Review by New York Times Review
TO AN INFLUENTIAL SEGMENT of the American electorate, the ascension of Donald Trump to the White House appeared biblically ordained. White evangelical Christians voted for Trump - a thrice-married adulterer who'd hardly set foot in a church - by an unprecedented margin of 80 percent, and his popularity among this constituency has remained high since he took office, the ensuing scandals and confusion understood by some at least to be all part of God's plan. As the press release for "Trumpocalypse: The End-Times President, a Battle Against the Globalist Elite and the Countdown to Armageddon," one of several briskly selling new Christian exegeses of his presidency, puts it, "God raised up President Trump as a fearless leader to guide America and the free world through a series of major crises" and - here's the clincher - the "chaos enveloping the planet could paradoxically signal the beginning of the great end-times awakening that millions are praying for." For insight into America's eschatological mind-set, and into fundamentalist culture generally, there may be no more eloquent guide than Meghan O'Gieblyn, who was raised in the faith and then - painfully, reluctantly - abandoned it, though not before honing her considerable intellect on the finer points of church doctrine at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, a deeply conservative college known among evangelicals, she notes, as "the West Point of Christian service." "Interior States" is O'Gieblyn's first book, a collection of essays, most first published in literary magazines such as Harper's and n+1, whose clever title denotes both the Midwest, where she grew up and still lives, and Christian America - places, one literal, the other figurative, that lie outside and often at odds with the country's mainstream. O'Gieblyn's father sold industrial lubricant, and the Rust Belt manufacturing towns where her family resided already seemed during her childhood in the 1990s, she writes, "mostly abandoned, covered, like Pompeii, in layers of ash." Saved at the age of 5, she was home-schooled until 10th grade. By age 8, she'd memorized statistics on ocean salinity, the better to "persuade unsaved kids that the earth couldn't possibly be more than 6,000 years old." As Y2K approached, her family braced for Armageddon, stockpiling shortwave radios, shotguns, drums of water and freeze-dried chicken - provisions meant to last until the Rapture. At Moody, she haunted Michigan Avenue on Friday nights, handing out leaflets next to chalk drawings outlining the steps to salvation. No wonder O'Gieblyn regards her childhood as "having occurred in a parallel dimension, one that occupies the same physical coordinates as secular reality but operates according to none of its rules or logic." And yet what she captures most vividly here is Christianity's indomitable reach - a parallel dimension, perhaps, but one whose fingerprints are discernible on nearly every aspect of national life. "Being a Christian," she writes, "required an interpretive vigilance, a willingness to harken to whispers." Thrillingly alive to big questions of meaning and belief, her essays are testaments to exquisite attentiveness, each painstakingly stitched and emitting a pleasing, old-fashioned whiffof starch. In "Sniffing Glue," an essay on Christian pop music, O'Gieblyn recalls her teenage amazement at discovering that talk of God was ubiquitous on MTV (a taboo diversion she only stumbled on at 13, in a hotel room in Moscow). In "Ghost in the Cloud," about the futurist Ray Kurzweil, she considers the eschatology at the frontiers of science - in discussions of "transhumanism," a term, she observes, that first appeared not in a tract on artificial intelligence but in an 1814 translation of Dante's "Divine Comedy." Then there is the presidential election. Many American fundamentalists, O'Gieblyn explains in "The End," believe that the Second Coming will be preceded by a period of tribulation, involving "pestilence, natural disasters and the rise of the Antichrist." During the 1930s, Mussolini was a favored candidate for the latter. Precisely how Trump fits the bill, O'Gieblyn doesn't say. But in "Exiled," a suggestive portrait of Vice President Mike Pence, she drops some tantalizing hints. She visits Pence's former congregation in Indianapolis, where the pastor is completing 18 months of sermons on exile, a recurring theme in the Bible. Pence, she notes, is partial to Old Testament narratives in his speeches; stories of the Israelites' long banishment in Babylon resonate with contemporary Christians "who saw themselves as a religious minority in a hostile pagan empire - a people who had long mistaken Washington, D.C., for Jerusalem." During the summer of 2016, while Pence was auditioning for the role of presidential running mate, his pastor dwelled on Daniel, an Israelite who stayed true to his faith while serving as chief adviser to the pagan tyrant Nebuchadnezzar - "an angry, irrational king," the pastor called him, likening Daniel's situation to that of "the vice presidency, if you will, of the country." "We now live in a world shaped by evangelicals' apocalyptic hopes, dreams and nightmares," O'Gieblyn quotes one scholar as saying. After reading her book, one could hardly disagree. "I imagined myself exiting a primitive cave and striding onto terra firma," she writes of the moment when she turned her back on religion. "But as it turns out, the material world is every bit as elusive as the superstitions I'd leftbehind." HEATHER HAVRILESKY is a different kind of apostate. An advice columnist for New York magazine and the author of a wry memoir about an unremarkable childhood, she declares herself in "What if This Were Enough?," her collection of essays, a defector from American culture - its "enforced cheer," its rampant materialism, its frenetic pace, its inauthenticity. Her dismay, to judge from her introduction - six pages in which she delivers her verdict in unvarnished terms, condemning our national "poison," "sickness," "lies," "delusions," "false narratives" and "shared hallucinations" - is considerable. Trump lurks unnamed between the lines. Havrilesky's grand pronouncements are so sweeping and so numerous - "our culture exerts a constant pressure on us that severs our relationship to ourselves and each other," "our compassion for ourselves and for others remains underdeveloped," "our whole lives are passing us by, but we hardly notice" - they quickly cease to arouse strong feelings of assent or disagreement. Similarly, her counsel: "We have to breathe in reality instead of distracting ourselves around the clock," "we must believe in and embrace the conflicted nature of humankind," "shut out the noise and enjoy exactly who you are and what you have, right here, right now." She's banking on at least a few of these slogans resonating with every reader. But the self-help framework - the stentorian assertions of diagnosis and cure - does Havrilesky a disservice. She can be a warm and funny writer, a savvy close reader, idiosyncratic, urbane. Her advice column stands out not so much for its practical guidance but for the empathy in which she wraps her message of self-empowerment - and for its comic riffs ("If you want to find love, you can't try to seem cooler than you really are. Love doesn't honor that kind of marketing effort"). When Havrilesky ditches the forced affinity of "we" for the more modest claims of "I," she has some poignant things to say. She is good at wresting fresh nuance from familiar touchstones, and arranging them into incisive, opinionated narratives. "Haunted," an impassioned meditation on the novelist Shirley Jackson, pans out to incorporate the television shows "Girls," "Homeland" and "The Mindy Project" and the 7,200-word letter the victim of a 2015 sexual assault at Stanford wrote to her attacker ("a Jackson novel in miniature"). Women's lives, Havrilesky contends, still too often imitate the contours of horror fiction: emotional seduction followed by humiliation and betrayal. "Jackson's uncanny portraits of the fragmentation and collapse of the female psyche echo throughout contemporary culture," she observes, "from the casual derision we lavish on all things female or feminine to the so-called fairy-tale marriages we celebrate in the pages of magazines, the ones that are later revealed to be nightmares of verbal and physical abuse." After you've closed her book, however, it's the passing glimpses of her own life and relationships that continue to resonate. A bravura essay about the glorification of consumerism in "Mad Men" and in the "Fifty Shades of Grey" trilogy opens with an anecdote about her father, a divorced economist who liked to quote Gordon Gekko, from "Wall Street," "in a tone that implied that the maxim 'Greed is good' was less a self-serving excuse than an expression of one of his core values." Like "Mad Men"'s Don Draper, Havrilesky's father was a serial dater (at one point juggling three women named Debbie) and amoral indulger, "beholden only to the laws of supply and demand." Twenty years later, his freewheeling ethic has found its pathological apotheosis in the fictional fantasy world of "Fifty Shades of Grey," where romantic fulfillment is just another kind of acquisition ("He is mine," the book's heroine repeatedly intones about her colossally wealthy husband, who surrounds her with highend goods), and in the flesh-and-blood form of Donald Trump. "Embedded in the orange-spray-tanned folds of his brow, we discover the hidden moral of this tale of luxurious excess and limitless power," Havrilesky writes. "There is no satisfaction in reckless, excessive accumulation. The more you have, the more you want." Several of this book's weirder, more original essays dwell on possessions - w hy do we seem never to have enough? "Stuffed" is a sharp-witted homage to the Japanese anticlutter prophet Marie Kondo, a revolutionary in the guise of storage-solution professional. In Havrilesky's view, what Kondo understands but never quite says is that our excess stuffis a sign not of prosperity but of impoverishment. Like our closets, our minds are filled with clutter, much of it imposed by constantly intruding digital devices. By stressing the intense feelings our objects provoke, Kondo invites us to consider whether our things ever really make us happy. Havrilesky's father intuited as much: When he died, of a heart attack at 56, he left, in addition to his fancy gear, a piece of paper taped to a bedroom mirror on which he'd written, "All of heaven is within you." Havrilesky shares with O'Gieblyn a moral skepticism about American culture, and an anxious yearning to resist its everpressing onslaught. O'Gieblyn puts it this way: "There are nights when I sit up in bed, awakened by the panic of some halfremembered thought, one of those foundational problems that gets lost in the wash of secondary concerns and emerges only when you are loose and unguarded to remind you, with a start, that you've forgotten the original question; that you're missing the point." EMILY EAKIN is an editor at the Book Review.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 9, 2018]
Review by Booklist Review
Native Michigander O'Gieblyn was raised a premillennial dispensationalist and pursued that faith to Chicago's Moody Bible Institute, aiming to be a missionary. She lost her religion before graduation, but her long immersion in it and her strong midwestern identity inform her essays, in which topicality and personal experience merge to afford insight. In Dispatch from Flyover Country, she conjures midwestern angst especially that of the youngster to whom Madison seems to be utopia with humor and dread. She examines big-time evangelicalism's growing avoidance of evil and sin (Hell) and the rise and fall of Christian rock (Sniffin' Glue) without a particle of condescension, showing why interest in those phenomena should be serious and humane. The Insane Idea is a fine précis of the pros and cons of AA, and Exile is a genuinely empathetic critical inspection of Mike Pence. The Creation Museum, John Updike and the religion of sex, preparing for the End Times (her family did), and the resemblance of transhumanism (immortality through technology) to Rapture theology are other themes she considers with grace, wit, and compassion.--Ray Olson Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
O'Gieblyn, whose essays have appeared in the New Yorker, Best American Essays, and the New York Times, muses on various religious topics in this delightful debut. Standout essays include "Dispatch from Flyover Country," about her experiences being raised in a Midwestern fundamentalist family fixated on the end times, and "A Species of Origins," about her visit to the Creation Museum in Kentucky. With her tongue planted in her cheek, she also writes on Christian rock music, contemporary culture in the Midwest, and the political views of Vice President Pence. Each essay is well-crafted and enjoyable, yet the collection as a whole feels scattered: though many of the essays address the central themes of faith (especially Christian faith) in American life, the overall organization is puzzling, and some of the works are removed from the theme, such as a book review of Emma Donoghue's novel The Wonder. Still, O'Gieblyn is a strong writer, and the individual essays flow due to the moving prose, the author's subtle sense of irony, and her deep insight into and affection for her topics. Although the collection never congeals, these distinct pieces shine individually. (Oct.) c Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Midwestern values continue to evolve as social media outlets broaden the cultural lens. Journalist O'Gieblyn argues that this evolution, however, ceases when it comes to Christianity and its stronghold on the Midwest. Born and raised in the heartland, the author spent her formative years in an evangelical community and attended Moody Bible Institute in Chicago to become a missionary when she began to question her faith. These 15 essays offer a unique compendium of contemplative musings that explore contemporary Christian culture from the point of view of an insider-turned-outsider, creative evangelical marketing tactics via music and museums, why Hell remains unnamed during megachurch sermons, the irony of Pure Michigan, and how a book by Raymond Kurzweil caused her a brief existential crisis. O'Gieblyn closes with "Exile," a thought-provoking essay on Vice President Mike Pence, unpacking the bigger picture on politics, evangelism, and today's Christian American identity. VERDICT A solid choice for intellectually curious readers with a bent for essays on the evangelical belief system and how it's shaped American identity, especially its influence on the social and political climate.-Angela Forret, Clive, IA © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Personal essays rooted in religion with a Midwestern ethos.In the preface to her first book, a collection of 15 mostly previously published pieces, O'Gieblyn characterizes the contents as primarily dealing with "questions about history and historical narratives" and her "abiding interest in loss." The main loss is her own religion, evangelical Protestantism, which is the prism through which she smartly probes a variety of timely topics. "Although I no longer espouse this faith," writes the author, "it's hard to deny the mark it left on me." In the longest and one of the best pieces, O'Gieblyn takes on the concept of hell. She recalls watching an instructional video in school about four kids killed in a car crash who end up in cages: "I was always too shell-shocked to find it redemptive." She then recounts her time at the ultra-conservative Moody Bible Institute. Her stay there contributed mightily to her religious change of heart. However, she still finds herself "lurking" around the religion section of bookstores "like a porn addict sneaking a glance at a Victoria Secret's catalog." In a piece on John Updike, she confesses to having avoided his misogynistic-tinged fiction. The author was in a forgiving mood after reading his "great" novel Couples, which documents "one man's fears about the limits of his own dominionhis dawning premonition that paradise is tenuous, and his to lose." The sprightly "A Species of Origins" recounts a visit to Northern Kentucky's Creation Museum, the "backwater fringe of creationism," and its Ark Encounter, where visitors encounter "robotic beasts." It posits a worldview, she writes, "that precludes the very possibility of inconvenient truths." Other topics include Alcoholics Anonymous, the myth of motherhood, Henry Ford's "vanity project," Greenfield Village, and Mike Pence, a "curious kind of Christian politician."O'Gieblyn's contemporary, hip voice is one people need to hear. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
