Real Presence

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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0803777795
• ISBN13: 9780803777798
• Release Date: January 1980
• Publisher: Dial Books for Young Readers
• Length: 279 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.

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.