Lion Country (1971)
Finalist for the National Book Award, 1971
Book Description
Antonio “Tono” Parr is a thirty-four-year-old ex-teacher, ex-sculptor, ex-would-be-novelist who, on impulse, answers the ad of a religious diploma mill: “Put yourself on God’s payroll – go to work for Jesus now”. He receives his ordination through the mail, along with promises of tax exemptions, prosperity, and spiritual fulfilment.
Sensing a possible scoop, Tono arranges to meet the ebullient and enigmatic head of the “seminary”, Leo Bebb, in a sleazy café in Midtown East. His twin, Miriam, is dying of a bone disease in a Manhattan hospital, but Bebb is so fascinating to Tono that he feels compelled to leave her side and seek out the mercurial preacher at his headquarters, The Church of Holy Love, Inc. in Armadillo, Florida. There, in the sweltering heat and humidity, he meets a strange set of individuals: Brownie, Bebb’s peculiar assistant; Hermon Redpath, a septuagenarian satyr whom Bebb hopes to make his patron; and Sharon, the preacher’s twenty-one-year-old daughter.
As Tono begins to mine for information he strikes gold. In addition to conferring degrees in almost everything upon almost anyone who can meet the fee, he discovers a murky past in which Bebb, among other things, has been tried on charges of sexual exhibitionism. Despite these lurid revelations, Tono still cannot shake the impression that Bebb is somehow “God’s man”, and, as he begins to fall in love with Sharon, the destinies of Tono Parr and Leo Bebb become curiously linked in ways that the latter appears to have foreseen.
Reviews
“Frederick Buechner is one of our finest writers. He has produced a body of work as impressive as any American writer currently practicing the art of fiction. Lion Country…has many morals, not the least being that a constantly entertaining novel can also deal successfully with the most serious ideas.”
— James Dickey
“Frederick Buechner can find grace and redemption even in the shoddiest, phoniest aspects of a cultural wasteland. One reads Lion Country…with hope and delight.”
— Louis Auchincloss
“Frederick Buechner’s career has worked its way in twenty years through the serious precocity of A Long Day’s Dying into a profound calm contemplation of the nonhuman sources of life, knowledge and joy. Now—when the danger was that calm would become becalmed—he has written Lion Country, a novel that demands a new kind of energy from his old sources. Demands and gets—it is his richest work, and unprecedented comedy which resounds, for me, with a depth and length that reconfirm not only his own high position among living novelists but our overdue debt of attention and gratitude to him for craft, stamina, wisdom, and, now, laughter.”
— Reynolds Price
“This is Frederick Buechner's sixth novel and his best.”
— Newsweek
“Lion Country is a fine blend of craft and comedy.”
— Philadelphia Inquirer
“...Disparate elements fuse brilliantly in a novel that is genuinely entertaining and also genuinely moving.”
— Barbara Bannon, Publishers Weekly
“Lion Country is elegantly written and very funny—a serious theme embedded in hilarity. Lion Country is a splendid book.”
— Boston Globe
