#Plot summary of another country by james baldwin how to
Similarly, in Louise Erdrich's "Satan: Hijacker of a Planet," a young girl who comes under the spell of an evangelical preacher and his feverish speech learns how to bring him under her own spell.
In James Baldwin's "Exodus," a mother's belief that the flight from Egypt is immanently, historically true has sustained her through slavery and its aftermath, yet, for her daughter, the story transmutes into a different kind of escape - and she walks out the cabin door, abandoning her aged mother. What he or she struggles with most intensely is another character, and a striking number of the stories involve some problematic pairing. Indeed, in most of the stories a character's relationship to God remains rather unproblematic. These people are not struggling through the cloud of unknowing to come face to Face. The characters are concerned with God, but this does not manifest itself as the intense longing for direct experience of the divine. Mystical is what these stories emphatically are not. Humility in its deep sense, its root-sense, related to "humus," and meaning "of the earth." This is an earthy volume of stories, and together they give the title "God" not just an earthy but even a comic dimension. Yet this collection of short fiction, with its grand title and its roster of grand authors, from James Baldwin through Tobias Wolff, radiates not grandiosity but humility. Michael Curtis Houghton Mifflin 400 pages $30 hardcover, $14 paperback