The Book of Longings, Sue Monk Kidd--the finale

 I am wondering about whether this book is really this disappointing, or if it has to do with my expectations of it. Because what I had heard definitely set my expectations, and then the book profoundly failed to meet them.

Let's pick up the story after the first quarter previously reviewed. When last we left Ana, she was being stoned in the marketplace for being an unmarried widow--her betrothed died before the actual marriage ceremony. Jesus stands between her and the mob, and promises to marry her, which takes the wind out of the sails of the mob and they leave. 

There is some plot I left out here--Ana was being groomed for seduction by Herod Antipas. That's the King Herod you know from the Bible. Is this the one who ordered the Slaughter of the Innocents? Kidd doesn't accuse him of that particular atrocity, but everything else? Yup, that's the one.

For some reason, Herod sees her, decides to use her as the model for a new mosaic he is having installed. This is how you know that the Romans are bad--because their love of interior decor has led Herod astray from the commandment against graven images. Herod is also a creepy dude, so since he's in service (and inspired by) the Romans, they must be terrible. Thus Judas is entirely justified in his terroristic/guerilla warfare. Which is less "war" and more "random violence and property destruction."

There is some mishegas where because Ana is this unmarried widow/spoiled goods situation, it's not clear that she can have any kind of respectable marriage. So her father brokers a deal with Herod where Ana will be taken in at the royal palace as a concubine. But she is Too! Good! For! This! and she rebels, insults Herod, steals some valuable hammered ivory to write on, and runs away from the palace. This is the accusation that nearly gets her stoned to death before Jesus appears in her life again. (Somehow in all of this she meets Herod's first wife, and they become soul sisters or something, which becomes important later.)

So having ruined this politically and economically advantageous match--Herod isn't interested any more--there is nothing left but for Ana and Jesus to marry off-screen, and she goes to Nazareth to start her new life.

Nazareth turns out to be a pretty impoverished village. Joseph has died, Jesus is pretty much considered to be illegitimate, so he has to go find work in other places. Ana is left alone (with Yaltha still) with Jesus's family--two brothers, a bitchy shit-stirring woman married to one of the brothers, a widowed sister, and his mother Mary. Mary is--of course--wonderful and loving. The sister is named Salome, but not THAT one. 

As rushed and this section is, it does contain some bits of realism that seem to be missing in the rest of the book. Ana turns out to be terrible at domestic chores expected of her--because she has literally never done any of that before. Jesus is gone a lot, picking up odd jobs where he can, and his absences create tension between Ana and this family she doesn't actually know. 

The book fast forwards through about seven years of impoverished domesticity. There is the whole "Ana doesn't want to have children, but 1st century contraception isn't fool proof, Ana gets pregnant, baby is born prematurely while Jesus is away, baby is born dead, Ana has an abbreviated crisis of identity--does she want to have more children or not? And will she ever have time again to write?

This is where you get the sense that Kidd has set herself a task she is just not up to executing. Seven years of close quarters domesticity would be where the book could really dig into Jesus as a man, as a Jew, as a 1st century Galilean, as seen through the eyes of the woman closest to him. This is where I was hoping   learn about how traditional Jewish practices informed his ministry, and how it differed from them. There are enticing nuggets--how in his search for work, Jesus met other gig economy types, and forged relationships with the men who would eventually become his disciples.

But so much of what happens with Jesus happens off-screen. We get some cute antics--Jesus and Ana go to the temple and release the sacrificial animals and run away, clearly foretelling the incident with the moneychangers. But for the most part, Jesus is absent from the narrative during this time. There is very little sense of how Judaism is practiced, how Jesus struggles with his understanding of God and his role. I strongly suspect that Kidd ships him off to look for work so she can avoid doing precisely this work. 

After about seven years of this, the Big Events happen. Ana introduces Jesus to her brother Judas, who has shown up to tell her that their mother has died. And Jesus and Ana meet "John the Immerser," and both get baptized. This sets up Jesus to confront his own destiny and launch his own ministry.

But Kidd is also not really equipped to handle this either. So Ana is left at home while Jesus follows John into the wilderness. "It's not that I think women shouldn't come along, Ana, but it's John's followers who are going to hate it...." Sure Jan.

So--more plot to the rescue! When Judas comes to Nazareth, he has political gossip! Herod wants to be elevated to "King of the Jews" by the Romans, and Ana's father recommends that Herod needs a well-connected Roman wife. So he's got to get rid of that inconvenient first wife, possibly by murdering her. So Ana writes a letter to her BFF warning her to flee, signs her name to it (!), and sends it off. 

First wife flees the palace and returns to her home country. Since the marriage was designed to stave off a war with that country, her returning touches off renewed hostilities, in addition to being a big humiliation for Herod. Servants get tortured, and Ana's part in this gets revealed. So Ana has to go run off to Egypt to avoid arrest just as Jesus starts his own ministry.

So everything that I thought a book about "Jesus's wife" might do--doesn't happen. Ana has faffed off to Alexandria, engages in challenging the patriarchy, puts other people at risk for her own sense of rightness, finds Yaltha's long lost daughter, and ends up hiding out in a spiritual retreat center, where she is immediately recognized as a Towering Talent and has all the time and materials she needs to write. She hangs out there until she gets word that Jesus has been arrested. 

So now it is Back To Jerusalem with all deliberate speed. People are put at risk of arrest and death to get Ana to Jesus, (it never occurs to her that this is maybe too high a price to pay to see a husband she has basically abandoned for 3 years) and she arrives in time to watch him on his walk to Golgotha. She reconnects with the Nazareth crew, sees Jesus die, and then hightails it back to Egypt before Kidd has to deal with any inconveniences around resurrection.

There is an epilogue where all the women join this spiritual retreat community and spend decades being at peace and Ana eventually makes copies of everything she has been writing (not clear what all that was, but I'm pretty sure I will be disappointed in that too, so I'm not really complaining) and seals them in jars and buries them. Maybe they will turn up, like the Dead Sea Scrolls did!

So did I hate it? I started there, but by the time I got through the first 25%, it was just a mild dislike. Is it because the book is not good, it is because my expectations were mis-set, or am I just impossible to please? Here are some questions I am asking to address that.

What does having Ana married to Jesus actually do for the book? Having the story framed as "the wife of Jesus" certainly affected how I came to this book. And a lot of my disappointment comes from the squandering of that premise. If it had instead been a book about a a first century Galilean woman, whose life brushes occasionally across Jesus's but is only incidentally connected--I might have had more patience with it. If Ana had met him as she did in the first quarter, but NOT married him, then it would have been more clearly HER story, not her perspective on him. 

I think the "married to Jesus" aspect threw the book out of balance for me. For example, I had zero patience or interest in what was happening in that retreat center, because it felt like a dodge to get the protagonist away from having to witness, interpret, and recount the life of Jesus. 

If the book had not been about their marriage, then I might have been interested in the account of a non-Jewish, non-Christian tradition that was in existence at that time. As it was, it felt like a plot contrivance rather than anything meaningful.

What does having Ana be Judas's sister do for the book? Again, this is a potentially explosive relationship that the book just does not address. Judas spends most of the book somewhere else--there is very little relationship between him and Ana. Nor do we see much of the interaction between Judas and Jesus--they are constantly walking away so they can talk without Ana overhearing. So why make the relationship so close? Why not make the meeting between them accidental? If Ana doesn't actually provide any insights into the relationship, there isn't any reason to make this relationship exist at all.

Is this just the weaknesses of historical fiction?  So many historical fictions are saddled with the protagonist having to meet every single famous historical person in the time period, and this felt like an egregious example of that. It's also more loaded because this isn't like Johnny Tremaine working for Paul Revere and being at Valley Forge during the American Revolution. This is taking two of the most seminal figures of a major world religion, and inventing the closest of relationship ties.

The problem pervades the book. It's Ana's father who sets up the marriage between Herod and Herodias, which leads to the beheading of John the Baptist. It's Ana who precipitates the conflict between Jesus's peaceful ministry and Judas's preference for armed insurrection--because without her, they wouldn't have met and Jesus would not have been betrayed. 

While I am hugely skeptical of this sort of Narrativium overdosing, I am willing to allow it if it illuminates something. If we got to see how Jesus's domestic life informed his ministry. If we saw how Jesus and Judas disputed over time, and how Judas came to betray his friend. What remorse did Judas have--or maybe he didn't? Did he hang himself, or was he lynched? Really digging into how these people might have interacted as humans, rather than as the mythic figures they are in the Bible--well, that's what I was hoping for.

Instead, almost all of these big moments are just reported. Ana has no more insight into them than we do.

The Verdict

I would not recommend this book as a story of the wife of Jesus and the sister of Judas. I might recommend it (with some significant reservations) if it had been about a young woman's search for spiritual meaning in the context of first century Galilee. I would not recommend it if you have already read The Red Tent--it felt very much the same.

Nor is "Jesus was married" all that interesting in this context. More minds were blown by the possibility that Jesus was married by The Da Vinci Code, which came out about 17 years earlier. 

Ultimately, by using major religious figures, Kidd is playing with explosive material she is not equipped to handle. If she had stripped down the story to minimize the representation of Jesus, it would have been a novel that was slightly better than average mildest fiction designed to appeal to women.

The Book of Longings, by Sue Monk Kidd (The first quarter)

 I liked The Secret Life of Bees when I read it ages ago. I liked the formal structure, where the facts about bees and their social structure and the science of beekeeping served as a framework for the story being told about a girl growing up in a largely female society. It resonated. It felt like Kidd was taking metaphors and examining them for the wisdom they could offer, but was also aware of the limitations of strictly equating bee and human behavior.

So I was willing to consider that she could do the same with her most recent book. The Book of Longings is described as a book about a first century Jewish woman who is married to Jesus and is sister to Judas. Based on the promotional materials, it promises to show Jesus as a fully human man, viewed through the filter of domestic life in turbulent times.

As of this writing, I have finished the first section of the book, and so far, I am not encouraged.

The first quarter of this book covers about a year, in which our protagonist Ana approaches the transition from a child in her parents' home to marriage. Structurally I expect this part of the book to show us the status quo--what is the social/economic/religious foundation that Jesus arises from, and which his teachings challenge. What are the attitudes and experiences that form the basis of daily life, as well as the exceptional experiences? What are the benefits--tradition, stability, power, wealth--and the draw backs--oppression, poverty, fear, violence? Who is our protagonist, how is she situated in this culture, and how does that affect what we will see about the value of the change Jesus and Judas are fighting for?

So far, the picture painted is not encouraging. I do not feel that I am in the hands of an insightful guide. (A quick search of the internet shows me that Sue Monk Kidd was raised Baptist in Georgia, but has moved to mystic Christianity over her life. Not necessarily the background of someone who can explain the soil from which the figure of Jesus was grown.)

In the first quarter of the book, Ana is 15. Her father is highly placed in society, a scribe to Herod Antipas, the tetrarch (ruler of a quarter) we know from the Bible as King Herod. Ana is not like other girls (have you read this book before, because I have) because she doesn't care for jewelry and shopping, she doesn't want to get married, she holds her traditional mother in contempt. Unlike other girls, her father has allowed her to learn to read and write, and that is all she wants to do. Which seems fine to me--it's not like we see that she has anything else to do in this book. She doesn't participate in any running of the household, seems to have no chores, no social life...honestly, no wonder she is bored.

But now she is 15, so it's time to get married I guess. Not clear why this is such a surprise to her, or why she doesn't seem to have any interest in getting away from the parents she obviously despises. I guess since she doesn't seem to know any other people, or have any siblings, she doesn't have any ideas about it.

Oh, there is this aunt who lives with them in the compound, who is herself a disgrace and is supposed to not be around Ana or give her dangerous ideas. Yaltha is a widow (which is a Bad Thing to be) whose husband beat her regularly until he died suddenly and she was suspected of poisoning him. Her brother has taken her in out of family obligation, but Ana's mother hates Yaltha and forbids Ana from spending time with her.

Not clear what Yaltha does all day either, but the two of them sneak out at night and sit on the roof and talk about how unfair the world is to women. Which--it is. No question. But they are the only ones who see it I guess. Because they are special and everybody around them are just sheep. Or evil. Or evil sheep (Ana's mother, I guess.)

Because Ana's big crisis is in this part of the book is that she is betrothed to an old man who has some kind of quid pro quo with her father and she is collateral damage. (Dad wants to own property, Husband-to Be wants to leverage Dad's proximity to Herod. HtB doesn't actually want to get married to Ana, and it's not clear why Dad threw her into the mix. What does he get out of it?) The day she first sees her betrothed is also the day she meets Jesus in the marketplace, and it is chemical attraction and love at first sight for her with Jesus. 

Look--these stories happen! They get told over and over because they can be powerful. But because of that, it is important HOW they are told. Pride & Prejudice, Shakespeare in Love, Tristan and Isolde, Monsoon Wedding, the entirety of Arthurian legend. Probably also many of the stories referred to in Ana's writings (she allegedly is writing out the stories of the women of the Torah.)  Many women are given few choices in life, and the conflict between who they are allowed to marry and who they love is powerful! Economic uncertainty, the struggle of the individual to find fulfillment with the strictures of their society--these are stories that surround us. But given that I have so many options to encounter this story, I don't want to waste my time with a dull and irritating version.

Which so far, this is. Ana doesn't actually do anything interesting--she is defined mostly by the awfulness of the people around her. Her mother is terrible--because her mother basically just tells Ana not to do the things that Ana wants to do. There is no explanation or understanding of WHY her mother doesn't want Ana to wander around the hills and caves with only a single servant in tow. Or why she doesn't want Ana spending her days reading the writing, or talking to Yaltha. Or why she is so anxious to get Ana married off.

But Ana manages to do all these things anyway, and then the two women just glare daggers at each other. And sure, I want everybody to get what they want--I am generally in favor of self-actualization! But Ana's condescension and reflexive opposition doesn't seem principled, or understanding of others. And this is a problem with the book, because while a 15 year old girl in first century Galilee might not understand much of anything, I want the author to! 

For example, compare this to Pride and Prejudice, where Lizzy is witty and smart, a bit rude, condescending her self, but also periodically redeemed by her love and admiration of Jane, her worry and care for Lydia, her kind ness to her father, and Austen herself makes fun of Mrs. Bennett, but you understand why she is so fixated on getting her daughters well-married. The economic anxiety is real. Mr. Bennet is not rising to the occasion, and Mrs. Bennet is ill-equipped for the job that has been dumped on her.

Austen shows empathy even while being quite cutting to people and their weaknesses. You don't actually like all her characters, but they have appealing moments, they have nuance. Wickham is appealing until his true colors are revealed. Lydia is obnoxious, but also pitiable. Mr. Collins is a subject of mockery and distain, until Charlotte marries him and then even Lizzie has to find something good in him.

But The Book of Longings so far doesn't trade in any such nuance. Ana is the smartest, richest, most educated and most beautiful girl in all of Sapphoris and so she is obviously the victim here. Oppression is fine for all the sheeple around her, but she is too good for this. Sure, she goes out to the hills with a single servant, and breaks all the social rules by meeting Jesus alone and eating with him. So--her mother was right then?

And when her repulsive betrothed actually dies of a plague, Ana is now "damaged goods." Betrothal is nearly the same as being married, and so now she is a widow, but also a harlot and a whore. So Jesus has to step in and prevent her from being stoned to death by a mob, by promising to marry her. "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone."

(So we get Jesus's Greatest Hits too.)

Let's not forget Judas. Judas is fighting to get the Romans out of Galilee. He's part of a guerrilla/terrorist organization that has forced him into hiding. But he's a Good Guy, as he shows up and promises to get his sister (half-sister?) out of her betrothal to the old man Nathaniel. Judas burns down Nathaniel's date farm, while being very obvious and declaring who he is. 

Of course, this is dangerous--it threatens the entire family's income if Herod feels he can't use a scribe whose son goes around committing terrorist acts. But Dad disavows Judas and Dad is cast as the Bad Guy here, rather than Judas.  Mostly because the book is entirely filtered through whether Ana gets what she wants or not. Judas is against Ana marrying Nathaniel, Dad is in favor, and so that's the moral calculus. 

I know that everything is much more complicated than that, and I want this book to acknowledge it and explain just how complicated everything is. I fear I am going to continue to be disappointed.

Judas is fighting to get rid of the Romans. So far, the evil presented by "the Romans" has been limited to inciting Herod to install figurative decorations inside his palace in contravention of the Second Law of Moses (no graven images). I can't keep this scene out of my head. From Monty Python's Life of Brian.

REG: They've bled us white, the bastards. They've taken everything we had, and not just from us, from our fathers, and from our fathers' fathers. 

LORETTA: And from our fathers' fathers' fathers. 

REG: Yeah. 

LORETTA: And from our fathers' fathers' fathers' fathers. 

REG: Yeah. All right, Stan. Don't labour the point. And what have they ever given us in return?! 

XERXES: The aqueduct? 

REG: What? 

XERXES: The aqueduct. 

REG: Oh. Yeah, yeah. They did give us that. Uh, that's true. Yeah. 

COMMANDO #3: And the sanitation. 

LORETTA: Oh, yeah, the sanitation, Reg. Remember what the city used to be like? 

REG: Yeah. All right. I'll grant you the aqueduct and the sanitation are two things that the Romans have done. 

MATTHIAS: And the roads. 

REG: Well, yeah. Obviously the roads. I mean, the roads go without saying, don't they? But apart from the sanitation, the aqueduct, and the roads-- 

COMMANDO: Irrigation. 

XERXES: Medicine. 

COMMANDOS: Huh? Heh? Huh... 

COMMANDO #2: Education. 

COMMANDOS: Ohh... 

REG: Yeah, yeah. All right. Fair enough. 

COMMANDO #1: And the wine. 

COMMANDOS: Oh, yes. Yeah... 

FRANCIS: Yeah. Yeah, that's something we'd really miss, Reg, if the Romans left. Huh. 

COMMANDO: Public baths. 

LORETTA: And it's safe to walk in the streets at night now, Reg. 

FRANCIS: Yeah, they certainly know how to keep order. Let's face it. They're the only ones who could in a place like this. 

COMMANDOS: Hehh, heh. Heh heh heh heh heh heh heh. 

REG: All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us? 

XERXES: Brought peace. 

REG: Oh. Peace? Shut up!

http://montypython.50webs.com/scripts/Life_of_Brian/10.htm

Will this get better? Will I even read it? As of now, there is no way to tell!