Reviews for Jesus Saves

The average rating for Jesus Saves based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-05-29 00:00:00 David Montgomery (For those concerned about the title, be aware that this novel -- which I find to be a grand achievement in fiction -- has other things in mind; it's an ambitious examination of contemporary America... The original review follows:) Ginger is an older teen, aimless and into casual sex and drugs, hanging with a local bad boy, Ted, and his even badder best friend, Steve. Hers is an odyssey of American suburbia, where an ugly poetic aesthetic can be found in the seediness of strip malls. She is definitely not the kind of role model preferred by the attendees of her father's suburban church, where he ministers to an aging, ever-dwindling congregation. Even so, Ginger deeply loves her father, or more precisely, empathizes with him. Like her, he is haunted by the death of his wife from cancer, and the father-daughter bond is solidified by their mutual sense of alienation. The minister's church has long been in decline, housed in a banal suburban box-like structure after being forced to move from a beautiful old downtown cathedral due to the socio-economic decline of the neighborhood and subsequent white flight. The church is under siege by the presence of a nearby corporate mega-church, where pandering and feel-good seem to be the modus operandi. Ginger's father is not unlike Gunnar Bjornstrand as the tortured priest in Ingmar Bergman's Swedish film, Winter Light, sensitive and perhaps too truthful in his harsh sermon messages of everyone's personal culpability in evil to be much of a balm to the simple-minded sheep. Whatever their differences, Ginger admires her father's principles, his unwillingness to sell out. The most powerful member and opinion-leader of the congregation, Mulhoffer -- a well-to-do furniture tycoon and lover of the TV advertising that made his fortune -- wants the church to become a TV ministry and open health spas and such to serve the members. To paraphrase him: people who don't watch enough TV are troublemakers. While Ginger watches her father's struggles and contends with her own teenage rebellion, she obsesses over the abduction of a young girl named Sandy Patrick. The novel's chapters alternate between snippets of Ginger's life and of Sandy's experiences in captivity with her psycho abductor. It is obvious that she is not the first, nor will she be his last victim. This is a very bold novel: thematically ambitious, meticulously and beautifully written and full of literary invention. Much of it is hallucinatory and surreal, even difficult to follow at times. Sandy's inner reality is marked by dream-like reminiscences of her past alternating with Lewis Carroll-like imagery of unicorns and bears and other carefree anthropomorphic characters who flit in and out of her consciousness. Steinke blends and explores the obsessions of her characters fearlessly, painting a vivid and terrifying portrait of Southern life in the 1990s; hers is a contemporary update of the classical southern Gothic novel. She references much pop cultural detritis on her sweeping canvas: everything from TV talk shows to the infamous Polaroid found in a parking lot showing bound-and-duct-taped abductee Tara Calico (although she does not mention Calico by name). The book is filled with imagery of decomposition, decay and decline: of cancer, of the South, of America, of religion, of death -- everything seems to be rotting in humid, fetid confines. Moral bankruptcy is blanketed in hypocritical religious and corporate righteousness. I have to admit that, at first, I thought Steinke was missing the forest for the trees with this one; that the writing was way overly descriptive. When Ginger puts in her tampon, for instance, every bit of the action is described in detail, and I wondered if such mechanical minutiae was necessary. Much reference is made of blood imagery, linking the book's incidents to Christ. It's perhaps not surprising that the book begins in the most American of venues, the open road, and with a collision with a deer. Thus, much thematic foreshadowing and quirkiness are established early on. Ultimately, and by the end, Steinke's method brings it all home and the book packs a wallop. I'd read another of Steinke's more popular books, Suicide Blonde last year, but this one is much more substantial on every level. A rewarding experience for those with patience. --- KR@KY Updated with slight amendment in Sept. 2017

Review # 2 was written on 2018-07-28 00:00:00 Darnell Gates Darcey Steinke's JESUS SAVES creates a dark and forbidding world that is at the same time penetrated by the divine'or at least, it might be. The novel centers on two young women'Sandy, who has been abducted by a rapist; and Ginger, who cycles through a life angst and despair'in a decaying suburb that followers of David Lynch will find thoroughly recognizable. Told in alternating chapters, their stories obliquely comment on each other: Sandy descends into a fantasy world of unicorns and friendly animals in order to endure confinement and sexual abuse; Ginger turns to sex and drugs in order to make herself feel alive and vital in a world that seems to lack meaning and purpose. Both women's survival strategies give them momentary comfort but not much else. The comments from Ginger's father, a Lutheran minister, provide a possible spiritual answer to the malaise and evil awash in the text, a solution suggested in the novel's title, though spiritual redemption is anything but a sure thing (some readers will no doubt think JESUS SAVES? would be a better title). But such uncertainty is precisely Steinke's point: doubt and questioning must be at the heart of faith in the contemporary world. The blinding recognition of evil, as well as the possibility of grace, voiced in the novel by Ginger's father is repeatedly contrasted to the feel-good religion that his congregation wants, a religion based on personal well-being and social enjoyment (as found in potlucks, aerobics, etc.). Steinke's scorn for what she clearly sees as such easy religion is everywhere palpable, recalling Flannery O'Connor's observation that faith is not an electric blanket but the cross. In Steinke's world there are no simple affirmations of faith that settle all problems and bring people spiritual enlightenment. What faith accomplishes, even if momentary and fleeting (as it usually is), is to cut through everyday pretensions and protections. Faith works on an elemental level of urgency, which is what draws Steinke's most memorable characters (as well as Steinke herself) to it. As she comments in her memoir EASTER EVERYWHERE, faith provides "the kind of care and connection one feels with strangers at the site of an accident or in an emergency room, where pulse and heartbeat mean more than the status or wealth or whatever else people use to subdivide themselves."