First off, I read DOWN AND DIRTY PICTURES by Peter Biskind.  Great info regarding indie films, Miramax and Sundance, but the book is about 250 pages too long.  Most of the second half keep reiterating what an idiot the Weinsteins from Miramax are as well as Robert Redford.  And, after reading it, my respect rose exceptionally for Ethan Hawke and took a nose dive for Kevin Smith. 

San Francisco Public Library RULES!!  Why?  Because I borrowed

THE BLOOD OF THE LAMB
by
Peter De Vries

and the cheapest copy at Amazon is $55.  This book is brilliant.  Yes, I'm talking CATCHER IN THE RYE brilliant.  Yes, I'm talking why aren't they reprinting this, brilliant.

From what I understand, this is De Vries most autobiographical novel.  I haven't come across De Vries before.  Is he well known?

The story chronicles the life of Don Wanderhope and his struggles with family illness, faith, infidelity and human motivation.

Page 120:

"There seems to be little support in reality for the popular belief that we are mellowed by suffering.  Happiness mellows us, not troubles; pleasure, perhaps, even more that happiness.  The sentimental saw belongs among those canards that include also the idea that wisdom comes with age.  The old have nothing to tell us; it is more commonly we who are shouting at them, in any case."

That was when Don committed his father to an institution, and this is when Don's brother is dying on page 24:

"My sensation, rather than fear or piety, was a baffled and uncomprehending rage.  That flesh with which I had lain in comradely embrace destroyable, on such short notice, by a whim known as divine?  By what authority and to what authority must this sleek version of the routed Uncle Hans plead for the life of a lad as beguiling as the shepherd grinning at me by the needlework river?  Who wantonly scattered such charm, who broke such flesh like bread for his purposes?  I later years, years which brought me to another such vigil over one more surely my flesh and blood, I came to understand a few things about what people believe.  What people believe is a measure of what they suffer.  'The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away' - there must be a balm of some sort in that for men whose treasures have been confiscated.  These displaced Dutch fisherfolk, these farmers peddling coal and ice in a strange land, must have had their reasons for worshiping a god scarcely distinguishable from the devil they feared.  But the boy kneeling on the parlor floor was shut off from such speculatory solaces.  All the theologies inherent in the minister's winding drone came down to this: Believe in God and don't put anything past him.  Or another thought formed itself in the languages of the streets in which they boy had learned crude justice and mercy: 'Why doesn't He pick on somebody his size?'"

Don questions the religious pounding he gets from his relatives and others as his life falls apart.

I have four other De Vries books on hold in San Francisco...put them on hold and you'll get them soon enough.

Literary love,

Tony DuShane