In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Testament: a Novel
  • Lynda Sexson (bio)
Testament: a Novel. By Nino Ricci. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003. 464 pp. $25.00 hdbk.

"You want to change things yet you're incapable of changing such a simple thing as your own mind," Jesus said.

The saying has an authentic, familiar ring. It's a hollowed-out parable devoid of sweeping, or seedlings, or son. Structurally, the inflated 'you' diminishes; desire reverses to resistance; and, things (the great, unwieldy world) is replaced by the simple thing (the mind). Subject descends into object as the seeker is unveiled as the lost.

Well, even though this call for metanoia seems to be from Jesus, it is not in the canonical gospels, but is from Ricci's brilliant novel, Testament. Someone is going to paint the letters of the saying and glue them into the Red Letter edition of the gospel. And this emptied saying might change a mind, which is, after all, what is called salvation.

Someone else will reconsider those tinted words as tainted with pessimism or irony; and the iconoclast will purge the saying, and Jesus—if not us along with him—will change again. To follow after a fictional Jesus may be an act of faith, or heresy, or folly, or a capability "of changing such a simple thing as your own mind."

Ricci gives us four renderings of Jesus, as generous as the New Testament. The Jesus of these four narrators is as diffident as he is compassionate, and enigmatic as he is plain-spoken. And in each recollection he is achingly vulnerable. The book reawakens the old questions: Why would Christians envision their god as a homeless baby or as a bleeding man? What does humanity gain when divinity suffers? What happens when the eternal tries on the ephemeral? Surely misery cannot be the only road love travels? Can truth be packed only into myth? Is there a danger that the sinner will love the story above salvation? Are there tales that transform the teller?

The book tells of a brooding man who was gossiped into a magician, taken for a messiah, whose story got away from him, and grudgingly became God. The young shepherd Simon reflects:

Somehow the story of the madman Jesus had cured…had been exaggerated beyond recognition, so that now the man had had a hundred demons in him and Jesus had moved them into some poor farmer's pigs, who straightaway jumped into the lake. And all of this, to the ignorant peasants…showed that Jesus had it in for us, and was going to let loose all his Jewish devils on the countryside.

The novelist relentlessly demythologizes as he meticulously embroiders. Luke commences, "Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things that have been accomplished among us," which reminds us that the canon is not as bountiful as it might have been with versions of the Christ. John reminds us that there is no end to cruci-fictions: "But there are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written" (John 21:25).

Some of the most stunning imagined lives have been sutured to the New Testament (Kazantzakis's Last Temptation of Christ, or more recently Jim Crace's Quarantine). All sorts of fictional achievements are infused with the story of Christ [End Page 242] (Dostoevsky, Ken Kesey, or Endo). Harry Potter enthusiasts find a gnostic gospel in the series' contest between wizards and demons or muggles. The New Testament's variants of the good news inexorably create an urgency to tell it again—to harmonize the discrepancies, or to weed out the extraneous, or to set the story straight. Or to set the story on its head.

I closed the pages of Testament just as a dear old friend, a cranky Jesuit priest and professor, happened to be in the state and so stopped by. Catching up on several years between visits, he told me: "I have been sometimes as much Buddhist as Christian." When he hastened to affirm his Christian faith, he seemed to...

pdf

Share