pregnant that way” (60).  Ivy’s naiveté continues to manifest itself hundreds of pages later when she stupidly asks her aunt, “You’re saying people have just been getting abortions forever?” (281).

For all her supposed smarts, being in advanced English courses and all, Ivy is as stupid at novel’s end as she was at the beginning.  Poor thing.

The reader reaches the second stage of scornful eye-rolls at her ignorant distortions of life-affirming feminist principles when Ivy’s preachiness about women’s rights, and oppression of women, and choice, and control of women’s bodies, and choice again, and blah blah blah overtakes the narrative.

For example, Ivy’s mother’s friend, who is presumably Catholic, discloses that she had an abortion and repeats the word “choice” intrusively in a few lines: “I might want to tell you this, but it’s your choice if you want to hear it.  We should have all the choices, every possible choice, when so much hasn’t been our choice” (155).  The author must have been self-conscious about the overuse of the word “choice” because she has the narrator offer this apologia for its repetition: “She says that word again and again, choice.  It’s a billboard, it’s a headline, it’s in neon lights.  It’s quiet, firm, dignified, self-respecting, a shout suppressed.  And, hey, ignored enough that it can seem like a gift instead of a right” (156; italics in original).

The reader’s possible guffawing reaction, the last step in the calculus, to Ivy’s stupidity occurs throughout the novel, especially when she illustrates how her pro-abortion distortion of feminist thinking blinds her to the logical fallacies and ironies of her own words.

On this point, the examples are legion.  Ivy uses the standard dehumanizing language of an abortion zealot in talking about or referring to the unborn child, ranging from calling him or her “‘a bundle of cells’ (according to some sites online) inside me”, the balance of the paragraph comparing the unborn child qua “bundle of cells” to her mother’s cancer cells (29); to an odd metaphor for the unborn child as “the grain of rice inside me, and […] the cells multiplying by the minute” (59); to Ivy using the demonstrative pronoun “this” to refer to the unborn child (255, repeated on 307); to the dehumanizing term with the longest grammatical history, “it” (308).

The ironies which the reader sees in Ivy’s stupidity ineluctably lead to guffaws, and these, likewise, are legion.  Ivy sees herself as a victim like Hester Prynne (87), completely unaware that, while the comparison does apply in that both Hester and Ivy are targets of adultery in the one case, fornication in the other, Hester gave birth to the child while Ivy will abort him or her.

Similarly, Ivy displays a lack of self-awareness when she asserts the following: “It’s sneaky, but when you get out of your own mind for a while and actually see other people and what they might need, too, you can feel, even for a minute, like maybe things will be all right after all” (90; italics in original).  That she cannot see what the unborn child might need or feel is either a blind spot on the author’s part or, most likely, more evidence of Ivy’s stupidity.

Ivy again compares her travels to kill the unborn child to a scene in the movie The Land Before Time: “young dinosaurs running from danger, fighting the odds, and struggling to get to the Great Valley—a tale of survival and teamwork and love, pretty much like this road trip” (201).  Here again Ivy is utterly oblivious that her abortion road trip does not end in survival of the unborn child and that the team collaborating in the killing does not love him or her—in fact, refuses to recognize him or her as a fellow human being running from danger, fighting the odds, and struggling to get to…birth.

Perhaps the weirdest irony occurs in Ivy’s statement about her “opinions”: “Another opinion I have is that appliances can hear, especially cars” (241).  Apparently, the AP English teenager is utterly bereft of basic contemporary fetological knowledge of the unborn child’s bodily functions such as movement in the womb or reactions to auditory and other stimuli.  Cars have feelings, but an unborn child burned to death in a saline abortion or dismembered in a D&E abortion feels nothing?

Stoo.  Pid.

Even other characters’ statements are ironic disasters if this novel is meant to highlight a pro-abortion perspective.  The irony of Ivy’s mother saying, “I want to respect your decisions around this, but it’s killing me” (119) would not be lost on an educated reader, whether a teen, young adult, or adult reader.  Ivy’s mother is blind to the fact that her own grandchild will be killed in Ivy’s abortion.

While it is not necessary to buy the book, I recommend that every teen, young adult, and adult pro-life activist borrow Caletti’s novel from a local library (libraries being the bastion of fiction like this which seem to be pro-abortion but advance the pro-life cause) if only to take a break from the serious matters of life: raising our families, voting pro-life, or donating to pregnancy support centers so that no mother would ever become as ignorant as Ivy, a fictional abortion zealot supreme.

Categories
Book reviews

Ashley Wurzbacher’s How to Care for a Human Girl (Atria Books, 2023)

Photo credit: Goodreads.com

An engaging novel to illustrate the negativity of an abortion-minded woman who is, apparently, utterly ignorant about the biology and purpose of her female body.

Combining the perspectives of two sisters, Jada and Maddy, faced with untimely pregnancies, Wurzbacher’s novel is more fascinating as a study of how a woman who purports to be educated (Jada) could be so stupid in her life choices.

Jada, an academic (which may account for her stupidity, since academia swallowed the pro-abortion and woke nonsense decades ago), thinks her marriage with Blake is not a covenant, an exchange of bodies for the satisfaction of a man’s and woman’s bodily and spiritual needs, but a mere satisfaction of options, which may account for the disdain which she shows the poor guy.  She aborts simply because she is “unexpectedly pregnant” [1] and because she merely asserts that “she would not have this child” (9).

Moreover, Jada suffers from a pronounced hatred of her body; only a massive dose of St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body can help her understand two essential matters of women in a covenant relationship called marriage: first, that a woman’s body should rejoice in sexual activity with a man who bears the title of “husband”; second, if that sexual activity produces a child, then she has the great opportunity to nurture another human life with her husband.

Jada, intelligent as she thinks she is, citing research work here and study there, doesn’t understand these aspects of the feminine.  Consider, for example, Jada’s sexual disasters with her husband Blake: “What he did know, what they both knew, was that her desire was dead.  When he reached for her, she rolled away.  When he touched her, she flinched, floundered, too slippy [slippery?] to be held.  The sex that had led to conception had been a chore” (4-5).

What a contrast, then, is Maddy’s view of her body:

“The fact was she liked her body, or at least she liked beholding it from the outside the way someone else would.  She liked knowing how others saw her.  There was power in this knowledge, or at least there could be if she could figure out how to use it, how to reconcile the body she admired with the body she inhabited” (151).

Now that’s a view of the female body that every feminist should have, at least pro-life feminists, since anti-life (violently pro-abortion) “feminists” disdain their reproductive capabilities to the point that they would rather kill unborn children (half of whom are their sisters) instead of nurture them to birth.

Of course, anti-life “feminists” would probably want Wurzbacher’s novel banned for the choice that Maddy makes regarding her untimely pregnancy:

“She was going to keep her baby, this sleeping boy’s half sibling, because she knew in her heart of hearts, in her secretest secret place, that though there might be someone out there who could give her child more than she could—more money, more material comfort, more opportunity of a certain kind—there was no one who could give it more love” (321).

Much more could be said about Wurzbacher’s novel.  For example, students could generate a substantial literary analysis paper on Jada’s use of the usual pro-abortion euphemisms (“the cluster of cells that had attached itself to her uterine wall” [2] or referring to her aborted child as “the clot” [261] or “the cell cluster that had clumped in her uterus” [264]) or Jada’s laughable reductionist view of the joy of sexual activity for husbands and wives to animal instincts and chemicals (“Jada was versed in the science of love, knew it as a pulse in the reptilian core of the brain, a hot spot of light in the ventral tegmental area, a squirt of dopamine” [132]).

Similarly, students could elaborate Maddy’s or Jada’s philosophical speculations into many essays for their ridiculous woke community college professors, such as two examples from Maddy: “No, she didn’t want a baby.  But she didn’t not want one, either.  She wanted only not to be in the situation she was in.  She wanted not to have to choose” (16) or “Please don’t say ‘baby’.  What a curse that you couldn’t refuse a thing without also acknowledging it, could not say ‘Don’t say “baby”’ without saying “baby”’” (49).

Likewise, consider these examples from Jada: when she speculates that her feminist philosophy may not be sufficient to account for her decision to abort the child because one’s conscience is the “voices in your head yelling at you at a volume no single voice outside of it could reach” (113); or the Kamalaesque word salad of Jada’s having “wanted to have wanted the child she didn’t want” (120).

Unfortunately delving into the merits of Wurzbacher’s novel isn’t as interesting as President Trump’s landslide victory and the activities of the next four, eight, twelve, and beyond years of pro-life presidents.  (Reading the few instances of Trump Derangement Syndrome spoken by anti-life characters is, at the very least, comical and quaint in the novel’s datedness.)  Suffice it to say that, on a snowy night when there is no more pro-life activity to accomplish, reading a few pages of Wurzbacher’s dive into the mind of a woman who aborted can entertain and educate one well.

 

Categories
Book reviews

Mamoru Aoi’s My Girlfriend’s Child (Kodansha, 2022)

Image credit: Goodreads.com

Although it has some moral flaws, Aoi’s novel is a quick read, depicting an ordinary Japanese teen experiencing the doubts and joys of being pregnant with her teen lover.

This graphic novel, written in Japanese manga style, can appeal to American teens who often do not read words but may be adept at “reading” the emotional power of images in cartoons, online games, or other material.

Two moral objections to the book should be discussed.  The first concerns one character who says, “There’s no right or wrong here” (60), which may say more about the character’s amorality than a recognition that abortion harms women, kills unborn babies, and alienates fathers—truths which, since they are based on natural law, apply not only to Jews and Christians in the West, but also to Japanese presumably steeped in Shinto and Buddhist traditions.

Similarly, the main character’s litany of questions about the source for moral authority [“What are the criteria for what we should do?  Is it how the people around us feel?  Common sense?  Popular opinion?” (83; italics in original)] could be a string of questions formed not so much by the character’s amorality, but by any teen faced with an untimely pregnancy.

These questions could also generate great discussion among teen students, thus serving not only a rhetorical function, but a didactic one to encourage any teen contemplating abortion to determine the reasons why abortion is always morally wrong, let alone not reproductive or somehow beneficial.

The second moral objection to the book can be located in the “Sex and Pregnancy Q&A” section, where three items of bad advice are provided to teens about sexuality and abortion.  “The easiest methods for teens are condoms and the pill”, the advice suggests, ignoring the benefits of abstinence and respect for male and female sexuality which a couple enjoys in the covenant relationship called marriage.  Also, abortifacients are misnamed “emergency contraception”; sophisticated modern Japanese young people know that an abortifacient is not contraceptive, but the chemical means to perform an abortion, which is the killing of an unborn child.  Finally, the advice that “nobody should have a say in what you want to do with your body or mind” is not only ambiguous, but also illogical; Japanese and American teens cannot avoid knowing moral restraints on sexuality coming from natural law, a divine source, or from their parents or guardians, mature people who know more about sexuality than hormone-fevered teens.

Categories
Book reviews

Aimee Wall’s We, Jane (Book*hug Press, 2021)

Image credit: Goodreads.com

Title this review: “A Case Study Proving That, Contrary to Prolife Feminist Principles, Anti-life Women / Pro-Abortion Zealots Are Not Comfortable in Their Bodies and Despise Biological Reality”.

Sometimes tedious to read since there is no major problem in the plot, Aimee Wall’s pro-abortion novel does provide a wonderful example of a young woman who chooses that destructive practice instead of caring for both the mother and unborn child because she despises her body.  Readers may therefore sympathize with a woman whose disgust over her female body leads her to [besides hints of lesbianism (35-6) and sadomasochism (141)] fornication, killing at least one unborn child, and alcoholism.

The three last-named activities are consistent with someone who merely glides through life with no purpose, no religious principles, no educational plan, no career objective, no ability to find a decent man who doesn’t just want to get into her panties, no this, and no that.

And Marthe, the main character, is what the Canadian author thinks is the best protagonist of her own “Great Canadian Abortion Novel” (9)?  Yikes!

The truth, though, is the opposite.  Marthe is just another sad sack of a drunken young woman who thinks promoting abortion is a necessary way to advance feminist goals.

Marthe is blissfully unaware that promoting abortion is the opposite of liberation for women.  In fact, at no point does Marthe consider any other choice for women experiencing unplanned pregnancies—this in the nation which in 1968 gave the world Birthright, the first prolife pregnancy support service so that mothers would not fall victim to thinking that their only choice was abortion.

Besides this primary blindness of the main character to life-affirming choices, the plot suffers because there is no crisis facing the women who think they must advance an underground abortion movement by becoming abortionist midwives.  In the novel’s milieu, abortion is still legal in both the United States and Canada’s Newfoundland province, and the work does not clarify what threats against “reproductive freedom” (that is, the so-called “right” of mothers to kill the unborn) would make it imperative for the women to become murdering midwives beyond the idea that there might be future provincial legislative action.

The lack of an essential problem in the plot, therefore, justifies Wall’s work as merely an academic effort, a “novel” which is more a postmodern exercise in writing fiction than a novel with a clear exposition, several crises, a climax, and a denouement.  Wall suggests this at many points when she writes that Marthe is more concerned not with action so much as she is writing a story: “She didn’t press Jane [her abortion co-conspirator] on the vague details, the gaps in the story.  She took the story as it was offered” (45); Marthe “tried to integrate this new information into the story” (126); Marthe speculates about “Jane losing control of their own story” (156); “This was the story Marthe told herself.  She was writing the story of Jane as they were still living it out” (196); and, finally, the repetition of the clause “Jane was a story” (five times no less in one paragraph) documents how the abortion controversy the author thought she was clarifying is all nonexistent, or implausible, or (worse) pro-abortion fearmongering nonsense (198; italics added in each quote).

Another flaw in the writing is not as fatal as the above and may merely be a mistake on the author’s part: “Within three months, she had gotten pregnant, he had accompanied her to the Morgentaler Clinic, and they had fallen in love” (15).

Huh?  Marthe first gets pregnant, then she aborts the child, and the next step is that she and her fornicating lover “fell in love”?  Isn’t the usual pattern in pro-abortion novels to fall in “love”, have sex, get pregnant, abort the unborn child, and then suffer PAS [which occurs soon after this tortured chronology: “Within another year and a half, Marthe had dropped out of her program and Karl had packed back up his single suitcase and moved home on a few days’ notice” (15)]?

Of course, while purchasing this novel is unnecessary (prolife readers should donate to pregnancy support groups which offer women with untimely pregnancies a choice consistent with their bodily integrity as women), the novel does have one merit: it illustrates how a so-called feminist (albeit an anti-life, pro-abortion one) blindly adheres to her hatred of her sexual ability to procreate because she despises her female body.

Readers who are comfortable with their maleness or femaleness may not understand Marthe’s intense disgust of her body in these statements: “It had been two years [since her abortion], but Marthe was still angry at the indignity of it all, at the insistence of the physical body” (19); “She felt that someone had done this to her.  The body.  Stuck her with it.  She felt, possibly belatedly, utterly betrayed by it” (21); or when Jane speculates about “people [who] become at home in their bodies” (38).

Think of it, reader: if you felt uncomfortable in your body, then you either had too much coffee or need to speak with an imam, minister, priest, rabbi, or psychiatrist.

Moreover, Marthe’s disgust of her female body could assist those who work with patients suffering from gender dysphoria, offering them a fictional account of the disastrous results of not recognizing that a human person is either male or female and should respect the abilities of both genders to engage in sexuality which is life-affirming and not life-destructive.  Students will find much more to write about, such as Marthe’s dehumanization of the unborn child (e.g. 10), why anti-life feminists view abortion as a matter of control (e.g. 43), or why those same anti-life feminists think that promoting abortion has almost a missionary or evangelical function (e.g. 45).

Categories
Book reviews

Louise Kennedy’s The End of the World Is a Cul de Sac (Riverhead Books, 2023)

Image credit: Goodreads.com

Aside from depressing modern secular Irish characters engaged in adulterous sex, the abortion story which ends the volume is worthwhile reading.

Louise Kennedy’s anthology of short stories certainly entertains as casual reading; the stories also teach by illustrating the sexual depths and purposeless lives of Irish characters who seem bereft of their Catholic Faith.

The final story in the anthology, “Garland Sunday”, is a wonderful illustration of the power of post-abortion syndrome (PAS) experienced by a mother who cannot overcome the inherent guilt and anger following her choice to kill the unborn baby whom neither she nor her co-conspirator husband wanted.

Granted, we are all tired of abortion stories which follow Hemingway’s, Brautigan’s, or Irving’s templates, where the mother either merely considers abortion and may not decide to have one (Hemingway), or where the mother accedes to the killing and destroys the relationship with the father of the aborted child (Brautigan), or aborts the unborn baby and somehow justifies it as a more moral choice than giving the child up for adoption (Irving).

Both the mother and father of the aborted child in Kennedy’s story suffer PAS in the usual ways: Jerry, the husband, becomes angry with his wife, Orla, and the wife struggles to understand his anger.  However, Kennedy’s story nuances the ordinary template of an abortion account; while it is the husband who tries to reconcile with his wife, showing his effort to overcome his anger by being willing to have sex with her, at story’s end the wife remains frozen in her hostility:

          Does this mean we’re all right? he said.

          It means we’re having sex, she said.  Brisk, wordless sex.  As if there were children in the house.  (286; Kennedy does not use quotations for dialogue)

It’s time for Orla to attend a Rachel’s Vineyard session and for Jerry to focus on increasing the paternal love he has for their twin sons.  Maybe he can teach his boys that real men protect women so that they don’t feel compelled to choose abortion, a practice which harms them, kills unborn babies, and alienates fathers who should care for both the women and the unborn.

Of course, while the other stories riddled with sodomization and adulterous scenes would not justify purchasing the book (the depictions are ordinary tiresome salacious sex scenes), borrowing the volume from a public library if only to read “Garland Sunday” would enable a student to write a splendid paper on PAS and the hate that a woman who chose abortion could bring into her marriage.

Categories
Book reviews

Gregory Mayo’s Almost Daddy: The Forgotten Story (2023)

Image credit: Goodreads.com

Pro-abortion zealots and feminists who despise men will try to ban this novel for giving yet another voice to the person most neglected in any abortion choice: the father.

It is to Gregory Mayo’s credit that he can admit in the Acknowledgements not only that “I have my own abortion story”, but also that “the story in this book is fiction” (303), thus generalizing his experience to reach the “fathers [who] have been the forgotten ones in the abortion story” and who, since “there have been over 62,000,000 abortions in the U.S. alone since 1973”, constitute “a lot of hurting dads” (306).

The reader is immediately struck with the powerlessness of Ben, the main character, in the opening pages where he is described being on the outside (literally) of the abortion business where his girlfriend will abort the child whom they conceived.  Ben’s powerlessness is heartbreakingly expressed in a parallelism which young men in his situation must feel all the time: “This was not where he expected to be” (1).

About fifty pages later, Ben’s helplessness repeats when another sexual partner phones him merely to assert her right to kill the unborn child; his reaction (screaming) does nothing to stop that mother from arranging to kill the child.

About a hundred pages after that, Ben’s helplessness is demonstrated yet again when he sees the body of a miscarried child whom he conceived with another lover.  This time, however, the helplessness is even more pronounced; the miscarried child is someone whom his lover, at least, wanted since she expressed sorrow over the loss of the child.

Despite these episodes which illustrate how helpless a father is when faced with the death of an unborn child, whether he or she is killed in an abortion or miscarried, the reader cannot sympathize with the sexually promiscuous Ben. Granted, he may be a typical secular American teenager finishing high school at the beginning of the novel, but one would think that by the ripe old age of 23 (the last stated age provided by the author nearly two-thirds of the way through the work), Ben would have learned that his numerous fornications would have educated him enough to know that immoral sex is not the same as the moral sex that a couple can enjoy with each other when they are in a covenant relationship called marriage.

I mean, really now, can Ben be that stupid as to not realize that using multiple women as his sex objects could expose him to the risk of being a father whose child would be aborted if the mother thought she had a right to kill the child herself?

Apparently, Ben is that stupid.

Ben’s first fornication occurs with Abby, the aborted mother.  When he learns that Abby had sex with his best friend while he was working far away from home, Ben has sex with Jenny, a server at a diner—and not merely for a one-night stand: “Ben found his way to Jenny’s each night” (92).  Ben then commits adultery with Melinda, who discloses after the casual sex that she is a married woman.  Ben’s fornication with another live-in lover, Carrie, becomes obvious when she is late with her period.  (Although her pregnancy test is negative, they discover that she was indeed pregnant, but miscarried the child.)

Ben’s fornication doesn’t end with what seems like the definitive arrangement  of having had a live-in lover: “After a short stint on the dance floor, they walked across the street to Ben’s room.  The next morning Ben awoke to the sound of Julie getting her things together” (171).  A few pages later, another fornication is denoted in a similarly-worded transition: Ben and Joanne (Jo) “walked upstairs to Ben’s efficiency.  The next morning [….]” (183).  The author must like such a transition, glossing over Ben’s sexual activity, since he uses it repeatedly.  For example, Ben must have had sex with Erica, because the narrator skips from the initial hook-up to the time after a night of illicit sexuality: “When he woke up” (199).  Erica will later abort the child.

Fortunately, albeit late in the narration, Ben, who is purported to be intelligent (he reads sophisticated philosophical books), does speculate on why his many romantic episodes fail: “An interesting young lady would start up a conversation, they would spend a couple of evenings together, and then she was gone” (188).

Ben becomes a somewhat attractive character only in the last third of the book, although his likeability is challenging to recognize since the last hundred pages are more didactic and preachy than meaningful prose.  The reader, especially the male reader, can cheer Ben when he seeks and finds comfort in the company of other men who are fathers of aborted children, especially men who have a religious foundation for their lives.  Unfortunately, Ben remains at the beginner level of faith; except for one Catholic buddy, Ben’s friends are Protestant Christians and reject sacramental Christianity. 

Ah, yes…forget the crass depictions of immature males in man caves, boozing it up, talking shit or merely talking dirty.  Ben’s world is male bonding at its sanitized, Protestant Christian best.

These initial comments aside, the novel has merit, which can be appreciated when at least three of the questions of right-to-life literary theory are applied to the work.

First, one must conclude that the novel supports the perspective that human life is, in the philosophical sense, a good which is priceless by what the novel says about the absence of that philosophical good.  For example, the narrator concludes after the abortion that “The weight of indescribable loss hung over them as did a sense of finality.  It was done and could not be undone” (7).

Second, the literary work respects heterosexual normativity and the integrity of the family.  This affirmation of the normalcy of human life is pronounced, especially since Ben comes from a severely broken family.  Ben’s parents were divorced, and his father “was long gone, presumably lost in a bottle somewhere” (9).  His stepfather, who is separated from his mother, thinks it’s fine for Abby to abort someone who would be his grandchild.

Worse, Ben’s religious knowledge is paltry.  He asks his friends in the Almost Daddy group of fathers who have suffered abortion a ridiculously ignorant question about Jesus, one which cannot be cited as ironic or a feeble attempt at humor: “So you’re telling me that all these religions and degrees [sic] and churches are all about this dude who preached for three years?” (240).

Despite these negative influences, Ben realizes that his many one-night stands are just that, mere nights of loss of sexual self-control.  No wonder, then, that the novel ends with heterosexual normativity affirmed, even though the traditional way of proposing to one’s beloved which Ben follows would make most male readers cringe, relegating the method to sentimental hogwash, while female readers would squeal with delight, most likely muttering something banal like “Aw…how cute!”  (Like most men, I reserve kneeling for the consecration at Mass, not for someone who is equal to me in the sacrament of matrimony.  But I digress…)

Third, the reader can affirm that the literary work comports with the view that unborn human life has an inherent right to exist.  Granted, several characters mouth the usual tired dehumanizing expressions of anti-life philosophy.  Lance, his best friend, claims that the unborn baby “was just growing tissue.  It wasn’t a baby yet” (24).  Even Abby thinks the unborn child “was just a lump of cells” (31).  In contrast, Ben affirms that “A baby was made by me and Abby, and that baby is now dead, and I didn’t do anything to stop it” (24).

Ben’s life-affirming sense, in contrast, remains consistent throughout the novel.  Although the narrator uses a dehumanizing term to refer to a miscarried child (“something” instead of “someone”) and to an aborted baby (“that” instead of “who”), the diction error could be excused since the overall idea expresses Ben’s life-affirming belief: “He tried to rectify the idea that a child lost to miscarriage was something to mourn, but a child at the same ‘age’ that was aborted was not even considered a human” (206; internal quotes in original).

Despite these positive points, the novel has several flaws, including the philosophical mistake of the title, stylistic problems, and several grammar matters.

While it should not register as a fatal flaw on the level of a hamartia in Ben’s character, the title is objectionable since, although it reflects common linguistic ignorance, it distorts biological reality.  Ordinary people could exclaim “it’s a boy!” and still affirm that the unborn child over whom they rejoice is a gendered human being, the pronoun “it” being merely a casual and quick way to express not only love for the child him- or herself, but also one’s paternity or maternity.

Ben, however, should have realized that he is not “almost” a father of several unborn children whom his lovers killed, but that he was in fact a father; “almost” would be accurate only if his sperm cell did not achieve fertilization.

The fatal flaw of the title, therefore, may simply be relegated to the author wanting to reach people on their level of ignorance, hoping to persuade them of the humanity of the unborn child by the novel’s action and commentary.

Stylistically, the novel would benefit from a revision in some areas.  First, the euphemisms used to express the sexual activity of Ben and his multiple lovers may appeal to an audience which has a puritanical view of sex.  Modern readers, however, expect to see some illustration of the contemporary sexual experiences of a teenager and, as the years pass, a young man who has no hesitation to bang any female he casually meets.

Thus, the technique of sliding from Ben meeting a woman whom he will use for his sexual gratification to “The next morning” (171 and 183) hides not only the details of Ben’s fornication, but also the circumstances which could obviate his culpability for that sin.  (This fine distinction may be lost on an author who apparently is writing for a “Christian”, that is, Protestant Christian, audience; Byzantine, Catholic, and Orthodox readers have a more comprehensive view of sexuality in fiction as a vibrant expression of reality.)

In fact, the euphemisms used to hide the characters’ sexual experiences contrast starkly with other phrases which a deconstructionist literary critic would have a proverbial field day in exploring.  The irony and double entendre in the following lines would make any contemporary and worldly student of literature either smirk fiercely or laugh uproariously: a neon sign for a bar named Cactus Rose whose active letters were “actus R se” (85); Ben telling Jenny that “It was my good pleasure getting to know you” (95); “Your load is ready” referring to a bucket of flooring mix, but a possible vulgar reference to Ben’s quantity of sperm (115); or the narrator casually affirming at novel’s end that Ben and Carrie “only made it out of the cabin to eat supper a couple of times” on their honeymoon (295).

Another stylistic problem involves the violation of a cardinal rule of writing: showing, not telling.  For example, this paragraph which tells the reader what happened might have worked better if it showed the anger which it tries to express:

One Saturday, in the middle of another argument about nothing in particular, Carrie ordered Ben to get out.  Ben laughed.  It wasn’t a joke.  She yelled and cussed and started throwing random objects from the kitchen at him.  Ben had enough.  (156)

Similarly, this paragraph is needless or, if there is some information which must be conveyed, could be reduced to a few words:

After getting and cashing his final check and closing his bank account, Ben filled up the truck and brushed his teeth in the parking lot of the gas station.  He used part of a bottle of water to rinse.  Wiping his mouth on his sleeve, Ben shut the truck door and started the engine.  (159)

Finally, several grammar and diction errors interfere with a mellifluous reading.  For example, capitalization of common nouns is not necessary in direct address, as in “So just start talking, Brother”, the last term not being used as a title (23).  Likewise, the instances of incorrect pronouns in a series used after a preposition are jarring.  While errors of this category may usually indicate that the characters speaking the phrase are ignorant, neither Carrie saying “for Shelley and I” (119) nor Ben saying “with her and I” (132) are credible since both are supposed to be intelligent people.  Many other similar errors should be corrected in a future edition.

I would recommend Mayo’s novel for high school and college students and for men in study groups designed to help them with their grief on having lost an unborn child to abortion.

Since Amazon collaborates with cancel culture and woke zealots and bans conservative and pro-life books, buy this book directly from the publisher: https://almostdaddy.com/product/almost-daddy-the-forgotten-story/.

Categories
Book reviews

Thomas F. Powers’ American Multiculturalism and the Anti-Discrimination Regime: The Challenge to Liberal Pluralism (St. Augustine’s Press, 2023)

Image credit: Goodreads.com

Packed with substantial endnotes and an extensive bibliography, thus making his work approachable to both students and ordinary citizens trying to understand contemporary American political culture, Powers makes a compelling argument regarding the anti-discrimination regime’s challenges to traditional liberalism.  He moves from a discussion of multiculturalism as developed in teacher education, to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (the preeminent American challenge to traditional liberalism), to postmodernism’s efforts to expand the categories of persons and groups who have been discriminated against, to the recent expansion of social protest by the woke movement.

Powers employs a variety of definitional methods to engage his reader.  For example, his denotation of “liberalism”, though written as a stipulative one, comports with the standard definition of the term: “Liberalism, as I use the term, refers to the extremely influential modern and contemporary view of political life that begins and ends with some defining notion of individual rights and freedom, as well as some view, therefore, of the importance of ‘limited’ government” (18; internal quotes in original).

An interesting use of negation occurs in the definition of “multiculturalism”, which “does not have anything to do with diversity.  Its only important meaning, [is] a simple, powerful, unified political meaning rooted in the civil rights revolution” (22).

The definition of “anti-discrimination”, the major concept of the work, in contrast, involves scouring a paragraph to determine its attributes.  Anti-discrimination “is a bold and wide-ranging program of moral reform [whose] moral in question is a simple one: discrimination is unjust, an evil heretofore tolerated but no more”; this “massive political project” involves a “politics [which] has been and continues to be a radical force” (279).

Other terms which are now identified with the new political order, “woke” for example, are not as clearly defined, although, to his credit, Powers explains that “This general phenomenon (activist-led social institution-building)” and “woke capitalism” help the reader to understand how deeply the anti-discrimination regime has penetrated ordinary life (83; parentheses in original).

Both students and faculty will appreciate Powers’ claims, some of which, albeit simply stated, can generate hours of class discussion and, hopefully, trenchant student writing on serious topics.  “Anti-discrimination is the cause of multiculturalism, not the other way around” (13) or “The perspective of liberal pluralism is a moral one that aims above all at finding social peace among people with contradictory viewpoints and conflicting interests” (206) are relatively innocuous.

Claims such as:

“As a demand for justice formalized in group representation schemes, inclusion means forever reliving the pain of the past and affirming group mistrust for the present and future” (262),

“Anti-discrimination seems unable fully to escape the hold of its necessarily negative starting point.  There does not seem to be any important place in it for transcending the plane on which it fights against evil; there is no important place for reconciliation, for forgiveness, for integration even” (272), or

“today, merit and personal responsibility are said to represent the language of privilege, a mask for hidden or implicit bias, a cover for racism” (284),

however, would rile any philosopher or theologian and agitate American students to the point that they must eschew slogans learned from woke professors and use critical thinking skills to formulate their moral positions.  These are tasks which Powers would approve as a counter to an inherent negative characteristic of the new politics, as he suggested in a litotes whose humor one could easily miss: “Anti-discrimination morality is thus not only a spirited morality but a somewhat angry morality, though its defenders would insist that it has earned the right to its anger” (267).

Powers’ writing style contributes to the readability of the volume.  For example, the paragraphs built on “that” and “it” parallelisms (5-6) and parallel verbs (45) and the point-counterpoint method contrasting the morality of liberalism and anti-discrimination politics (265) impress the reader with succinct phrases about various concepts, as does a helpful table contrasting multiculturalism and traditional liberal pluralism (225).

Some stylistic features, however, should be reexamined.  As scholarly as the volume is, there is no need for excessive page-length paragraphs.  Also, although he is able to use enumeration correctly to guide the reader, as when he writes that there are “four characteristic features of life under this [anti-discrimination] regime” (48), more enumeration in topic sentences would assist readers to follow Powers’ thought.  For example, in discussing “Several other undeniably radical features of anti-discrimination politics”, the reader can locate the “first” and the “second”, but it is unclear whether the “Another radical dimension of the anti-discrimination regime” a paragraph later is a continuation of the previous paragraph or a new enumeration (280-1).  Thus, quantifying the number of “Several other” initially would make the reading more mellifluous.

Finally, while he explicitly states that “It is not the purpose of this book to enter into the question of reform in any detail” (290), the activist reader (student, faculty, or ordinary citizen) may discover that Powers’ discoveries can be applied to contemporary social movements.  For example, if he argues that anti-discrimination law, which is mostly accomplished by statute, is more effective than constitutional law, then such a position might be an opportunity for pro-life theorists and activists to argue that the unborn child has a right to life based on principles of anti-discrimination diversity, inclusion, and equity (65ff).  Similarly, for the more politically minded, “By becoming the party of anti-discrimination, the Democratic Party” (66) could become an easy target for Republican Party activists because of its extreme support of woke culture.

The volume is attractively produced in a readable font.  Best of all, especially for the student researcher, the thorough 296-page text is expanded by 66 pages of endnotes and a 78-page bibliography.  The 22-page index should be expanded in future editions to include important terms often mentioned in the text (such as “abortion” or “transgender”) as main entries.

Since Amazon collaborates with cancel culture and woke zealots and bans conservative and pro-life books, buy this book directly from the publisher: https://www.staugustine.net/9781587310454/american-multiculturalism-and-the-anti-discrimination-regime/.

Categories
Book reviews

Robert Hugh Benson’s Lord of the World (1907; republished by St. Augustine’s Press, 2011)

Image credit: Goodreads.com

Title this casual review: Brave New World Revisited Yet Again, or, How Could a Century-Old Novel Have Become a Frightening Prophecy of Life in the United States in 2023?

Several Catholic sources mentioned Benson’s novel as timely for contemporary life.  After reading it, one can concur.

Granted, some elements of this science fiction novel written 116 years ago miss the mark regarding technological advances that humanity would experience well beyond 1998 (the last future-identified year in the novel itself).  However, other elements hit the target directly, including the following.

In his preface to the novel, Ralph McInerny concludes that “Three-quarters of a century before John Paul II’s encyclical Evangelium Vitae, Robert Hugh Benson imagined a Culture of Death” (vii).  C. John McCloskey III identifies the most frightening example of the death-loving culture in his introduction to the novel when he states that “The Culture of Death is omnipresent in the novel, particularly the universal availability of euthanasia.  Chillingly in an early scene, the ‘ministers of Euthanasia’ descend upon the survivors of a ‘Volor’ crash in order to finish them off” (xvii; volor is a type of airplane).

The following are quotable quotes which students of literature will find worthy to study to determine how what was written in 1907 applies to life today (British spellings retained):

On the feebleness and decay of Protestant Christianity and the remnant of faithful (orthodox) Catholic Christianity:

“I think, that, humanly speaking, Catholicism will decrease rapidly now.  It is perfectly true that Protestantism is dead.  Men do recognize at last that a supernatural Religion involves an absolute authority, and that Private Judgment in matters of faith is nothing else than the beginning of disintegration.  And it is also true that since the Catholic Church is the only institution that even claims supernatural authority, with all its merciless logic, she has again the allegiance of practically all Christians who have any supernatural belief left” (8).

On Islam’s attacks on the West:

“the patient East proposed at last to proselytise by the modern equivalents of fire and sword those who had laid aside for the most part all religious beliefs except that in Humanity” (17).

On the barbarity of mobs, such as those of young people who think they are fighting “for Palestine” when they are promoting genocide of Jews:

“And then the rest of the world—the madness that had seized upon the nations; the amazing stories that had poured in that day of the men in Paris, who, raving like Bacchantes, had stripped themselves naked in the Place de Concorde, and stabbed themselves to the heart, crying out to thunders of applause that life was too enthralling to be endured; of the woman who sang himself mad last night in Spain, and fell laughing and foaming in the concert hall at Seville; of the crucifixion of the Catholics that morning in the Pyrenees, and the apostasy of three bishops in Germany….  And this…and this…and a thousand more horrors were permitted, and God made no sign and spoke no word….” (120).

On Antifa domestic terrorists and Hamas terrorists destroying Western civilization:

“but this was a cheap price to pay for the final and complete extermination of the Catholic past” (179).

On the current state of the world, described for the “new pope” in the novel:

“Christianity had smouldered away from Europe like a sunset on darkening peaks; Eternal Rome was a heap of ruins; in East and West alike a man had been set upon the throne of God, had been acclaimed as divine.  The world had leaped forward; social science was supreme; men had learned consistency; they had learned, too, the social lessons of Christianity apart from a Divine Teacher, or, rather, they said, in spite of Him” (194).

Since Amazon collaborates with cancel culture and woke zealots and bans conservative and pro-life books, buy this book directly from the publisher: https://www.staugustine.net/9781587314711/lord-of-the-world/.

Categories
Book reviews

The Babylon Bee’s The Babylon Bee Guide to Gender: The Comprehensive Handbook to Men, Women, and Millions of New Genders We Just Made Up! (Salem Books, 2023)

Image credit: The Babylon Bee

The Babylon Bee Guide to Gender is the perfect Hanukkah and Christmas gift for LGBTQ zealots who would rather murder you instead of argue for their distortion of heterosexual normativity.

Ordinary people (you know, the only two genders on the planet called “men” and “women”) will laugh, often hysterically, at the Bee’s reduction of the idiocies of gender zealots to quick one-liners or strings of memorable verbal phrases.  It is simultaneously most unfortunate that those who have been infected with gender ideology by leftist, anti-American, anti-Semitic, and woke weakling professors who want to make a name for themselves by talking about gender, gender, and more gender will believe the sorry shit the Bee is mocking.

(Sorry for the string of adjectives before “professors”; I know they’re repetitive concepts, being terms denoting people who want to kill fellow human beings.)

However, disregarding the pains of those who suffer from gender ideology for the moment, the humor in the book is substantial.  Consider the following quotes:

Gender is “whatever we want it to be, and it’s never what we don’t not not want it to be” (4).  Wha-what?  That’s the point, though; since gender ideology is not based on rational science, trying to state its tenets yields as irrational language as any verbal tongue-twister.

“A key concept we’ll be discussing throughout this book is the core difference between the fluid, imagination-driven concept of gender identity and things that try to make us question our gender identity—bigoted, hateful things such as ‘reality,’ ‘facts,’ and most importantly biology” (7).

“If they can’t tell at a glance that you are a non-cisconforming fairy-bodied triosoul, they obviously hate you, and the only thing you can do both for their benefit and for the forwarding of culture is to proverbially smash them into the ground with charges of hate speech, microaggression, macroaggression, misogyny, misandry, homophobia, transphobia, sexism, and possibly even racism.  Did I say ‘possibly racism’?  I meant ‘definitely racism.’  Always racism” (10).

“’Maleness’ only exists as a spiritual force of political oppression that can manifest itself in all kinds of bodies, no matter what the genetics say” (17).

“Men are a dark force of unbalanced power that must be neutralized at all costs.  They are the main cause of all the bad things, such as global warming, racism, climate change, and global warming.  The evil force of manhood can take the form of a man, woman, or Brian Stelter” (30).  The repetition of “global warming”, I suspect, is deliberate to illustrate that gender zealots merely repeat themselves needlessly because they are not critical thinkers of a valid philosophy.

Margaret Sanger is correctly described as “the feminist and women’s rights activist who was indirectly responsible for one of humanity’s greatest achievements: baby murder.  Sanger notably also inspired the charismatic world leader Adolf H.  Don’t worry about his last name.  It’s not important” (50).

Regarding pronouns: “And if you’re not on our side, we will punch you in your ignorant, bigoted, and probably white face.  We will win this war.  Join us or die, infidel!” (67).

“Pride is loving who you are despite what others may think, and also attempting to force others to think in the exact same way as you; otherwise, they are fascist aggressors who literally want you to die, and they should die themselves unless they change their beliefs” (129).

Political activism is defined as “the act of intimidating and terrorizing elected officials into passing laws to officially recognize gender ideology as the law of the land.  If we don’t do this, politicians will turn this country into The Handmaid’s Tale and hunt down trans people for sport” (190).

Universities “cost $200k a year and turn kids into obedient gender activists with highly effective slogan-repeating skills and second-to-none demonic screams” (199).

Other items in the work provide more of the Bee’s inimitable comedic commentary: a chart on inventing a gender (58), Pride flags (61-2), replacing family traditions like “sitting around the campfire” with “sitting around the burning police station” (99), how a woman can attract a man (“Show up at his front door barefoot, wearing a housewife dress, holding a load of fresh bread, and offer to bear his children.  Subtle!”) (107), a “Gender-Sensitive Pickup Line Generator” table (115), commentary on “The Church of Gender” (119ff), an analysis of woke corporations (146ff), “The Twenty-Five Step Process to Changing Your Gender” (162-7), and the gender glossary (210ff), wherein “biology” is defined as “hate speech” (211).

Finally, since Amazon collaborates with cancel culture and woke zealots and bans conservative and pro-life books, buy this book directly from the publisher: