How the Body Prays

How the Body Prays invites us to view a gallery of family portraits, each give the power of speech and vivid narrative. Weltner's strikingly distinct characters tell their stories, or parts of them, acting in concert to produce a contrapuntal chronicle of American experience through several decades. The themes of war, mutilation, love, death, religious aspiration, and music itself recur and intertwine in a long, polyphonic lament designed to further the ideal of life lived fearlessly in the present moment. Liner notes like these here can't , however, convey the actual impact of this cultivated, highly wrought novel. Alfred Corn

I guess publishers don't hire proofreaders any longer. I'd be reading along in Weltner's very fine book and time after time I'd find typos that were jarring. Typical example: The matriarch of the family is spoken of as POURING over some Bach sonatas. Pouring what? Syrup? Hot fudge? Gravy? The word Weltner was looking for is PORING, as in reading studiously or attentively. What probably happened is that the publisher, author and/or editor ran SpellCheck and everything came up spelled correctly, so they figured they were good to go. Wrong. Homonyms like that can trip people up. But I'll bet if one of Weltner's students made a mistake like this on a paper, Weltner would be all over them. If I find typos in a paperback thriller by a Stephen King wannabe, that doesn't bother me. But HOW THE BODY PRAYS is good solid writing that is served up as serious literature. For his next book I hope Weltner's publisher gets a real live human to do the proofreading.

The previous reviewer sounds like maybe a disgruntled student who did not do so well in Mr. Weltner's class. The book itself seems to hark back to works by Hemingway and Faulkner. Mr. Weltner has an astute knowledge of literature and his influences appear readily in this novel.