The Book of Longings

The Book of Longings, Sue Monk Kidd

Book of Longings is Sue Monk Kidd’s novel on the imagined wife of Jesus, Ana. In a creative twist, Kidd doesn’t follow the tradition of other writers on this topic by having him marry Mary Magdalene, but rather creates a new character, a girl in Galilee who has a yearning to study, to write, and to write women into the stories of God and history.

I want to review this book in two ways. As the book itself, and then the subject matter. The book itself is excellent as a novel and a story. Ana is the only daughter in a wealthy Jewish family in Galilee, living with her parents and her aunt, Yaltha, who has amazing stories of Alexandria. Her father is the chief scribe to Herod Antipas, and Ana lives a life proscribed by tradition and the rules around women but with small indulgences. Her father has allowed her tutors, as well as papers and inks, and so she knows how to write. She dreams of being able to study and write, and has written stories of all the women in the Torah – the matriarchs, the heroes, and what she dubs the Tales of Terror: the rapes, tortures, and other injustices visited on women throughout. She is mostly on her own other than a brief friendship with Herod’s first wife and a cousin, Tabitha, who is cast out of her family after being raped. Her brother, Judas, has run off to join the Zealot’s.

Early in the story, 14 year old Ana is brought to the market where two things happen. Firstly, she sees a young man named Jesus who she becomes fascinated by. Secondly, she learns that she is betrothed to an older widow, Nathaniel. She is horrified by the idea of this marriage, and how it will change her life. It is in looking for a place to hide her inks and scrolls that she again encounters Jesus in a short meeting, as he has been in the wilderness surrounding town praying. Shorty after, Jesus stops a crowd that has accused Ana of harlotry from stoning her, and the two get married.

The interesting thing about this story is that it really and truly is Ana’s story. Jesus is almost incidental in the tale, as odd as that sounds. Yes, it hovers around the edges, but Ana is only married to him for a few short years. Then Jesus leaves to first follow John and then lead his own ministry, with her brother, Judas, by his side, and Ana is forced to flee after it is revealed she warned Herod’s wife he was going to divorce her and leaves Galilee. (It was the daughter of Herod’s second wife, Herodias, who asked for the head of John the Baptist.) Her time with Jesus and his family is only a short period between her father’s house and her exile in Alexandria and then with the Therapeutae, a scholarly, ascetic, Jewish sect she stays with first while waiting to learn when she can return home and then after her husband’s crucifixion. Even here it isn’t the center part of the story. Ana is there at Passover and right after her brother betrays Jesus in the hopes of starting a rebellion, and with the women (Mary, Mary of Magdalene, and others) who prepare him after the cross, but leaves before the Resurrection and the founding of a new religion. She lives out the rest of her life with the Therapeutae, studying and writing as she had always dreamed.

Overall, I liked the book. Kidd is a wonderful author, and all of her books are intriguing and pull you in- it’s never work to read her. She packs an amazing amount of plot into the story—there are numerous side stories and additional points in Yaltha and Ana’s lives—without it feeling overloaded or overly complicated. I liked all of the historical information, and the way Ana is able to make her own way. I really appreciated that for a book that is pretty much in the “[Blank]’s Wife” genre it really was Ana’s story. And by inventing an entirely new character of Ana, rather than using Mary Magdalene or another woman from the Gospels, Kidd is able to really explore different ways of living in the region, what Ana’s life could have looked like, and bring in other new stories. Taken on its own, as a story, it’s incredibly inventive and enjoyable as a deeper sort of easy read.

And yet, this is the type of book that you can’t take on its own. It doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and there I am less thrilled. For one, I wonder why Kidd thought that this story had to be told through Ana being Jesus’ wife. As I say, his story is almost incidental to the story. I feel that it could have been almost the same story without her brother being Judas, without her husband being Jesus, but through a woman at that time period as these new ideas and new Messianic goals are swirling around. Would it not have been equally interesting to let Ana stand on her own?

And that is before we even consider the genre of considering Jesus’ family and being married. In her Author’s Note at the end, Kidd says that she has first had the idea of writing a novel about a fictional wife of Jesus in 1999 but hadn’t had the audacity to take it on, and that she even made a weak effort to talk herself out of it in 2014. “Centuries of tradition insisted Jesus was unmarried… . Why tamper with that?” But there are also centuries of tradition of discussing this topic, and it’s often discussed as possibly in the Gnostic gospels. There are “lost Gospels” about it. And I’d argue that in our post-Da Vinci Code world it’s hardly a controversial topic for a work of fiction.

And this is often done, arguably, from a feminist perspective. The chaste nature of much of the history of Christianity has been a huge disservice to women, and that I don’t deny. It is too often taken as some hostility to women rather than a dedication of one’s life to God and service rather than family. Plus, to some it seems odd that Jesus would be unmarried. This is what Kidd discusses in her notes: being an unmarried Jewish man would be highly unusual and against the grain. Isn’t it more likely he would be married? Wouldn’t it be better to imagine a fully human Christ, and to see marriage as something good?

I understand the impulse, I truly do. But it misses a few key things. Firstly, everything about Jesus’ life, if the Gospels are to be believed, is about questioning tradition – harvesting wheat on the Sabbath, refusing to stone someone, crossing cultural boundaries, and even telling women they could study – why say it’s unbelievable he wasn’t married? More importantly, though, is the fact that the treatment of women in the Gospels and the early Church was decidedly feminist!* Consider the life of women in Rome and in Judaism at this time. Women were entirely under the control of their closest male relative. They had no rights whatsoever, even as a widow, to inherit or control property, which is also why caring for widows and orphans is a standard command in the Bible. The commandment in to marry one’s brother’s widow was partly a charity because a woman without a man to offer her standing, shelter, food, etc, was nothing. Women had no value whatsoever except as a wife, and no rights whatsoever as independent beings.

And yet in the Gospels we see Jesus teaching women. They are not listed among the 12 Apostles, but there are clearly women among his followers. He tells Mary that it is right and good to want to study. I cannot overstate how radical this is, this idea that a woman could study, could have an independent relationship with God, could have value in her own right. And it continues! Paul has an, um, problematic, view of women, but he still accepted them. In the early Church, Paul refers to women who are deacons in the Church. Many of the early martyrs, in Rome and in the early European Church, were women who had refused to marry, or who wanted to stay Christians when they were married. Their relationship with God and independent value to God was celebrated as more important than their duty to a man.

This is truly groundbreaking and shocking. There is a reason that Christianity was early on embraced by women, slaves, and other outcasts, and that is because Jesus said that each of these people had worth just by existing. Far from Jesus’ celibacy being anti-feminist, it was profoundly feminist. He was preaching that women had value outside of their marriage, outside of their commitment to a man who possessed them. This message has been corrupted over time, that is certain. I am not saying that in 2020 – or 1960 or 1560 – the Catholic or Protestant Churches have really embraced feminism. But they’ve also largely ignored all that stuff about selling your goods to help the poor or caring for your neighbor, too. What I am saying is that we should consider the Gospel messages in their time. And at the time, this idea that women could pray to God, could have a relationship to God, could follow a prophet, was revolutionary. We should recognize and celebrate that.

By focusing on the whole idea of Jesus’s wife, intentionally or not, authors and scholars are still in this mindset that being attached sexually to Jesus would give this woman more worth. I would like to see an end to this genre. I want to read an account of Mary Magdalene, an independent woman who defies conventions to follow a prophet on her own. A fictionalized account of a woman disciple. The tale of a deacon who defies her father and community to live her own life. Show me women who had value on their own, as Jesus saw, with no male intermediary. Because unwittingly or not, by attaching these women to Jesus as their husband, writers are continuing the very injustice Jesus radically tried to escape. Women can have value on their own, without a man to master them.

Bowlaway

Bowlaway, Elizabeth McCracken

At the beginning of Bowlaway a formidable looking, somewhat matronly, woman of indeterminate age, one Bertha Truitt, is found in a graveyard in Salford, Massachusetts at the beginning of the 20^th Century. She has a candlepin bowling ball, a well tailored dress with a split skirt for bike riding, 15 pounds of gold, and virtually nothing else. Presumably she has some sort of history as well, but she won’t speak of it, saying only that she doesn’t know where she’s come from, but she knows she’s here now, and that the best thing anyone can do for any of there problems is to bowl them away.

Bertha is a force unto herself and is quickly embraced by the town. She sets about building a candlepin bowling alley, insisting that she has invented the game, and hiring two otherwise outcasts in the town to manage and pinset at the alley. She insists on letting women bowl. She marries a Black doctor – one of the first people to have found her in the cemetery – causing a minor scandal. This book is not one particularly concerned with political commentary, though, although the interior lives of many people that we encounter hint at the way the personal is political. No, the minor scandal is more that no one knew that she had gotten married or when and were shocked to learn she was attached. The racial aspect is noted by the town almost in passing. Same for suffragette marches, which happen in the background, and the wars that occur during the course of the book.

Bertha and her husband, Dr. Leviticus Sprague build a house, have a daughter. The bowling alley thrives. And then Bertha is suddenly killed in a freak accident, with no answers about where she came from or who she is or how she showed up out of thin air. From there the book continues to surprise, following an assortment of characters that continuously surprised me, dropping in little extraneous details and stories highlighting the secret interior lives of everyone in the town, and then passing on with just enough that I wanted to follow a character more. It has a through line of the Bowling Alley, and there are people who stay throughout the book, in varying degrees of centrality. But in general it didn’t follow the plots or the lines I expected it to. It was so delightfully and intriguingly well written, though, and I was pulled in to each of the characters’ lives so quickly. McCracken is very good and creating a well-lived in character in a short amount of time.

I do not know entirely what I was expecting when I picked up this book, but I can say definitively that it surprised me throughout. When you read as much as I do, that’s an incredibly fun experience! Usually I can see the shape of the book before I begin, and all the twists and turns before they come. But this was a bit new, and I never knew quite where McCracken was going. I really enjoyed going along with her, though.