CLERICAL ERRORS

Father Edmond Music is no model priest. For one thing, he is a stone cold atheist. For another, he has been a sexual athlete in his time, and still sleeps with his housekeeper, Maude Moriarty. Not only has he enjoyed a robust sex life, he's profited from it: his lover nearly 50 years before, in the 1950s, English Lady Violet Devlin ("Kiki"), gave the church her inherited family seat, Beale Hall, to be turned into a scholarly Catholic retreat with the proviso that Music be its director general. These blips on Music's moral radar don't bother him, really—but he is irked by what he sees as the bloody strain of anti-Semitism in the church and his complicity in it. Music was, after all, born a Jew. In occupied France, his parents thought it the better part of valor to have him convert before they disappeared—his mother to a concentration camp, his father into hiding in the French countryside and, eventually, to Israel. Music's immediate worry, and the gambit for the novel's intrigues, is the investigation mounted by his old enemy, Father Twombly, into the mysterious transfer of a reputed Shakespeare manuscript from the Beale Hall library to a private bookseller in Paris. While Music races around trying to prevent the exposure of that transaction, Maude, inching toward 70, is becoming poisonously disillusioned with her lover. Isler (The Prince of West End Avenue, winner of the National Jewish Book Award) mixes the Jewish comic tradition and the high church comedy of Waugh and Murdoch to produce this scathing yet touching farewell to faith, hope and charity in the mad, bad 20th century. (June)

Forecast:This book defies marketing—Catholic readers will quickly be appalled by the unapologetic blasphemy, and Jewish readers will tend to say, what is this, a book about a priest? Yet Isler's amiable refusal to please sets him squarely in the tradition of Philip Roth; his tone is reminiscent of Malamud. With luck and a few good reviews, his book will sell despite itself.