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Published in time for Easter, Tony Hendra's debut novel, The Messiah of Morris Avenue, explores this premise: What if Jesus returned as a half-Guatemalan New Yorker named Jose Francisco Lorcan Kennedy? The setting is America in the near future after a rigid theocracy has been established. How religious? Well, Hollywood has been forced to give up one of its letters: Hooray for Holywood.
A well-known satirist for National Lampoon who also appeared in the film This Is Spinal Tap, Hendra wrote the 2004 spiritual memoir Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul, which became a best seller and garnered comparisons with the confessions of St. Augustine.
Controversy ensued when his daughter Jessica Hendra said that as a girl she had been sexually abused by her father. (Her 2005 memoir, How to Cook Your Daughter, was co-written by USA TODAY reporter Blake Morrison. Her father has denied the abuse.)
Hendra's novel is intended to combine both his writing personas. It has a Spy magazine-like edge about the rich, the publicly pious, the powerful. (Hendra once edited Spy.) And it contains the religious journey Father Joe celebrated.
Unfortunately, the two elements never mesh. Often called Jay, Jose has a mother named Maria, a carpenter father and an "Apostle Posse" of former crack whores and ex-cons. He can heal the sick, raise the dead, walk on water and urges people to give up their worldly goods and to show kindness to others.
Hendra also updates the message of Christianity. This 21st-century Jesus offers the world a new message: God is Mother as well as Father. His story ends in pain, suffering, death and resurrection.
Hendra's Jesus shuns all the damage done in his name since his last visit: the Crusades, the obsession with Armageddon, the failure to care for the poor. But this Jesus never explains the evil wrought by Hitler, Stalin, Mao and others. This feel-good theology-lite trivializes Christianity's complexities.
Hendra does a better job creating the narrator, a disgraced, aging journalist named Johnny Greco who chronicles Jose and his story. At the beginning of the book, Greco cleverly ridicules this new nation under God that is ruled by fundamentalists devoted to wiping out doubt, pleasure and the poor. Hendra's digs are quite funny, but they peter out as the religious drama takes center stage.
Frankly, during the holiest week of the year for Christians, the King James Bible offers a great deal more substance than this odd little novel.
The Messiah of Morris Avenue
By Tony Hendra
Henry Holt, 245 pp., $24
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