I was inordinately pleased when I heard this week that Zadie Smith reported that the most “impassioned” book recommendation David Foster Wallace ever gave her was for Brian Moore’s little novella, Catholics.
I know Brian Moore was friends with Joan Didion and he won lots of prizes but I always feel like he is the most neglected of all of Ireland’s great literary talents. There is no Irish author more eminently readable than Moore and his treatment of Irish religion, even living in exile in Canada and California, was unparalleled.
Apart from Aidan Mathews of course. If Moore is neglected, Mathews seems forgotten. Yet his short story collection from 1988, Adventures In A Bathyscope blew my mind as a young teenager. Re-reading it as an adult was the rarest of pleasures- I got to think fondly of my adolescent self for being so exhilarated by such fine art. Lipstick On The Host is his second collection of short stories. It is magnificent. The title story comes last and tells of an English teacher, aged 41, alone with nothing but the considerable compensation of her wonderful integrity and wit.
And then most unexpectedly, she falls in love. It is touching and tragic and lovely and heavy. It alone is worth the price of the second hand book procured through some digital mastery via a warehouse in Texas. Yet it is joined by tales where Mathews inhabits the lives of housewives, little boys and 1st Century camels.
And in his depiction of characters who have faith he excels far beyond Moore and basically is the finest writer of fiction who ends up penning theology I have yet encountered. I rate it higher than Dostoevsky. I would though, cos Fyodor is from 1890’s Russia whereas Matthews was writing about the Ireland I grew up in. Where Moore describes faith in such a way that it actually is realistic and believable, it remains the description of a church from the outside. He discerns much from the glow through the stained glass windows. Matthews knows what the faith feels like from the inside. He thus never falls into telling you that religion is a lifestyle choice that motivates the peculiar actions of a character. It is much deeper than that. Much realer than that. Much more alive than that.
I had a great session with the fifth years and Milton. We talked about the paradox of him being a Puritan who adored the city of Rome; we talked about the paradox of a Christian scripting mighty fine speeches for Satan, and then we talked for a time about The Exorcist, because they wanted to. Mind you, I always thought The Exorcist was an over-eighteen. They all agreed the best scene was where the head turns round and she vomits everywhere. That was when I tried to get them back to Milton and how his use of lovely, long Latin words is a compensation for no sex. It is, actually, a kind of cunnilingus.
Should I have said that? Perhaps I shouldn’t have said that. You can show them pictures of the electric chair or a baby eating blue-bottles in a back-street in Bangladesh, but you can’t tell them that people receive each other like Holy Communion.
– Aidan Mathews, “Lipstick on the Host” in Lipstick on the Host, p. 248-249.
I loved this book.
Your Correspondent, He’s as bright as his hair is dark