The Eyes of the Heart: A Memoir of the Lost and Found

Its cloying title aside, this fourth memoir by the Pulitzer Prize-nominated author (Godric) is elegant, understated and elegiac. As the reader is guided through the author's library--his ""Magic Kingdom""--various books, manuscripts and mementos become the stimulus for meditations about Christian faith and about the people who have touched his life. We read at length about the folly of writing a novel about Jesus; to do so, the ordained minister writes, ""would be to cheapen and somehow dishonor the bond between us."" We see the author's father--who committed suicide at the age of 38--not only as a distant figure, alcoholic and adulterous (""the empty place at [the] center"" of Buechner's childhood), but as a charismatic Princeton alumnus who once seemed so full of promise. The memoir's penultimate chapter is a tribute to the author's beloved brother, Jamie, who died as Buechner was finishing the book--he had called and said he had ""incurable cancer of virtually everything and didn't intend to be around for more than two weeks if he could possibly help it."" Such a moment--a pitch-perfect blend of tenderness and sardonic lyricism--typifies the poetic intensity of the memoir. Also of note is the second chapter, about Buechner's friend, the late poet James Merrill, who appears in the author's dreams: ""and it is always goodbye that we are saying again as if to make up for never having had the chance to say it properly."" Acknowledging at once the intensity of their bond and the married minister's puzzlement at the alien pleasures of an unapologetically homosexual man, this chapter exemplifies the memoir's adroit equipoise, unsparing and loving at once. (Dec.)