Called Out - Hardcover

When a passenger jet crashes near the desolate Texas town of Bounds, tragedy links the lives of victims and townspeople, forcing the citizens of an insular community to confront a world on which most turned their backs long ago. An unnamed, out-of-town newspaper reporter pinpoints the novel's narrative technique while musing on the unreliability of conflicting eyewitness accounts of the crash: ``That's how it always is with one event seen through different windows.'' The windows Mojtabai (Ordinary Time, 1989, etc.) constructs are monologues through which three main witnesses tell their stories in alternating chapters, interrupted occasionally by minor characters. After the reporter, the two other main witnesses are Father Mark, the town's Catholic priest, and Glenna Wooten, the town's postmaster. Their folksy, colloquial speech, meant to be both poetic and sensible, is what we expect from these familiar salt-of-the-earth types (hardy, defiant, proud of their simplicity and bedrock values), and it contributes greatly to the novel's tensionless, conversational feel and to the blurry uniformity of the characters. From the moment the plane crashes, the focus is on the townspeople; the victims--initially, gory corpses and the ghostly walking wounded; later, the survivors and relatives of those who died--seem curiously incidental. The plot's only conflict develops late: To accommodate the flood of survivors and relatives drawn to the crash site, Father Mark keeps the church open night and day. Members of the parish council, upset by the increased cost of utilities, challenge the priest by asking, ``Whose church is this, anyway?'' The question we are meant to ponder is whether a brotherhood of man unites us, whether some larger human connection makes these outsiders neighbors rather than strangers. Mojtabai's fragmented narrative offers no definitive answers, but her writing is occasionally powerful in the dead-on rightness of isolated images and in its evocation of the fascination catastrophe holds. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

The sixth novel by Mojtabai (after Ordinary Time and the award-winning Blessed Assurance , a nonfiction work about the South) offers a curious admixture of sociology and metaphysics. The story, narrated by a variety of witnesses, records the traumatic impact on the inhabitants of a small Texas town of the crash of a commercial airliner in a local field. Mojtabai interweaves narrative, character portraits and dream-like meditations on life, death and the role of fate. As she notes in her acknowledgement, the heart of the book comes from a question that has long concerned her: What happens in a disaster situation when a priest anoints people who may not be Christian as they die at the crash site? Father Mark's dilemma is compellingly explored through powerful writing (another character suggests that in the case of non-Christians "it's . . . just wasted oil and a wistful prayer"), yet the priest's ruminations are overwhelmed by the crush of--eventually indistinguishable--narrative voices. The crash serves as the boundary between the world of daily, small-time concerns and the amorphous land of consciousness. However, the plot ultimately loses its way and runs out of fuel as a vehicle for exploring the psychic map of a small town. At its best, Mojtabai's literary perception awakens a sociologist's tale. Ultimately, however, her work lacks the narrative patterning and intensity of perspective that would elevate it from an interesting concept to a full-blooded novel.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.