M.L. Hoekstra's 'Tarsus' is a divine revelation

October will be a good month for the few and dedicated Mary Lou Hoekstra fans as, on the anniversary of her death, her final work, "Saul of Tarsus," will hit the shelves.

"Saul of Tarsus" is the last - and presumably lost - installment of Hoekstra's "Loose Trilogy."

The "Loose Trilogy," which includes Hoekstra's first and fourth novels, "Abaleen" and "Six Sheets to the Wind," is not bound together by a common plot or cast of characters (as is, for example, the "Star Wars" trilogy), but by commonality of theme.

Fellow postmodernist and literary critic David Foster Wallace characterized the first two installments of the series as "a wicked epistemological tour de force" given a "weird opacity about it, a narcotized over-earnestness that's reminiscent of lead-poisoned kids in Midwestern trailer parks" due to the lack of completion, the suppression of "Saul of Tarsus."

It was Hoekstra herself who suppressed her fifth and finest novel. Although she was under contract to finish the trilogy by 1965 when she completed "Saul" sometime between 1955 and 1963, Hoekstra had become so disenchanted with the publishing industry and its consistent, unauthorized alteration of her work that she hid the manuscript to "protect it from publication."

Hoekstra died in 1977, still in litigation for breach of contract.

REVIEW
	Saul of Tarsus Mary Lou Hoekstra Farrar, Straus and Giroux

"Saul of Tarsus" is based on an historical personage, a Jewish tyrant of the first century A.D., who converted to Christianity (with an attendant name-change) after having a vision of Jesus while traveling from his home in Tarsus to Damascus.

Thus Saul became Paul. Hoekstra meticulously mirrors and embellishes this tale in her character Saul Leab, an ultra-conservative political pundit (a lá Rush Limbaugh) and his parallel persona, political activist Paul Lieb.

Hoekstra discusses the duality of man by encasing both tyrant and saint within the same protagonist, predating both Maxine Hong Kingston and Adrienne Kennedy in this almost schizophrenic multiple-development of a character.

But Hoekstra does not do this by making these two opposing forces into one character (as in the Biblical account). She instead crafts two interlocking, intertwined tales - two separate characters unaware that they share the same corpus.

Hoekstra relates all of this in a hauntingly Postmodern voice:

"For them, and in that time, it was the American Dream in blacklight: Every lapdog rabid, every picket-fence a harrow, every postman sick-hearted and armed. All of the priests touched the alter boys, all the cops were on the make. Satellites hid among the stars, watching."

The novel's only real fault is that it doesn't cleanly stand alone. There is always a piece missing - conceptual bridges developed in the Trilogy's first two parts and treated as givens in "Saul."

Although "Saul of Tarsus" was set to paper more than 30 years ago, Hoekstra captures a "fin de siecle Part II" sort of melancholic desperation that, as we close in on year 2000, is somehow comforting. It's like your 81-year-old grandfather joking about paying for everything by credit card.

Nonetheless, her characterization of Saul/Paul takes a refreshing turn from the postmodern norm of the "paralyzed" protagonists, so run-down by life that any action, good or bad, is too much effort. Both Saul and Paul almost glow with violent energy as they close in on their goals and the confrontation between these two men sharing one body.

Although the novel seems to be constantly at risk of tumbling into the lame or hokey, it pulls through with stunning emotional clarity. Hoekstra walks a fine line, both brilliant and whimsical. And you won't see the end coming.

08-10-98