Handmaid and the Carpenter Book

Elizabeth Berg's "The Handmaid and the Carpenter" is a difficult book to review. It is, as some big-name reviewers have pointed out, poetic and reflective. It means well. Nevetheless, this novelization of the Holy Family in its early years also suffers from careless theology.

In brief, the carpenter gets his just desserts, but the handmaid -- somewhat surprisingly -- does not. Joseph is here portrayed as a model of traditional rectitude. Mary, while not promiscuous, is rather shockingly forward with her betrothed. Her conduct is such that the virgin birth of Jesus is even harder for Joseph to accept than it otherwise might be, and Berg's attempt to lend perspective to familiar characters robs Mary of some of her dignity.

The best part of the novel involves Mary's interaction with her older cousin Elizabeth. Berg there sheds light on how the two women might have helped each other. She also gets the chronology of the visit from the Magi right -- they do not show up at the manger together with adoring shepherds. Beyond those wonderfully written episodes, however, Berg pays no mind to the (admittedly Catholic) doctrine of the perpetual virginity of Mary. Consecrated virginity, while never common, was not then or now unheard of, yet it does not figure here. Instead Berg goes in the other direction, positing Jesus as the firstborn of seven (!) siblings. Why our savior from the cross commended His mother to the care of the apostle John, rather than to any of His alleged siblings, is never explained: Berg ducks some of the questions that would sabotage her choices by ending the story with the death of Saint Joseph. Without giving too much away, it also pained me to see Joseph ennobled partly by the cost of his struggle with gossip about Jesus that made no sense when raised in our own day by especially imaginative members of the "Jesus Seminar," and would have made even less sense in first-century Judea, given what we know through scripture and tradition about the character of the people involved.

This is a quick Christmas read, but there are better such out there. An evocative description of the wise men from Persia, a poignant rendering of mutual love between cousins of different generations, and a gift for describing simple meals deliciously are not enough to pull this novel from the postmodern morass of doubt and cynicism that looks selectively at scripture, soft-pedals the Magnificat, and puts nearly every miracle in figurative quotation marks, except for Mary's admirable but undeveloped convictions that the earth is full of miracles, and virtuous life is itself a miracle.