Ginger is an older teen, aimless and into casual sex and drugs, hanging with a local bad boy, Ted, and his even badder best friend, Steve. Hers is an odyssey of American suburbia, where an ugly poetic aesthetic can be found in the seediness of strip malls. She is definitely not the kind of role model preferred by the attendees of her father's suburban church, where he ministers to an aging, ever-dwindling congregation.Even so, Ginger deeply loves her father, or more precisely, empathizes with him. Like her, he is haunted by the death of his wife from cancer, and the father-daughter bond is solidified by their mutual sense of alienation. The minister's church has long been in decline, housed in a banal suburban box-like structure after being forced to move from a beautiful old downtown cathedral due to the socio-economic decline of the neighborhood and subsequent white flight.The church is under siege by the presence of a nearby corporate mega-church, where pandering and feel-good seem to be the modus operandi. Ginger's father is not unlike Gunnar Bjornstrand as the tortured priest in Ingmar Bergman's Swedish film, Winter Light, sensitive and perhaps too truthful in his harsh sermon messages of everyone's personal culpability in evil to be much of a balm to the simple-minded sheep. Whatever their differences, Ginger admires her father's principles, his unwillingness to sell out.The most powerful member and opinion-leader of the congregation, Mulhoffer -- a well-to-do furniture tycoon and lover of the TV advertising that made his fortune -- wants the church to become a TV ministry and open health spas and such to serve the members. To paraphrase him: people who don't watch enough TV are troublemakers.While Ginger watches her father's struggles and contends with her own teenage rebellion, she obsesses over the abduction of a young girl named Sandy Patrick. The novel's chapters alternate between snippets of Ginger's life and of Sandy's experiences in captivity with her psycho abductor. It is obvious that she is not the first, nor will she be his last victim.This is a very bold novel: thematically ambitious, meticulously and beautifully written and full of literary invention. Much of it is hallucinatory and surreal, even difficult to follow at times. Sandy's inner reality is marked by dream-like reminiscences of her past alternating with Lewis Carroll-like imagery of unicorns and bears and other carefree anthropomorphic characters who flit in and out of her consciousness.Steinke blends and explores the obsessions of her characters fearlessly, painting a vivid and terrifying portrait of Southern life in the 1990s; hers is a contemporary update of the classical southern Gothic novel. She references much pop cultural detritis on her sweeping canvas: everything from TV talk shows to the infamous Polaroid found in a parking lot showing bound-and-duct-taped abductee Tara Calico (although she does not mention Calico by name). The book is filled with imagery of decomposition, decay and decline: of cancer, of the South, of America, of religion, of death -- everything seems to be rotting in humid, fetid confines. Moral bankruptcy is blanketed in hypocritical religious and corporate righteousness.I have to admit that, at first, I thought Steinke was missing the forest for the trees with this one; that the writing was way overly descriptive. When Ginger puts in her tampon, for instance, every bit of the action is described in detail, and I wondered if such mechanical minutiae was necessary. Much reference is made of blood imagery, linking the book's incidents to Christ. It's perhaps not surprising that the book begins in the most American of venues, the open road, and with a collision with a deer. Thus, much thematic foreshadowing and quirkiness are established early on. Ultimately, and by the end, Steinke's method brings it all home and the book packs a wallop.I'd read another of Steinke's more popular books, Suicide Blonde last year, but this one is much more substantial on every level. A rewarding experience for those with patience.
What do You think about Jesus Saves (1999)?
Jesus. What was that?I appreciate darker stories centering around social backgrounds that I don't have experience with. I like to be thrown into lives that are so different than mine, and into places that I will probably never visit. It helps me broaden my horizon and appreciate the live I'm able to live.Jesus Saves gave me exactly this. Taking place in the outskirts of U.S cities, where poverty, drugs and hopelessness rules the day, it really showed me a way of living I've never really thought about before. The descriptions of trash filled parking lots and run down mall strips is really graphic and helps you to be drawn into the world.The characters though, didn't made me feel for them. Yes their lives are hard, but nothing that happened really made me hope for or suffer with them.I must admit, the first few chapters from the viewpoint of the young kidnapped girl were brilliant. Her way of trying to deal with the circumstances by fleeing into fantasy worlds and imagining the smallest details outside of the room she's kept in, were very very well written. But instead of limiting those scenes to a few chapters, the author did it over and over again. It really got old for me, and hindered my sympathy.I also really appreciate short, abrupt and non happy endings. But this was just...what? There was no real connection between everything, and it all felt out of place.All in all, a partly well written book with graphic descriptions of it's world ,but sadly for the most part a tedious and confusing mess of stories with no beginning and no end.
—Timo
