Real Presence (Voices of the South)

By Richard Bausch

Book Overview

This novel charts the progress of Monsignor Vincent Shepherd, a priest assigned to a rural parish after a heart attack. The story focuses on his encounters with the unwashed and demanding Bexley family. Can he learn to accept and love the unlovable, or will his faith disintegrate?

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 080712477X
• ISBN13: 9780807124772
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: Louisiana State Univ Pr
• Length: 279 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 0.8" x 5.8"

Customer Reviews

Interesting, despite its subject matter.

A family under intense economic pressure is helped, begrudgingly, by a priest and his somewhat dissolute neighbor. Not surprisingly, the novel explores people's response to need. Primarily, though, it is a novel of state of mind: loneliness, desperation, loss of faith, love. It manages to be interesting, without resorting to any facile devices of plot or character to hold the reader. The writing is very good, although if I were Bausch's editor for this book, I would have tried to eliminate some of the descriptive analogies which just don't work, and detract from the force of his simple prose.