Called Out - Hardcover

Mojtabai, A.G.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 038547430X ISBN 13: 9780385474306

Publisher: Nan A. Talese, 1994

Synopsis

"Long on vision, and as lyrical as need be," in the words of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, A. G. Mojtabai's novels are well-known for their consummate craft. Nowhere is this vision more evident than in her splendid new novel, Called Out, which renders compellingly the larger connections linking even the most isolated lives.
The story is set in the small rural Texas town of Bounds, where, one windswept afternoon, a passenger jet crashes and the great world drops in. As survivors stumble through the fields and relatives of the deceased converge upon the town, five narrators recall their experiences of the disaster and its aftermath: Father Mark, the priest summoned to minister to the accident victims; Glenna Wooten, the town postmaster, whose field has been devastated by the crash; a newspaper reporter, obsessively poking through the rubble of facts for the meaning that eludes him; Chip Parker, a solitary young man haunted by the single treasure he snatches from the wreckage - an emblem of his own brokenness; and Francie Alred, a woman who, after years in the city, has returned home to pick up the pieces of her life.
Called Out is a novel intricately voiced, rich with character and sense of place. In exploring the impact of disaster on a little town and on those people, near and far, "called out" by the crash, it reminds us of the small personal worlds we all inhabit, their limits challenged, pushed toward growth, by collision with what lies beyond.

About this title

Reviews

The sixth novel by Mojtabai (after Ordinary Time and the award-winning Blessed Assurance , a nonfiction work about the South) offers a curious admixture of sociology and metaphysics. The story, narrated by a variety of witnesses, records the traumatic impact on the inhabitants of a small Texas town of the crash of a commercial airliner in a local field. Mojtabai interweaves narrative, character portraits and dream-like meditations on life, death and the role of fate. As she notes in her acknowledgement, the heart of the book comes from a question that has long concerned her: What happens in a disaster situation when a priest anoints people who may not be Christian as they die at the crash site? Father Mark's dilemma is compellingly explored through powerful writing (another character suggests that in the case of non-Christians "it's . . . just wasted oil and a wistful prayer"), yet the priest's ruminations are overwhelmed by the crush of--eventually indistinguishable--narrative voices. The crash serves as the boundary between the world of daily, small-time concerns and the amorphous land of consciousness. However, the plot ultimately loses its way and runs out of fuel as a vehicle for exploring the psychic map of a small town. At its best, Mojtabai's literary perception awakens a sociologist's tale. Ultimately, however, her work lacks the narrative patterning and intensity of perspective that would elevate it from an interesting concept to a full-blooded novel.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

When a passenger jet crashes near the desolate Texas town of Bounds, tragedy links the lives of victims and townspeople, forcing the citizens of an insular community to confront a world on which most turned their backs long ago. An unnamed, out-of-town newspaper reporter pinpoints the novel's narrative technique while musing on the unreliability of conflicting eyewitness accounts of the crash: ``That's how it always is with one event seen through different windows.'' The windows Mojtabai (Ordinary Time, 1989, etc.) constructs are monologues through which three main witnesses tell their stories in alternating chapters, interrupted occasionally by minor characters. After the reporter, the two other main witnesses are Father Mark, the town's Catholic priest, and Glenna Wooten, the town's postmaster. Their folksy, colloquial speech, meant to be both poetic and sensible, is what we expect from these familiar salt-of-the-earth types (hardy, defiant, proud of their simplicity and bedrock values), and it contributes greatly to the novel's tensionless, conversational feel and to the blurry uniformity of the characters. From the moment the plane crashes, the focus is on the townspeople; the victims--initially, gory corpses and the ghostly walking wounded; later, the survivors and relatives of those who died--seem curiously incidental. The plot's only conflict develops late: To accommodate the flood of survivors and relatives drawn to the crash site, Father Mark keeps the church open night and day. Members of the parish council, upset by the increased cost of utilities, challenge the priest by asking, ``Whose church is this, anyway?'' The question we are meant to ponder is whether a brotherhood of man unites us, whether some larger human connection makes these outsiders neighbors rather than strangers. Mojtabai's fragmented narrative offers no definitive answers, but her writing is occasionally powerful in the dead-on rightness of isolated images and in its evocation of the fascination catastrophe holds. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

In exploring the effects of a major plane crash on the small town of Bounds, Texas, Mojtabai (Ordinary Time, LJ 8/89) has created both a novel of ideas and a page turner of the highest caliber. Eyewitness accounts from the townspeople of events leading up to the crash create a sense of almost palpable impending disaster. Central to the story is a Catholic priest who gives the last rites to all the dying and a reporter who asks, What's the point of anointing everyone, when it only "sticks" to good Catholics? In the aftermath of the crash, relatives of the dead from all over the world and of many different faiths make pilgrimages to Bounds to see the crash site and to talk to the priest. These visits do more to reinforce the priest's sense of vocation than his years of parish duty; in fact, his own parishioners protest the time he spends with these "outsiders." Mojtabai has succeeded in telling a gripping story that also poses intriguing questions about religion. Highly recommended.
Patricia Ross, Westerville P.L., Ohio
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Nan A. Talese
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 038547430X
• ISBN 13: 9780385474306
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208