Saving Faith
Description of Saving Faith
Because of a misguided medical diagnosis as an orphaned child, Jack Fenien was never adopted. Now, two years after leaving the orphanage, he works as a repossessor for a used car dealer.
One night, he enters a bar looking for Ev Sorin, whose car Jack has mistakenly towed. Expecting violent anger, he is surprised when Ev reacts with indifference; but as Jack soon discovers, Ev – a disgraced journalist – has bigger problems on his mind.
The next day, in the same courthouse to which Jack and Ev have gone to arrange for the release of Ev's car from the impound lot, a nurse and young woman sit in a crowded courtroom opposite a row of lawyers, asking the judge to keep alive a comatose patient whose true identity is unknown but who has been given the name Faith Powers. After the hearing, Ev seeks out the nurse – not for years has he done a real story, and he feels a sudden urge to be a journalist again. It is an urge that will connect Jack with Clare, the troubled young woman who appears to have an almost fanatical attachment to Faith. Intrigued with Jack's role as a repossessor, Clare sees him as a kind of modern moral prophet.
Although the characters initially focus on investigating Faith's real identity, they eventually come to use Faith as a catalyst for changing their own lives. But not until a seemingly random shooting occurs in the city do the characters become truly immersed in the mysteries of the patient and of each other.
Reviews of Saving Faith
"Saving Faith is a rare accomplishment, a philosophical novel of ideas with an allegorical structure and popular appeal. The style appears to be plain, but "Everything is more than it seems." Cast in the form of a mystery, it evokes the fundamental mysteries of life, combining popular with high art. The narrative is poignant in tone, humanistic in perspective and rich in ironies, similes and wit.
Patrick Garry has emerged in the tradition of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Flannery O'Connor, allegorical writers with moral visions that have a striking clarity and power when contrasted to novels by even the best postmodernists, such as Thomas Pynchon or Don DeLillo. Garry is strongest where the New York postmodernists are weakest, in vision—in showing us ourselves with historical perspective, an objective sense of proportion, psychological insight and spiritual depth.
The young narrator is Jack, an orphan who grew up in an institution, one of the many young people today who were conditioned to feel unwanted in a society dominated by narcissistic adults. "In the orphanage we were all mistakes," he observes. The opposite of most Americans in the past, with their great expectations, he has no expectations at all: "The key to finding love, I figured, was to find someone who didn't want to be in their own home." What he misses most about the orphanage is "being around people who believed, despite the odds." To survive in the cynical and corrupt world outside the institution, he learns, a person must be able to place faith in something, however unlikely. Love, in particular, depends upon faith.
At the center of this novel, giving birth to its allegory, is an otherwise unidentified patient called Faith Powers, who demonstrates the powers of faith by reviving the lives of those around her while herself remaining comatose. Jack's personal life seems empty until he happens into the room of Faith, where he meets the nurse who keeps her alive, befriends a disgraced journalist who uses her to revive his career, and gets involved with a confused modern woman who talks to Faith as if praying, or talking to the best part of herself. As he gets to know the people who care about Faith, Jack compares them to orphans with unrealistic hopes.
Insightful satire and wit display the range of Garry's fiction. His greatest appeal as a writer, beyond even his talent for allegory, is his overall perspective and elegiac tone, both here and in his deeply moving previous novel In the Shadow of War. His writing has a soul. It is redemptive and sustains a loving spirit of compassion, sacrifice and transcendence."
-Midwest Book Review
Saving Faith "shows inherent strengths in dialogue," with language that is "forceful and fitting." The narrative intervals, "provide an incipient rhythm of location and analysis." And the "linguistic dynamic is forceful and commanding of the reader's attention, and it conveys a definiteness of encounter and feeling and emotion."
-Dr. George Panichas, former Prof. of English, University of Maryland and editor of Modern Age
Saving Faith " is a philosophical book that gave me much to think about." It is a "lovely" novel.
-Book Marks, publication of the South Dakota Library Association
