April
2002
Book
Review: Jesus
Lives In Trenton
By Christopher Klim
Creative
Arts Book Company
Berkeley, Calif.
$14.95
Reviewed
by Mark M. Feffer
My
first thought upon completing Christopher Klim’s novel, Jesus
Lives in Trenton, was that I should have liked it better.
It’s a book from an imaginative author; unfortunately, Mr.
Klim’s competence as a writer never quite enables him to
rise to the level of his own vision. These are harsh words to
begin with, and I would hope people will at least give this book
an honest browse in the bookstore, for some of them will be intrigued
enough to take it home. But for me, the book reads like a writing
project by an ambitious college student, filled with twists that
don’t add up, details that aren’t fleshed out, and assumptions
about newsgathering, the media, and even human nature that strike
me as just plain wrong.
Boots
Means is a photographer and aspiring reporter for the Trenton
Record, a tabloid newspaper that seems to be just a little bit
poorer and a lot more schizophrenic than its nearest competitor,
the Trentonian. Boots’s main responsibility is to photograph
the newspaper’s Page Six girls, a job that frustrates him
because of its fluffiness, and embarrasses him after he gets himself
fairly well beat-up by two ornery contestants for the title of
"Miss Record." Boots is an orphan, abandoned by parents
he never knew, and raised in a series of foster homes that have
left him with a sizable chip on his shoulder as well as a lot
of pent-up ambition. Still, he lives in a shabby mobile home in
a shabby trailer park set along the Delaware River, attempts to
maintain some distance from his well-to-do and marriage-minded
girlfriend, and dreams of photojournalism greatness. When the
newspaper gets a call from a woman who claims to see the face
of Jesus on a billboard, Boots – if only because no one else
wants it – gets the assignment to check out the billboard
and talk to the woman who called in the vision.
Unfortunately,
the two chapters that lay out that groundwork are the best in
the book. After this promising start, we have 28 chapters to go,
and they move along like a skiff running upriver on a misfiring
outboard motor. In other words, they get where they’re going,
but they take a long and unsatisfying time to get there. Along
the way, Boots will encounter:
-
A prison ministry involved in gunrunning
- A
televangelist with a grudge against the prison ministry involved
in gunrunning, but not for the reasons you might think
- A
nubile and oversexed assistant from Lawrenceville (the town, not
the school)
- A
rich Texan who claims to be his father
- A
rich Texan who claims to be his brother, and who tails him around
the city for no clear reason, except that his father – the
other rich Texan – told him to and he helps move the plot
along a few times
- A
grand jury investigation that lands Boots in jail for contempt
of court, as explained by a judge and prosecutor who possess all
of the eloquence of a high school civics presentation
- A
newspaper owner who seems to be a Rupert Murdoch wannabe
- An
editor who is gruff but, of course, has keen ethics and a heart
of gold
There’s
more, but in truth I read the book twice and I’m still not
sure I followed it all.
And
therein lies a big part of the problem. Mr. Klim has stocked his
book with a cast of offbeat characters, some of which are well
drawn and others of which are mere paper dolls. He’s filled
the narrative with twists and turns, some of which are amusing
and many of which make no sense. Boots Means himself aches from
his childhood abandonment but at the same time balks at any notion
of family – be it from his fiancé, his erstwhile father,
or any of the clergy he finds himself surrounded by. However,
it’s never clear whether he’s emotionally damaged to
the point of perpetual fear, or just plain stupid. Actually, I
suspect he’s damaged and hurt, but Mr. Klim never bothers
to show this to me. Instead, he sketches Boot and expects his
readers to work off of the same assumptions he, as the author,
has built his story on. This doesn’t work, and I found myself
wishing he had gone deeper on character, even if it meant dropping
some twists. The book would have been far more effective that
way.
The
notion of Jesus appearing on a billboard appears to be a reason
for a number of zealots and some nefarious hangers-on to gather
in Trenton. Unfortunately, the crowds that flock to the billboard
just appear. There’s no build up, no gathering of emotion
or fervor. Boots get his assignment in the dead of night, and
he immediately goes to check out the billboard – in the dead
of night, remember. Once he’s seen it for himself, he interviews
the story’s source, a cheerful, elderly woman who happily
brews tea while they speak, which would be perfectly logical,
if Mr. Klim didn’t portray this as happening at sunrise.
I suspect this is meant to demonstrate the exotic nighttime existence
of newspaper reporters, but in my experience – both as a
reporter and also as a drinking companion to many fine journalists
– I don’t know of any editors who’d send their
staff to follow up on a soft feature story at midnight. And I
certainly don’t know many elderly women, cheerful or otherwise,
who’d sit for an interview as the sun’s coming up.
I
have my hat off to anyone who can write and publish a novel, and
I hope Mr. Klim will try again. My disappointment in Jesus
Lives in Trenton comes not so much from feeling this is a
bad book, but from the sense it’s a first draft of a book.
If Mr. Klim would have drawn me in deeper, I think he’d have
had me all the way.
###
Mark Feffer is a founding editor of the Trenton Writes Project.
He is writing a novel.
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