Over at the Bookshelves Project, I just talked about one guilty pleasure. I will talk about another one here. This one is doubly guilty because it involved breaking my own rule: although I am supposed to be reading only books I already own this summer, I picked up At Home in Mitford by Jan Karon because Lauren Winner described the Mitford books as being among her favorite comforting re-reads.
The Mitford books are a series about an Episcopal priest who lives in an idyllic small town, a town where the pastors of all the churches get along, the homeless guy is homeless by choice (and a font of spiritual wisdom, to boot), and problems, no matter how intractable, can be solved. For instance, in this book a woman who is dying at the beginning of the book is not dying by the end.
This novel is so treacly that I kept checking the copyright date to convince myself it was actually written recently. Yep, 1996 is pretty recent, all right. For the first thirty or forty pages, I was almost nauseated by its cloying, false sweetness.
And then I got sucked in.
By the end of the novel, I had become fond of its cloying, false sweetness. This book is as much a fantasy novel as The Dragonriders of Pern, but it's a fantasy version of our own world, in which modern problems are held off, just outside the city limits, while the denizens of our little hamlet in the hills hold bake-offs and lovingly tolerate the eccentrics in their midst and inherit big chunks of money from people who were ready to die anyway just when the money would come in most handy.
Winner says the Mitford books helped bring her to a Christian faith, and this embarrasses her. Maybe it should; this town is so faithful the police pray before they go on the job. On the other hand, it's a vision of what life could be like if people were truly neighborly and took the care of each other seriously. It doesn't surprise me a bit that Winner re-reads these books for comfort when life is hard. They are as comforting as cocoa and grandma's hand-made quilt.
I could even--and I admit this through clenched teeth--see myself reading the next novel in the series. I want to know, after all, whether the priest ever finally gets together with the attractive children's-book illustrator who moved in next door (after an uncle left her the house free-and-clear just when she most needed a new place to live), and whether that scamp Dooley grows out of his difficult pre-adolescence into the fine young man we all know he's capable of becoming. In Mitford, it's an easy bet he does.
Posted by Su Penn at July 4, 2003 08:18 AM | TrackBackI read this series on internship (I am now a pastor) and am embarassed to admit how fond I am of them. Yes, they're idealized; racism and sexism are not issues, and the economic differences among people in the town are lovingly discounted. What keeps me going back to Father Tim and his flock is their emphasis on prayer. Prayer is the foundation for everything they do. The fantasy world of Mitford helps me have hope, that it is possible for people to love their neighbor.
Posted by: Julie on July 7, 2003 07:25 PMOkay, me too - I'm on the third book. I'm an old (well almost 50) guy with an M.Div and I work on computers.
It dawned on me - Mitford == Mayberry.
Andy=Fr. Tim, Opie=Dooley... and well, it doesn't map perfectly but the similarties are there. There are problems, but none too bad. People die (though usually offscreen) and wrestle with problems. But they all do it... in NICE way. People swear (Fr. Tim even repeats it) but we just hear they "used an expletive".
It is like Sherlock Holmes. Anyone could write a dry treatise about living by logic and solving problems with pure intellect; but the contrived world of Holmes shows us how it COULD work.
Likewise with Mitford. You can read tracts and sermons about living a Christian life, but the Mitford books are a vision of how it could work. Devotional literature of a sort that gives us something to aspire to.