Post by sturgeon on Aug 6, 2021 15:24:48 GMT
Fresh from reviewing CLERICAL CALENDARS, I find another religious mystery on my desk. But this one more explicitly religious (despite its more prosaic setting), and perhaps more sophisticated.
The main character is a menopausal housewife who projects her inadequacies upon a street beggar whom she suspects of being dishonest based purely on the cleanliness of his fingernails. Later, her suspicions are cruelly proved correct, which serves to reinforce her general attitude of mistrust - to the extent that she expects a stranger to pull a gun on her, and she ends up pepper spraying another innocent bystander.
This paranoia comes across at least partly as a product of the pervasive American cultural fear of otherness. The second half of the story reinforces this, when a preacher calls attention to his disability to drive home a point, and she refuses to give him the benefit of the doubt, instead taking offence at her assumption that he is manipulating and even lying to her.
I'm not 100% clear on what this capital's trying to sell. But for me the overriding feeling I'm left with is a damning one. This character is dissatisfied in her home life - utterly insular and boxed in - but rather than taking responsibility for it, she allows her mistrust to consume her and ends up turning to God for an out. Which is a sad ending for her, and a sad condemnation of the parochial suburbanite Americans she represents.
I can imagine other readers getting something completely different out of this story, so I'm going to yes it because I wanna hear what the others have to say.
And now, some notes:
Grammatically, I can understand why Mountain may be capitalised as a reference to the Sermon on the Mount, but Refreshed and Renewed and Fellowship and so on certainly don't need to be capitalised. Also, Monday's, Wednesday’s, and Friday’s should be plural not possessive.
And editorially, the second part starts "Looking back, I’m glad I had the pepper spray. I don’t know what I would’ve done without it." But she grossly misuses the pepper spray and at least briefly feels bad about it, so that reflection doesn't seem to fit.
The main character is a menopausal housewife who projects her inadequacies upon a street beggar whom she suspects of being dishonest based purely on the cleanliness of his fingernails. Later, her suspicions are cruelly proved correct, which serves to reinforce her general attitude of mistrust - to the extent that she expects a stranger to pull a gun on her, and she ends up pepper spraying another innocent bystander.
This paranoia comes across at least partly as a product of the pervasive American cultural fear of otherness. The second half of the story reinforces this, when a preacher calls attention to his disability to drive home a point, and she refuses to give him the benefit of the doubt, instead taking offence at her assumption that he is manipulating and even lying to her.
I'm not 100% clear on what this capital's trying to sell. But for me the overriding feeling I'm left with is a damning one. This character is dissatisfied in her home life - utterly insular and boxed in - but rather than taking responsibility for it, she allows her mistrust to consume her and ends up turning to God for an out. Which is a sad ending for her, and a sad condemnation of the parochial suburbanite Americans she represents.
I can imagine other readers getting something completely different out of this story, so I'm going to yes it because I wanna hear what the others have to say.
And now, some notes:
Grammatically, I can understand why Mountain may be capitalised as a reference to the Sermon on the Mount, but Refreshed and Renewed and Fellowship and so on certainly don't need to be capitalised. Also, Monday's, Wednesday’s, and Friday’s should be plural not possessive.
And editorially, the second part starts "Looking back, I’m glad I had the pepper spray. I don’t know what I would’ve done without it." But she grossly misuses the pepper spray and at least briefly feels bad about it, so that reflection doesn't seem to fit.