What to Wear to See the Pope: Stories

By Christine Lehner

Book Overview

The Codwell family is a jovial, tight-knit clan that dines together often and for whom dinner table conversation is repartee as art form. But subtext runs deep, patience wears thin, and recriminations run rampant. A conflicted Catholic and amateur linguist, Ursula Codwell's passion for saints and semantics is surpassed only by the affection she feels for her family--and that includes her precious bulldog. Brought up in what she refers to as the "fraught and schizoid tradition of Belgian Catholicism," Ursula is herself rather fraught and schizoid, personality traits that often threaten to overwhelm her children and her ostensibly tolerant Unitarian husband ("What he generally had to say about the saints was not worth repeating"), not to mention herself. Her indecisiveness and excessive attention to detail lead her to become fixated on matters such as what to wear to see the Pope when he comes to her hometown in New York's Hudson Valley or reclaiming her surgically removed teratomas from the pathology lab. Reminiscent of Allegra Goodman's The Family Markowitz, Christine Lehner's What to Wear to See the Pope is a dead-on portrait of fragile family connections and crises of the soul, brought to life in ten wonderful interconnected stories.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0786713291
• ISBN13: 9780786713295
• Release Date: March 2004
• Publisher: Carroll & Graf Publishers
• Length: 210 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.8" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

This is a terrific book.

In a voice that's distinctive and marvelously quirky, the author tells tales of domestic life that dance on the edge of the absurd but resonate with essential truth. The voice is so quirky that it would be easy for it to go over the top, or become cloying, but it never does. Lehner delights not just in chasing absurdities to comic lengths, but in playing with the language -- and while it can be irritating when writers toss in fancy words, it doesn't here. She's not showing off; she's rejoicing in the richness of the language. My favorite is a tale about a knife that seems to have a malicious mind of its own, but the story of a phantom limb runs a close second. And, throughout, these odd saints keep appearing, to delightful effect.

Better than Belgian Chocolate and funnier too

It does not do justice to this book to call it a collection of short stories, it's more a series of plunges into the same bracing swimming pool. I read it in one sitting and it played every variation of my laugh button. Ms. Lehner knows more about Saints than she needs to, but you don't have to be Catholic to enjoy the obsession. This book has enough family mustard so that in spite of the religion, the literary references and flawless punctuation you wonder at the end who might play each role when Hollywood gets it's crass teeth into it.

Just literally plain fun!

This writer has a great use of language and can poke fun of an extensive vocabulary all the same. I am a book reviewer for a major newspaper and a published author as well, so I kiss a lot of toads to find the royalty that will go in our columns, this one made it in stellar fashion. I am including this as one of 2004's best debuts. I read much of this book while climbing a stairmaster at the gym. On three occasions people came up to me to ask me what it was that was "SO FUNNY" about the book, writing down the title to go find it. ENJOY!