[easyazon-image align=”left” asin=”0664239153″ locale=”us” height=”333″ src=”http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51Ze90UEloL.jpg” width=”212″ alt=”Katherine Paterson” ]Uncomfortably Faithful to the Incarnation
A Feature Review of
A Stubborn Sweetness and Other Stories for the Christmas Season
Katherine Paterson
Hardback: WJK Books, 2013
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Reviewed by Katherine Willis-Pershey
If you should ever happen to find yourself magically transported into a Katherine Paterson’s A Stubborn Sweetness and Other Stories for the Christmas Season, I have some very important advice for you: pick up the hitchhiker. It’s true that not every pedestrian making his or her way through a bone cold Christmas Eve night is actually an angel in disguise. One such lonely figure actually pulled a gun – okay, a fake gun – on the kindly gentleman who stopped to help her (see the title tale). But even on those rare occasions when the stranger does not mean well, there will inevitably be a Really Important Lesson hidden in his or her back pocket (along with the phoney weapons, apparently).
There are a lot of Really Important Lessons in Paterson’s new collection, which is in fact mostly comprised of stories that have been published in other anthologies. They are the sort of lessons that, if made into television movies, would invariably be accompanied by a great deal of dramatically swelling music. Yet Paterson doesn’t need a sad violinist accompanying her Christmas stories. Even without that dramatic touch, I found myself reaching for tissues time and again – at the conclusion of nearly every single chapter. It was practically Pavlovian. After a while, and I say this as an avid fan of Katherine Paterson – it started to all feel like a bit much.
A Stubborn Sweetness is just that – adamantly, relentlessly, aggressively sweet. Which is not to say that there is not also grit. One story unfolds during the Communist Revolution in China, and involves contraband Christian books and brutal, unjust beatings. One is set in an unidentified Central American nation torn apart by civil war; a character named Joseph leads his wife (who is pregnant, of course) on a long and harrowing journey of immigration (illegal, of course) to the United States, where the child is born in the backseat of a 1978 Plymouth Van. Another takes place in wartime Japan; the pastor, who had lost his wife and children to an American bomb, preaches of Jeremiah and Karl Barth to an empty sanctuary – empty, but for a runny-nosed child and a military guard caught off-guard by the redemptive story of Christ’s birth. Yet another story finds a night watchman finding an abandoned baby in a mall trash receptacle. If you guessed correctly that the watchman did not call the police and/or Child Protective Services, but rather brought the baby home to his family as a Christmas Miracle – well, you’ve figured out the general gist of these holiday yarns.
Paterson explains in the Acknowledgments that the stories were written over the course of forty years, and that most of them were read aloud by her husband, a Presbyterian pastor, during Christmas Eve services. I confess that I had a hard time imagining many of these stories read aloud in the parishes I have served. There is something simultaneously too sweet and too rough about the stories. Or maybe it is the way the sweetness and the roughness are intermingled. You do not want to hear, in a candlelit sanctuary, of the violence that sent Joseph and his family fleeing to the U.S. border – you do not want to hear, in between singing “O Come, All Ye Faithful” and “Silent Night”, of soldiers rooting out communist militias by killing small children with machetes and raping their mother and leaving her for dead. Even if Joseph succeeds in smuggling his family into the promised land, blessing his backseat newborn (named Esperanza, meaning hope) with the words, “Someday peace will come to our mountains and I will take you there. Hope will come to my people.”
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Lovely review, Katherine. Guess I’ll be putting this one on my list. . . Thanks.
Since I reference Katherine’s great review, I’ll offer up mine as well. http://www.bobcornwall.com/2013/12/a-stubborn-sweetness-and-other-stories.html