A comic religious novel, North Gladiola treats the same region of southeast Louisiana and some of the same characters that James Wilcox introduced to his readers in his first novel, Modern Baptists (Doubleday, 1983). The protagonist of the first novel, bumbling Mr. Pickens, plays a minor role in the second, as do meddling Donna Lee Keely and the fiery redhead, Toinette. Familiarity with the first novel will enhance the reader’s enjoyment of the second, but is not essential.

North Gladiola is set in a region that had always been a backwater but now is confronted with giant water slides, with moral and theological relativism, with watered-down religion, with fast-food chain restaurants, with lesbians, Freudian and pop psychology, and unisex hairstyling stations—in short, with modernity. Nowadays, these ugly signs of “progress” can be found in most regions of the United States, even in the backcountry South. And whenever the traditional and the outlandish flourish together side by side, amazing conflicts and incongruities arise, arousing our sense of the uncanny.

Much of the humor of North Gladiola derives from the frequent and absurd clash of the old and the new: Duk-Soo, a Korean existentialist, loves Mrs. Coco, once a Baptist but now an oldfashioned Catholic married to a nominally Catholic Italian. Her husband advocates the power of positive thinking and annoys his son by subjecting him to various of the 29 Ways to Have Wholesome Fun With Your Son, an inane self-help book for unimaginative fathers. The son marries a bisexual who once won first prize in a Miss Housing Development beauty contest. At another beauty contest, she places second and is awarded two free lube jobs at the Tula Springs body shop. Father Fua, an old Samoan priest, blesses mobile homes and presides over Our Lady of the Flowers, where the old statuary has been “replaced by twelve modest Stations of the Cross, semiabstract aluminum modules with Pac-Man-like Roman soldiers.” On Mrs. Coco’s bookshelf, the Douay Bible sits beside Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man, and out in the country sheep graze next to satellite dishes.

Weaving her way between these hilarious juxtapositions is Ethyl Mae Coco, whose crisis of faith and her eventual discovery of a Christian resolution provide the serious center for a comic novel. Once out of touch with herself, her faith, her family, and her community, Mrs. Coco finally finds herself through humility and love. Brought to realize that pride and anger had prompted her charitable acts, that Pharisaism had been the cloak for sin, she learns the practice of religion as a joyful love as well as a duty.

Both Modern Baptists and North Gladiola focus on characters whose sinful pride is painfully shattered. Humbled by circumstance, Mr. Pickens and Mrs. Coco grow to accept and love people they once thought utterly detestable. Indeed, many of the characters in both novels are detestable. All are flawed in one way or another; all are related to Adam. James Wilcox seems to be familiar with the salty theology of his fellow Southerner, William Campbell. A Baptist preacher from Mississippi and author of Brother to a Dragonfly, Campbell sums up the Christian message in eight words: “We’re all bastards but God loves us anyway.” All of Wilcox’s small-town Louisianians are bastards, but he loves them anyway. And so will all but the most puritanical readers. Those who respond to the themes running through the stories and sketches of Nathaniel Hawthorne and who can appreciate the irony, absurdity, and grotesqueness found in Flannery O’Connor’s fiction will find enjoyable reading in Wilcox.

 

[North Gladiola, by James Wilcox; Harper and Row; New York]