Coffee Rings: Three Women, One Tragic Event, Nineteen Years Later, Secrets Surface (Lehman, Yvonne)

Rating:
Summary: A SIMPLE FAITH STRETCHED TOO FAR
Review: COFFEE RINGS is a detective story. Eunice Hogan, soon to die of cancer, takes up for the last time the mystery of why and how 19 years earlier her daughter Dove drowned on the North Carolina coast while swimming with three girl friends. Dove had left a note before driving off during a college break. At the scene of the tragedy Eunice had also found part of her daughter's bathing suit. The police crime report and autopsy differed from the excuses given by the three surviving girls, especially champion swimmer Annette Billings. But Eunice had declined to pursue these clues. And the three girls never volunteered a word. Eunice, facing certain death, is determined to know the truth and persuades the three friends, now adults, Annette, Ruby and Lara to return with her to the beach for a final accounting.

COFFEE RINGS is also passionate and graphic. Made into a best-selling movie it would be rated R for explicit sex, nudity, violence and suicides. Lehman's characters, like those of the three Bronte sisters, are vexing mixtures of insight and obtuseness and of good and evil; in some people the evil is more insidious and ineradicable than in your ordinary American neighborhood. There are no heroes.

COFFEE RINGS is also unabashedly religious and explicitly, argumentatively, even defensively theological.

Very long for an Yvonne Lehman novel, COFFEE RINGS focuses on a handful of people; and almost all of them belong to one local unnamed evangelical Protestant church. The principal characters (one the minister of that church) are attached by habit and sometimes by deep conviction to their religious community and allocate both themselves and one another into that community's strikingly narrow neo-Calvinist pigeonholes. That church does not, for instance, appear to think often or deeply about baptism or eucharist. And remarriage after divorce is presented offhandedly as if every Christian's right. The church's major "sacrament" seems to be bible-reading of self-selected texts alone or with others. Some characters are sure that they can find a Scriptural passage to enlighten or even explain every concrete happening in their lives. Theirs is a religion in which a belief in election, fate and doom interact unpredictably with free will and Scripture.

At one level this novel is explicitly didactic: designed to spark discussion of its contents within like-minded church groups. Witness its postscript "DISCUSSION THOUGHTS," with questions (but no answers) for each of the book's 34 chapters. Samples: "Must one reveal one's past to the person one plans to marry?" "Does your church speak out against abortion? Does it offer an alternative?" "Eunice has kept the coroner's report secret from her husband for nineteen years. Is that right?" "Should you reveal something that eases your conscience but hurts another?" "Is it hypocritical to behave like you're morally upright after you've had an affair?" "Is withholding the truth the same as lying?" "Are you able to tell other people how they can be sure they will go to heaven when they die?"

To a reader who is Christian but not an evangelical Protestant, the many good deeds, hymns and prayers of the church community described have the ring of authenticity. The theology, however, does not seem nuanced enough to bear all the burdens routinely unloaded upon it by the novel's characters. Either the church's imparted wisdom is received by rote and barely internalized, or, more frighteningly, church teaching guides the believer into relieved personal self-satisfaction that there is no necessary connection between evil deeds and ineligibility for election to salvation and heaven. Each person judges his own righteousness on the basis of Scriptural texts and assigns the verdict to God.

Not all readers of COFFEE RINGS will be closely allied mentally and spiritually to the novel's little mountain Carolina church community. Readers from other denominations or non-evangelical faiths might charitably hope that a kindly God has paradoxically led these honest searchers into what seems a temporary theological strait jacket -- but only en route toward a framework more spirit-filled and internally consistent. It might seem unlikely to many readers that Providence intends the people of COFFEE RINGS to remain so self-contentedly cramped much longer. For experience suggests that human freedom and human destiny cry out for a universal gospel with larger lungs for breathing.

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