What to Wear to See the Pope Book

From proper pope-viewing attire to the definition of the word "apocryphal," the obsessions of Ursula Codwell—conflicted Catholic and amateur linguist—come to life in this moving and funny look at the quandaries of faith and fragile family connections.

Ursula Codwell's passion for saints and semantics is surpassed only by the affection she feels for her husband, her children, and her precious bulldog, Saint Joan. But her indecisiveness and attention to detail lead her to become fixated on matters such as what to wear to see the Pope when he comes to her hometown in New York's Hudson Valley or reclaiming her surgically removed teratomas from the pathology lab, threatening to overwhelm her children, her ostensibly tolerant Unitarian husband, and even Ursula herself.

In ten interconnected stories-all narrated by Ursula-What to Wear to See the Pope tells the highly entertaining story of a strained but loving family and explores the type of day-to-day obsessions that drive us all.

Publishers Weekly

Ursula Codwell is obsessed with saints, her drippy-eyed bulldog Saint Joan, her teenaged son's minimalist vocabulary (with "chill" as an anchor), the exact fruit that may have been the apple in the Garden of Eden and much more idiosyncratic minutiae. The narrator also has two tumors and a cyst removed; these extractions more or less bookend this collection of 10 interconnected stories, but are told in the same wool-gathering, navel-gazing style that, depending on your threshold for sitting in someone else's bathwater, either delight or tire, or more likely, actively stir both responses, often on the same page. Questions abound in Lehner's highly contextual stories: What is the weight of an arm? Was Fran ois Villon hanged or did he just disappear? And, well, what to wear to see the pope? Meanwhile, the book sits in traffic on some of the larger emotional questions: What keeps Ursula and husband Gus together besides their communal love for debate? Why does her life feel defined by the shapes of other people's lives, especially those who may not have even existed? These stories are punctuated by epiphanies-as in "The Phantom Limb," when Ursula says, "It's becoming clear to me that tumors... are all psychosomatic, or least they're outgrowths of mental states"-but Ursula, like so many of her beloved saints, remains a mystery. (May) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.