sands through the hourglass If ol’ Fred Nietzsche were around to review Simon Mawer’s The Gospel of Judas, he’d probably say with a nod to fellow philosopher Yogi Berra “See? What’d I tell you? It’s eternal recurrence all over again!” I don’t mean to poke fun at Mawer’s excellent novel, but merely to indicate that Nietzsche’s notion of “eternal recurrence,” as commonly conceived, can profitably be used to view it. There may be other ways, but the book has about it a lot of what Nietzsche called the “eternal hourglass of existence” that is continually being “turned over and over and you with it, a mere grain of dust.” Further, in The Gospel of Judas, time is not linear, like the idea of time that has come down to us from Aristotle through Judeo-Christian teaching, but circular and cyclical, like Nietzsche’s time. The novel shifts fluidly back and forth from World War II to the present day, and it definitely has much to do with Christianity.

Leo Newman is a Roman Catholic priest, British but living in Rome. A renowned scholar of biblical-era texts, he is summoned to Jerusalem to decipher a recently found scroll that appears to have been written by Judas Iscariot, the betrayer of Christ. Leo quickly senses that the scroll is genuine and literally devastating to Christianity.

At this time Leo, who is apparently 50-ish, embarks on his first sexual affair. The woman, named Madeleine, is Catholic and the wife of a British diplomat. She is one element in the “potent sense of womanhood” that informs Leo’s life. Indeed, the novel gives off a muted sensation of must more than that, of the ancient fear that women are not only sexual predators but the very occasion for sin.

A leitmotif of repetition and reflection accompanies the time/eternal recurrence theme. The Leo-Madeleine affair reflects the affair that the priest’s mother, Gretchen, also a Catholic and the wife of a (German) diplomat, has with an Italian Jew named Francesco during World War II.

This leitmotif, in turn, is entwined with the book’s and Leo’s obsession with word origins and names. For instance, Yerushalem (Jerusalem), the author tells us, is not from shalom, the Hebrew for peace, but from the Canaanite god, Shalem.

While these explanations are a treat to come across, they amount to more than mere intellectualizing. Leo’s working life is one of words “Had he always feared that as soon as he teased at the words that made up his faith, the whole fabric would unravel?” and, as he tells Madeleine at one of their first meetings, “In this business you always start with the name. Names always had meanings.” Darn right they did, and do. Madeleine is a form of Magdalene, Mary Magdalene, the reformed and repentant whore of the New Testament. So is Magda, an artist and whore with whom Leo later shares an apartment.

A priest of Christ who takes up with two women named for the woman who, aside from Mary, is most associated with Christ. As Leo works at translating the scroll, one of them, Madeleine, stands figuratively at his shoulder, just as “her namesake had been there at the discovery of the opened tomb.” All of this would be mere symbol-dropping and parading of knowledge if the author did not make it so much of a piece. Tightly constructed is not the right term; try seamless. Mawer, author of Mendel’s Dwarf and several other novels, has produced tightly woven, brilliantly matching narrative threads that make up a splendid cloth. And for good measure, the scroll mystery adds a nice thriller element.

Like all good modern authors, Mawer lets us make of it what we will. “Was it here,” Leo wonders as he pores over the papyrus, “that the history of Christianity would finally come to an end?” The weight of the book’s evidence would seem to point to one answer yes.

However, also like all good modern authors, Mawer’s true concern is not the cosmic and infinite, but the immediate and human. The priest of Christ, not Christ, animates this book.

In the final pages we learn that toward the end of the war Gretchen has taken the name “Mrs. Newman” names, after all, always had meanings and that Leo, the child with which she is pregnant, is “a kind of resurrection.” He is also, you will discover, a kind of eternal recurrence.

Roger K. Miller is a freelance writer in Wisconsin.

ike sands through the hourglass If ol’ Fred Nietzsche were around to review Simon Mawer’s The Gospel of Judas, he’d probably say with a nod to fellow philosopher Yogi Berra “See? What’d I tell you? It’s eternal recurrence all over again!” I don’t mean to poke fun at Mawer’s excellent novel, but merely to indicate that Nietzsche’s notion of “eternal recurrence,” as commonly conceived, can profitably be used to view it. There may be other ways, but the book has about it a lot of what Nietzsche called the “eternal hourglass of existence” that is continually being “turned over and over and you with it, a mere grain of dust.” Further, in The Gospel of Judas, time is not linear, like the idea of time that has come down to us from Aristotle through Judeo-Christian teaching, but circular and cyclical, like Nietzsche’s time. The novel shifts fluidly back and forth from World War II to the present day, and it definitely has much to do with Christianity.

Leo Newman is a Roman Catholic priest, British but living in Rome. A renowned scholar of biblical-era texts, he is summoned to Jerusalem to decipher a recently found scroll that appears to have been written by Judas Iscariot, the betrayer of Christ. Leo quickly senses that the scroll is genuine and literally devastating to Christianity.

At this time Leo, who is apparently 50-ish, embarks on his first sexual affair. The woman, named Madeleine, is Catholic and the wife of a British diplomat. She is one element in the “potent sense of womanhood” that informs Leo’s life. Indeed, the novel gives off a muted sensation of must more than that, of the ancient fear that women are not only sexual predators but the very occasion for sin.

A leitmotif of repetition and reflection accompanies the time/eternal recurrence theme. The Leo-Madeleine affair reflects the affair that the priest’s mother, Gretchen, also a Catholic and the wife of a (German) diplomat, has with an Italian Jew named Francesco during World War II.

This leitmotif, in turn, is entwined with the book’s and Leo’s obsession with word origins and names. For instance, Yerushalem (Jerusalem), the author tells us, is not from shalom, the Hebrew for peace, but from the Canaanite god, Shalem.

While these explanations are a treat to come across, they amount to more than mere intellectualizing. Leo’s working life is one of words “Had he always feared that as soon as he teased at the words that made up his faith, the whole fabric would unravel?” and, as he tells Madeleine at one of their first meetings, “In this business you always start with the name. Names always had meanings.” Darn right they did, and do. Madeleine is a form of Magdalene, Mary Magdalene, the reformed and repentant whore of the New Testament. So is Magda, an artist and whore with whom Leo later shares an apartment.

A priest of Christ who takes up with two women named for the woman who, aside from Mary, is most associated with Christ. As Leo works at translating the scroll, one of them, Madeleine, stands figuratively at his shoulder, just as “her namesake had been there at the discovery of the opened tomb.” All of this would be mere symbol-dropping and parading of knowledge if the author did not make it so much of a piece. Tightly constructed is not the right term; try seamless. Mawer, author of Mendel’s Dwarf and several other novels, has produced tightly woven, brilliantly matching narrative threads that make up a splendid cloth. And for good measure, the scroll mystery adds a nice thriller element.

Like all good modern authors, Mawer lets us make of it what we will. “Was it here,” Leo wonders as he pores over the papyrus, “that the history of Christianity would finally come to an end?” The weight of the book’s evidence would seem to point to one answer yes.

However, also like all good modern authors, Mawer’s true concern is not the cosmic and infinite, but the immediate and human. The priest of Christ, not Christ, animates this book.

In the final pages we learn that toward the end of the war Gretchen has taken the name “Mrs. Newman” names, after all, always had meanings and that Leo, the child with which she is pregnant, is “a kind of resurrection.” He is also, you will discover, a kind of eternal recurrence.

Roger K. Miller is a freelance writer in Wisconsin.

Pulitzer Prize-winner herself, Anne Tyler is a champion of holy losers, if not outright fools. Many of her novels (this is her 15th) read like blow-by-blow rundowns of extended family reunions at which all parties seem determined to present their worst or at best, most eccentric behavior. Rebecca (“Beck”) Davitch, the accidental matriarch at the hub of this Baltimore clan, finds herself at 53 with a grown brood three mildly squabblesome stepdaughters and their extended households, along with her own daughter, now on her third husband-and-child combo and a resident 99-year-old uncle-in-law, plus an in-home party business to run out of a grand, if deteriorating brownstone, the Open Arms. Beck’s problem, oddly, is not overextension, but a gap at the core: the one thing achingly missing from her life is her husband, Joe, who died only a few years after sweeping her into this maelstrom. Her midlife crisis, when it comes, is one of identity slippage. She’s perfectly clear or thinks she is on who she was at 21, when Joe mistook her for a “natural-born celebrator,” thus typecasting her into the role she has occupied for the past three decades. But who is she now? Has she inadvertently strayed from her “true real life,” the one she was meant to have? We all wonder from time to time about the road not taken. In Beck’s case, a seemingly portentous dream about the son she might have had with Will Allenby, her childhood-unto-college sweetheart, prompts her to look him up to often awkward, sometimes hilarious effect. A carefully staged meeting with his resentful teenage daughter is a modern classic. Beck’s family is far more accepting of this potential rekindling: indeed, her mother, an old-fashioned passive-aggressive whose every innocuous comment bears a barbed reproach, is outright ecstatic. Will Beck find the lost segments of her younger self by reconnecting with this phantasm from her past? The reader will quickly form a fervid opinion as to whether she should. Meanwhile, Tyler’s latest entertainingly refutes Tolstoy’s dictum that happy families are all alike.

Sandy MacDonald is incubating a family compound on the island of Nantucket in Massachusetts.

magine if you and your nearest neighbors had chalkboards hanging outside your homes and rather than communicating by talking, you wrote messages to each other on these boards. While the medium might be somewhat limiting, curtailing “dialogue” to brief missives, it might prove liberating in other ways. Without having to risk a face-to-face confrontation, or the entanglement of a protracted conversation, people might feel free to speak their minds, airing issues perhaps as openly as in the traditional chat over a cup of coffee or as curtly as the rigid warning sign, “Beware of Dog.” Melinda Haynes uses this peculiar, yet intriguing premise to create an isolated and bizarre setting for her riveting new novel, Chalktown. The mysterious aura of Chalktown beckons Hezekiah Sheehand, a 16-year-old boy who literally and figuratively has “the weight of the world on his shoulders.” One day he cuts school, bundles his mentally and physically disabled little brother, Yellababy, on his back, and heads out to visit this curious, small village.

From this simple beginning, Haynes weaves a provocative tale that intertwines the lives of her numerous characters, each struggling toward some measure of peace and self-respect. Before Hezekiah even sets out for Chalktown, we are introduced to Susan Blair, his abusive mother, who fills their shabby home with other people’s cast-off clothing to sell on consignment, and Marion Calhoun, the Sheehand’s black neighbor who is treated with derision by his white neighbors. As Hezekiah makes his way to Chalktown, the plot and list of characters expands like ripples from a stone thrown in a lake, but Haynes masterfully reins the ripples in, tying diverse elements like love and murder, racism and romance, kindness and cruelty into a cohesive, fascinating tale of hope and redemption.

Readers who reveled in the artistry of Hayne’s debut novel, Mother of Pearl (a highly acclaimed, New York Times bestseller and Oprah book club selection) will be no less impressed with Chalktown, a stunning second book which reaffirms Haynes’ stature as a gifted writer and incredible storyteller. If I had a chalkboard outside my home and my neighbors were anxiously awaiting my words of wisdom regarding Haynes’ latest book, I would simply go outside, pick up my chalk and write, “Wow!” Linda Stankard writes from Cookeville, Tennessee.