Category: Book reviews

Whores, emasculated men, and Protestant views on sexuality.

Forget the “iconic” film version of Steinbeck’s novel with weepy-eyed James Dean in the lead role.  Read all 601 pages to see how screwed up American life was a hundred years ago.

What can a novel written in 1952—68 years or about three generations ago—teach contemporary readers anything, especially since the narrative depicts an even older time, spanning the last decades of the nineteenth and the first two decades of the twentieth centuries?

Nothing, except that…

The riveting attempted self-abortion episode in chapter 13 beautifully illustrates how some mothers were so hostile to their husbands that they would do anything to kill the unborn children whom they carried.  Attempting to abort twins with a knitting needle?  What a horrible way not only to reject unborn life, but also to endanger one’s own life.

Adam Trask’s wife is not so much a typical liberated woman as she is a typical bitch character.  As a daughter, Cathy arranges the murder of her parents.  As a wife, Kate shoots Adam, leaves him, abandons her newborn twin sons, kills the owner of a local whorehouse, and then assumes ownership of that whorehouse—all actions to accomplish her desire of being “free” (however distorted her idea of freedom was).  She commits suicide at novel’s end.

How is that a happy, liberated life?  Is that what women’s liberation wanted for women a hundred years ago?  Is that what women—and men—want from the anti-life (pro-abortion) feminist movement now?

Even though the fighting (between male characters and the fighting between Adam and Cathy as husband and “wife”), the shootings, and the murders are vibrantly depicted, some parts of the novel are tedious, which may account for the need to take a Joe Biden nap nap every few chapters.  Charles’ anger against Adam is an overreaction.  Cal’s extreme anger against his father’s affection towards his younger brother seems unjustified.  The Chinese servant Lee spouts too much wisdom to Adam and his sons.  The sexual purity of Aron need not be attributed to sexual hang-ups but to his devout and mature understanding of his male sexual power.  The narrator becomes preachy, as in the ridiculous claim that categorizes religion as something “which limits or destroys the individual” (chapter 13, p. 131).

Perhaps these flaws show how Steinbeck’s novel is a condemnation of the Protestant ethic which distorted what should have been joyous things in American life: marriage, sex within marriage, children, and wealth.  If only the characters adopted Catholic Christianity!

Whether the dictator is Nero, Stalin, Obama, or Communist China, a novel which speaks to our times.

Sienkiewicz’ massive novel of Christians persecuted under the pagan Roman emperor Nero reads like real life for Christians who survived Lenin, Stalin, Clinton, Obama, Communist Chinese, or other dictators who tried to crush Christianity.

Relevancy aside, the novel is a masterpiece of swarming detail; lugubrious paragraphs; and dynamic, not static characters—many of whom are people we first hate and then love (think Susan Lucci of All My Children).

The detail of the novel is amazing and reminds one that the ancient Roman Empire was as diverse as the contemporary United States: languages, races, literature, religions, etc.  Sienkiewicz must have researched the empire thoroughly to be able to enumerate such details.  See, for example, his descriptions of the Roman Forum and the general population (chapters II and XXXVI); typical Roman orgies (chapters VII and XXXI); the Great Fire of Rome (chapter XLIII); and the gladiators’ deaths and the slaughter of Christians (the “orgy of blood” in chapter LV).  These last examples are not for the weak.

The details that Sienkiewicz provides account, no doubt, for the lugubrious paragraphs, often running more than one page.  The print is small, and the 422 pages could be a severe challenge to contemporary American readers, who are more familiar with meager paragraphs and lots of insipid dialogue.  Stay with the reading, however; you will find yourself not lost in detail but immersed in the ancient world.  It helps, too, if one has visited Rome.  Reading about Trastevere (“Trans-Tiber” in the novel) and other Roman sites is enhanced if you’ve walked on the Janiculum or on “the island” in the Tiber.

True, Sienkiewicz mentions that there are thousands of people who fill the Roman Forum, the Circus, and the city of Rome itself, but, fortunately, only a handful of his characters are memorable.  My favorites:

Chilo, the old con man, whom we love to hate at first for betraying the Christians and who later becomes a Christian himself on seeing the man whom he betrayed (Glaucus) burned to death on a cross for Nero’s sadistic pleasure (chapter LXI).

Eunice, faithful slave to Petronius (he of Satyricon fame), who, although still a pagan, loves her master more like a Christian wife than a pagan slave.

Petronius, pagan Roman and author of Satyricon, uncle to one of the main characters, Vinicius, a tribune.  Arbiter of good taste in Nero’s court, he eventually commits suicide and despises Nero’s buffoonery and evil acts.  His suicide with Eunice at his side is an exemplar of their love for each other, although it does not comport with the Christian admonition to protect life.

Why read a master novel from a dead white male who constructed this masterpiece between 1895 and 1896?  Easy.

First, it’s a masterpiece, and, unless you’re an Antifa domestic terrorist, this work of literature cannot be torn down as easily as a statue.

Second, the novel is certainly entertaining, for both good and bad.  Bad, because readers will come to know how ancient Romans were cruel, vicious killers.  Good, because we will learn again the idea that what makes Christianity different from pagan religions is that it is based on love, the only force which destroyed such an evil empire as that of the ancient Romans.

Third, and most relevant for today, the Christian imperative to love, especially one’s enemies, worked against all those dictators and despots throughout the centuries who wanted to destroy the new faith, whether Nero in ancient times or, in the twentieth century, Lenin and Stalin, and, even closer to the American homeland, Clinton and Obama.  All these dictators despised human life, whether born (as in Nero’s case) or unborn (as in the cases of Clinton and Obama, who violently supported abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia during their occupations of the White House as American presidents).

Philosophically, a reader will become aware of other key ideas which Christianity contributed to the world.  Sienkiewicz makes it clear that Rome and the despot Nero “did not exist” for the first-century Christians, so focused they were on Christ Himself (chapter XX).  Christians brought the power of forgiveness to the world (chapter LXI), and it is inferred that Christians were the impetus for free speech, which leads to happiness, since no one could speak his or her mind freely under Nero’s despotic rule (chapter XXVI).  Moreover, Christians had respect for marital and sexual love while Romans just engaged in debauchery (chapter XXXIII).  Finally, the idea that “before God men are equal” is clearly a Christian idea in contrast to the Roman view which devalued human life, such as slaves (chapter LXIII).

For this reason alone, Sienkiewicz’ novel will give those who defend human life in this twenty-first Christian century, attacked by a new era of pagans, great hope.  After all, the despot Nero is gone, but ordinary life-affirming humanity continues.  As Sienkiewicz writes in his penultimate paragraph in the Epilogue: “And so Nero passed, as a whirlwind, as a storm, as a fire, as war or death passes; but the basilica of Peter rules till now, from the Vatican heights, the city, and the world.”

How fortunate for us that, no matter how many despots have arisen since 1895, what was true then is still true today.

Read this novel to understand why Bible-thumping Protestant fiction on abortion bores people.

The preachiness of these lugubrious 448 pages will help one sleep more than appreciate the problems of abortion in the African-American community.

No doubt, Pat Simmons wanted to mean well in this novel, but an honest evaluation is that watching episodes of Hoarders between chapters is crucial to avoid a three-hour man nap which will utterly throw one’s schedule off for the three days it takes to plow through this freakishly saccharine novel of “urban Christian” (so-called) experience.

And I mean that honestly.  I had to break away from this tedious fictional work often to stay awake.

Simmons’ main character, Cheney, is a typical post-abortive mother, and her regret over her abortion punctuates the tedious narrative (15, 158, 316, and 408).  Even though Cheney’s character comports with how mothers who have aborted feel, several items in the thick narrative cannot be asserted as pro-life statements.

For example, a father whose child was aborted “still harbored ill feelings on the topic of pro-choice” (18).  I don’t know of any pro-life person who would contort his or her language to replace the word “abortion” with the sanitized and linguistically deceptive phrase “pro-choice.”

Also, when Cheney says that “For me, it was the wrong choice” (196), the inherent logical fallacy of begging the question becomes obvious.  Is she implying that for other mothers, abortion is the “right choice”, as though abortion (which harms mothers, kills unborn babies, and alienates fathers) is ever morally correct?

Another concern about the novel is its racism against whites.  Cheney’s husband, Parke, suggests that an African-American child should not be raised by white parents.  When he speaks about the whites who adopted a child whom he conceived by a former (and now deceased) girlfriend, the author manifests the racism clearly: “Parke’s trained ear told him Gilbert Ann [the man who adopted his son] wasn’t black.  How could he show a black boy how to be a strong black man?” (200).  Parke’s racist fears are repeated later in the novel when the author writes that Parke “could only pray” about his son, being “reared by a white man” (279).

Worst of all, the narrative is simply unreal, if not fantasy fiction.  These characters all have revelations from God Himself, and we’re not talking about locutions validated by the Catholic Church.

The most unreal matter in the novel is what would have been a great marital sex scene, ruined by preachy Bible-thumping (315).  The author should read Dr. Greg Popcak’s book Holy Sex!: A Catholic Guide to Toe-Curling, Mind-Blowing, Infallible Loving (New York: Crossroad, 2008) to understand that there is nothing dirty about sexual love between a husband and wife.  And if it isn’t dirty, then there’s nothing wrong with depicting it in fiction, especially “urban Christian” fiction.

Conclusion: if you want to know what bad writing is like, read this novel.  If you want to take a three-hour man nap between reading these boring chapters which will utterly throw one’s schedule off for three days, then read this novel.  If not, then read a classic like Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair instead.

A wonderful example of anti-Catholicism at its best from a British perspective, this novel contains the usual cast of characters who support assisted suicide: a protagonist who is called a “non-believer”, her dead husband who was a fallen-away Catholic, pages of attacks against Catholic sexual ethics (see pages 157-9), and frequent references to pagan deities and Greek mythological characters (see, for example, pages 58, 80, 129, 156, and 261).

That the characters cannot speak coherently and logically about assisted suicide is evident in an interchange between Adam, the protagonist’s son, and Deborah, his mother, accused of killing her husband.  One passage illustrates the lack of logic on this issue.  When Deborah says, “If I say that I did it to help him and I knew what I was doing they will find me guilty of murder”, Adam’s response is the nonsensical and pathetic “That’s mental—that’s totally cracked” instead of logically recognizing that his mother’s killing of his father is just that, a killing (136).

Nazis and euthanasia zealots: same tactics, horrors, and struggle of life over death.

Every civil rights activist (i.e. right to lifer) should read Sem-Sandberg’s novelization of Friedrich Zawrel’s life in The Chosen Ones.  American pro-lifers, especially, will find that those who support medical killing (assisted suicide and euthanasia) in this twenty-first century are using the same tactics as the Nazis did in Austria in the 1940s.

A plot summary for this 559-page novel is relatively easy.  Adrian Ziegler, the fictional avatar of Zawrel, suffers in the Spiegelgrund facility in Vienna which was originally established for the care of disabled or severely-ill children.  When the Nazis conquered Austria, the purposes of the institution became decidedly eugenic; the children and youths sent there were euthanized since they did not meet the Nazi ideal of a eugenically perfect race.

However, reading this novel should not be merely a view into history, as though it is just a way to pass time during the Christmas break between academic terms.  The novel’s ideas are as relevant for those civil right activists who fight against medical killing today (in the forms of assisted suicide and euthanasia) as those who fought against Nazi eugenics in the 1940s.

Contemporary readers will be able to connect many Nazi ideas about race perfection with those who advocate assisted suicide and euthanasia for those whose lives are deemed less than perfect.  The children who came to Spiegelgrund were simply in dire medical or psychological straits.  Instead of treating their diseases, the Nazi system “treated” them by killing the patients themselves.  Does anybody not see how false this logic is?

Similarly, the euphemisms for the killing of the children resound in the speeches of today’s twenty-first century medical killers.  Everybody knows that dehumanization is an essential part of killing human beings.  Thus, Grandma in a nursing home is not Grandma, but a “vegetable”.  (How the beloved grandmother can suddenly become a zucchini is beyond me.)  Similarly, the children who were chosen to be killed at the Spiegelgrund facility are murdered “like you’d be killing rats” (292; italics in original not only to show these words as dialogue, but also to emphasize how dehumanizing they are).

People outside the institution knew what was going on inside.  Spiegelgrund was where “children get the injections” (290; italics in original)—not “injections” as in ordinary shots to cure them of their diseases, but coded language for the post-war correct identification that the children were “killed by lethal injection” (481).  This use of a euphemism to distort reality occurs several pages later when a child marked to “receive treatment” is rephrased in correct language to mean that “the child should be killed” (496).

Readers feel Adrian’s pain throughout the novel, not only the pain of physical suffering under the eugenicist Nazi doctors, but also the emotional pain of being falsely accused of immoral activity.  Adrian is accused of perpetrating homosexual acts on other children and even soliciting staff when he himself is the victim at the hands of a despotic pedophile (254-8).

It should be no surprise that one of the Nazi eugenicists, Dr. Jekelius, becomes an abortionist after the Soviet liberation of Austria from the Nazis.  Alluding to this other aspect of medical killing certainly makes the narrative consistent.  After all, if someone like Jekelius could murder children by euthanizing them, he can easily murder them while they are still in the womb.  When the body parts of the children murdered at Spiegelgrund (preserved for future medical research by one of the eugenicist doctors) are discovered years later, the scene reminds one of the infamous abortionist Gosnell, who kept body parts of the babies he aborted in his Philadelphia clinic (536-8).  Nazi doctors and eugenicists yesterday…assisted suicide and euthanasia supporters and abortionists today: nothing has changed, except for the passage of years.

It is interesting that none of the characters supporting and implementing the Nazi medical killing, like their twenty-first century counterparts, professes a religious belief.  The closest that one comes to a character who is familiar with religious language is Anna Katschenka, a nurse at the institution.  When “she prays, something she hasn’t done for a long time, to the God she is convinced has long since turned his back on mankind” (295), the intelligent reader recognizes her theological ignorance at once.  It is not God who has abandoned humanity, but humanity which has abandoned Him.

The novel could be just another incredibly sad reading experience were it not for a fact that Nazi eugenicist doctors and today’s medical killers (those severely educated people who think they know how we ordinary folk should live our lives—or die if they think we don’t meet their standards) fail to understand.  Adrian Ziegler’s life was worth living, and he succeeded years beyond the Spiegelgrund horrors, even though he was the son of a gypsy father and a mother whose employment and mode of living were useless to the Nazi war machine.  That Adrian Ziegler is just a fictionalized version of the much more successful Friedrich Zawrel—who lived to 2015, seventy years beyond the Nazi atrocities—is a further testament to the enduring respect for human life that today’s pro-life activism promotes.

A complicated whodunit, useful to fight against infanticide, but 200 pages could have been cut.

Reading these 469 pages was tedious, especially since the infanticide of the baby abandoned by his mother is not as interesting as other angles, such as:

Why the main character Erhard abandoned his wife and two daughters in Denmark to live in Fuerteventura, in the Canary Islands.

Why Erhard steals a ring finger from a dead man and duct tapes it to his own hand, whose ring finger he cut off when he abandoned his wife and daughters.  This is indeed an odd behavior, which is never fully explained.  When he adds the finger to his hand, it “stirs a pleasure all the way down in his belly, hell, down in his cock” (14).  A psychological literary critic would have a very Freudian thing to say about that!

Why the young man Raúl looks up to Erhard as a father figure.

How Erhard, a nearly seventy-year old man, could engage in fornication with a flabby middle-aged woman over the span of six pages and ejaculate prematurely (318-323).  Since 200 pages could have been cut, these six could have been reduced to one sentence instead of an accumulation of huge paragraphs which were meant to be arousing, I guess, but which were tedious instead.

Despite these more interesting angles, the novel has merit for pro-life activists as a tool in the fight against infanticide, the killing of the newborn.  Erhard is virtually ignorant of religious values, demonstrated when he inaccurately says that “To hurt a child is the most unforgivable act [….]  Even in Catholicism, which otherwise revolves around forgiveness” (58).  How could anyone not know that Catholic Christianity teaches that all sins are forgivable?

Yet Erhard’s compassion for the three-month-old baby boy whose death by starvation is the exposition of the novel is noteworthy.  Repeatedly, the irreligious Erhard expresses the natural law love that humans should have for newborn life.  “How can someone abandon a child?” (51), he says.  Although he thinks that no parent would “starve a child to death and abandon it in a cardboard box” (104), Erhard does not condemn the mother for the child’s abandonment and eventual death because “a mother is so beautiful” (348).  At novel’s end, when he finally locates the mother who abandoned the baby boy, she affirms that she cannot abort the new child she is carrying (“I can’t.  I can’t kill it”), so Erhard then encourages her with a simple life-affirming command: “Just be with your child” (469).

Is the novel worth two days’ time reading?  Yes, if one wants to follow the actions of a most unlikely detective.  What is perhaps most compelling about the novel is what it can teach contemporary society.  At a time when those who support abortion and euthanasia want to promote and legalize the killing of handicapped newborns, it’s refreshing to know that even a most irreligious character knows intuitively from natural law that newborn human life is worthy of respect and protection.

Startling and life-affirming account from an abortion survivor.

Melissa Ohden’s eminently readable, 179 page biography shatters feminist stereotypes and replaces them with a strong, life-affirming account of her life as the survivor of a brutal saline abortion.

Of course, surviving an abortion goes against the basic anti-life feminist principle that an unborn child meant to be killed in a saline abortion should not survive.  However, the attempted abortion of her life is not the emphasis of the book.  Chapter after chapter reinforces the much more positive messages that Ohden loves her birth parents, her adoptive parents, her own family, her pro-life activism, and her faith.

The love which Ohden expresses for her adoptive parents, Ron and Linda Cross, is simply joyous.  For me, they are the first heroes of this biography.  The Crosses raised Ohden in a loving home even though they were poor—in stark contrast to her maternal grandmother (her birth mother’s mother) who wanted her dead.

Can you imagine?  What grandmother wants her grandchild killed?  Grandmothers are supposed to be all-loving types who bake wonderful things for their grandchildren at holiday times.  The stereotype did not apply to Ohden.  Apparently, her maternal grandmother wanted to safeguard her social status more than her granddaughter’s life.

Unfortunately, one feminist stereotype is reinforced in Ohden’s biography, to my great disgust since it testifies to an entrenched, stifling political correctivity in academia.  Ohden discovered anti-life feminist opposition to her life story among her peers in college.  One of her respected professors manifested his ideological blindness to Ohden’s life story by suggesting that her adoptive parents lied about her being an abortion survivor.  Such anti-life bias is typical of academia, where some faculty have their heads so far in the clouds of their hard-core anti-life ideologies that they can understand neither pro-life talk nor pro-life persons—even when someone who survived an attempt to burn her to death in the womb by a saline abortion stands in front of him.

But this might be too much political commentary.  Fortunately, Ohden exemplifies the pro-life philosophy not only in her actions on behalf of Feminists for Life, but also in her love for her family: certainly for Ron and Linda Cross; for her husband Ryan, with whom she has a wonderful family; and—surprise anti-lifers!—for her birth parents, a father who died before she could contact him to share her love for him and for the mother who suffered a forced abortion at the insistence of the above grandmother.

Reading this biography fills one with sheer joy that Melissa Ohden is alive, well, and a loving wife, mother, and pro-life activist.  The hate that some people have for the unborn is neutralized by Ohden’s lucid biography.  I dare you to read it and not rejoice for her and her family.  The pro-life movement should be proud to have such a loving woman on the side of the angels.

Cogently argued; offers irrefutable reasons why African Americans should vote only for Republicans.

Candace Owens shocks leftists by being an African-American conservative Trump supporter.  The rest of us know she’s simply another sane person.  Reading her book, therefore, will infuriate politicians in the useless and lawless Democratic Party which uses Antifa domestic terrorists to try to suppress the Republican vote.  However, it will reaffirm the commonsense beliefs of the rest of us Americans.  For example (page numbers provided for those students who will use her book in research papers):

Owens argues how, after President Johnson’s Great Society catastrophe, blacks descended into poverty (6-7).

She writes about the “domestic terrorism of Democrat KKK Klansmen” (16).

She blasts “media talking points to further a political agenda” (30).

She describes how she rejected the “victim mentality” (34).

She offers a passionate defense of the “right to life” (37).

She notes that, “although leftists dominate the TV market, conservatives are winning the internet” (42).

She discusses the statistic of 75% of black families being without fathers (46).

She notes that Margaret Sanger, founder of the abortion business Planned Parenthood, was a eugenicist (59).

She calls “Mississippi appendectomies” what they really were, forced sterilizations of black women (61).

She comments on the high black abortion rate (61).

She determines that Black Lives Matter supports abortion and does not care about the black abortion rate (63).

She criticizes modern feminism, now repackaged as “intersectional feminism”, as nothing like the feminism of the Founding Mothers (66).

She argues that “modern feminists are drawing upon the most ancient of southern racist tactics[;] ’Believe women’ vs. ‘black men’” (74).

She criticizes blacks who choose segregation (89).

She comments on liberals’ false charity (103).

She identifies abortion as an indicator of the liberal distortion of reality (108).

She demonstrates the disastrous effects of FDR’s New Deal on black wages (111).

She trenchantly observes, “Black America will never become prosperous via welfare and government handouts; if it were possible, it would have already happened” (126).

She argues that “Conservatives believe neither in white power nor black inferiority” (132).

She shows how affirmative action causes discrimination (134).

She claims that Democrats fear when blacks are educated (147).

She comments on black and white disparities in education (151).

She discusses Bill Clinton, Epstein, and pedophiles (154).

She destroys the distortion that blacks are killed by police (168).

She suggests that “Leftists need to believe that success is evil” (184).

She praises Tyler Perry’s success (189).

She shares her shame over an episode of fornication (190).

She writes the uncomfortable truth that blacks “commit a disproportionate number of crimes” (192).

She praises black faith (219-20).

She bemoans how black culture has devolved (223).

She discusses Biden’s “you ain’t black” fiasco (225).

She claims that Democrats think blacks are stupid (227).

She contrasts the criminal George Floyd against the hero David Dorn (233).

She discusses social media and youth (242).

She identifies the horrors of Aztec cannibalism and how European whites stopped it (247).

She comments on the Back to Africa movement (250).

She states that “Black victimhood is profitable” (253).

She excoriates left-wing journalism (265).

She documents how Chris Cuomo defended Antifa domestic terrorism (267).

She claims that no one else but Trump could work as president (273).

She concludes by affirming that she is a fighter (283-4).

What do all these one-line notes of the above huge litany indicate?  Two things.  First, not only adult voters, but also high school and college students will appreciate Owens’ wide range of commentary on current topics.  Second, since Owens offers such excellent content and commentary, instead of writing down notes or trying to transcribe them into one’s computer as I did, just buy the book.  You know your money will go to a solid pro-life conservative activist.

Forget the gay parts; focus on the abortion and how the novel supports heterosexual normativity.

Tim Murphy’s novel is supposed to be about the AIDS pandemic and how it affected specific lives in New York since the 1980s.  It does that, but much more interesting are the abortion and heterosexual normativity themes.

The abortion which Milly keeps from her husband, Jared, the father of the aborted child, is an example of what happens in a marriage when a mother aborts the child she has created with her husband and tries to keep the killing secret.  Eventually, the secret is disclosed, so the breakup of the marriage and the disastrous effects it has on her life become obvious consequences.

The second much more interesting theme is the heterosexual normativity which another major character displays.  Adopted by Milly and Jared after she aborted their child, Mateo knows that his birth mother died from AIDS, but he does not know who his father was.  His anguished journey from his teenaged years to adulthood illustrates well in fiction what thinkers like Jordan Peterson have discussed in their nonfictional works: gender theorists are foolish in thinking that they can eliminate the heterosexual normativity which has been ingrained in human beings for millions of years.  Not even a lifelong exposure to gay and lesbian ideology and practices can stifle Mateo’s urgent need to learn about his real parents.

Oh, yeah.  If you want to read how gay and lesbian activists behaved in the AIDS era, then the rest of the novel may be interesting, too.

As with most other passages in contemporary literature, the sex scenes (whether heterosexual or that genital activity involving gay men or lesbians) are often laughable.  Although they are probably meant to keep the reader’s interest if it flags, such ridiculous sex scenes are howlingly funny and can help husbands and wives who are faithful to each other understand why so many charterers who are godless, amoral, or immoral act like animals instead of human beings gifted by God with rationality.

One problem with the narration is that the complicated chronological style shifts too much, moving from something in the 1980s, to the twenty-first century, then to the 1990s, then back to the 1980s, etc.  Such shifting chronology makes the entire novel unstable.  That may be the point of such a style, but jerking the reader chronologically like this could make it difficult for him or her to understand which character was doing what when.

Finally, the repetition of many ideas and interior monologues makes the reading tedious.  Cutting at least 150 pages would have helped.

Dead white lesbian novel has distorted male friendships, race, and teen sex all in a day’s read.

Since students are smart enough to see teachers’ and professors’ leftist leanings, high school and college faculty can recommend this novel for a variety of reasons, consistent with major literary theories dominant in academic circles, even though those theories often are anti-Jewish, anti-Christian, anti-American, and anti-Western values.

McCullers’ novel can be read through the lenses of many literary theories.  A biographical critic can easily see how the main character, Mick Kelly, is McCullers herself: tom-boy, vows never to marry (“I never will marry with any boy”; 236, emphasis added), late to coming to her female sexuality, etc.  A Marxist critic can delight in the numerous passages where political ideas babble their way through the narrative.  Marxist ideas are uttered by the African-American Doctor Copeland, who espouses the birth control programs (what he euphemistically calls “Eugenic Parenthood for the Negro Race”), which come from racist groups like Planned Parenthood (63) and the white Jake Blount, who admits he is a “Red”, a Communist (134ff and 243).  A feminist or queer gender studies critic will find the usual oppression of women by heteropatriarchy blah blah blah in the depiction of the female characters, especially Portia, Doctor Copeland’s daughter.  A disabilities studies critic would delight in reading the passages where Mr. Singer, the deaf mute, reigns supreme as a stalwart and honest character.  Why he commits suicide at novel’s end would create a delightful term paper for any student.  Finally, a critical race theory (blackness studies, whiteness studies, and so on) critic could point to this novel as evidence of that hated satan, America, always having been a racist country and thus argue that Antifa and Black Lives Matter are justified in promoting their brand of domestic terrorism, racial bigotry, destruction of property, killing of police, blah blah blah.  (No wonder hardworking Democrats are rejecting their party and voting for the law and order candidate, President Trump!)

What I find most compelling, though, is that this novel (which is more character depiction than action) admirably illustrates how the five questions of right-to-life literary theory can be used to better appreciate the novel.

1. Does the literary work support the perspective that human life is, in the philosophical sense, a good, some “thing” which is priceless?

There is no evidence that any character thinks this about their own lives or the lives of others. While such a respect for human life need not be explicitly stated, it should be evident.  I do not see these characters manifesting this philosophical good at all; they just live from hour to hour, day by day, month by month, in their feeble existences of racial segregation and declining financial conditions.  What a drab existence!

2. Does the literary work respect the individual as a being with inherent rights, the paramount one being the right to life?

If the characters do not perceive that the existence of humanity is itself good, then how can they love the individual persons who constitute humanity?  With the possible exceptions of Mr. Singer and Biff Brannon, I see no evidence of respect for individual human beings throughout the novel.  Instead, characters use each other for their own selfish needs, as though a fellow human being is one’s property instead of a coworker in God’s creation.

3. If the literary work covers the actions of a family, does it do so respecting heterosexual normativity and the integrity of the family?

It is interesting that McCullers, who was involved in many lesbian relationships, depicted faulty heterosexual marriages well—faulty, because the couples obviously did not understand the purposes of marriage as involving a husband who loves his wife and a wife who loves her husband, both of them being open to new life and nurturing children.  Furthermore, the word “queer” itself is repeated frequently in the novel and is used often in connection with the male friendships of Mr. Singer and Spiros Antonapoulos (184ff and 276ff) and Mr. Brannon and Jake (294ff).  Maybe these same-sex friendships were McCullers’ way to presage a future gay literary work as a means to resolve her own sexual confusion—more evidence that the novel (or McCullers herself) does not respect heterosexual normativity.

4. Does the literary work comport with the view that unborn, newborn, and mature human life has an inherent right to exist?

There are no abortion and infanticide episodes in the novel, but the sex scene between Harry and Mick suggests that, if Mick were to become pregnant by their one act of intercourse, he thinks they should marry, itself a faulty reason to enter into the sacrament of matrimony.  Specifically, if she did not send him an “OK” message a month after their fornication (he demands that she “write and tell me for sure whether you’re all right”; 236), the presumption, of course, is that being pregnant would not be “all right.”  (A contemporary reader might exclaim in exasperation, “Duh!  How stupid can Harry be?  A man has sex with a woman.  What do you think could result, fool?”)  Also, throughout this racially-classified novel, the persons who are most disrespected, of course, are the “Negroes”, both professionals like Doctor Copeland and servants like his daughter Portia.  Contemporary readers would find the passage where the terms “Negro”, “colored”, and “nigger” are discussed most interesting since it has implications for today’s rap music (66).

5. When they are faced with their mortality, do the characters come to a realization that there is a divine presence in the world which justifies a life-affirming perspective?

Want to read how ignorant some people can be about Jews and Catholics?  Read pages 138-39 to laugh at their bigotry or sheer ignorance.  I guess their words must be taken with a proverbial grain of salt since the people uttering these stupidities are children in the Deep South circa the late 1930s.  It is unfortunate that such bigoted opinions still exist today.  Moreover, to the point of this last question of right-to-life literary theory, no character has an extensive religious purpose for his or her own life.  Even Doctor Copeland, who constantly refers to a “strong true purpose” (for example, page 119), rejects religious truth.

If you want a good read, try this blast from the past, which surprisingly addresses current political issues well.  You won’t find any answers to those issues, but the characters will make you appreciate people (pro-lifers and Republicans) who reject racism and the distortion of male friendships into sexualized alliances and who live the philosophy that people are to be respected and not used for selfish gratification.