Milk

I won't give a book review (since a few others have given complete synopses) but I have to say that this little book was simply put, beautiful in the most profound, soulful way. I wanted to underline most of it or commit entire paragraphs to memory. To call it prose is not quite right. It was poetry in the highest, purest sense of the word. I loved the way the author gave you bits and pieces of each character and let you fill in the spaces. I've never read a book quite like this one. The entire book was a praise poem to SPIRIT. I can't wait to read Ms. Steinke's other books.

Milk, by Darcey Steinke of Suicide Blonde, is a strangely sexy novel. It is also a strangely spiritual novel. But-strangely-it is not a loving novel. This strikes home especially upon considering its title and opening scene. When we first meet Mary, one of three protagonists, she is nursing her baby. Nine short pages later, both she and baby are experiencing a religious vision, what we soon find out is called an Aleph, a point where time stops to open into God's universe and godhead itself. She mistakes the vision for an electrical short, but when she sweeps a broom through, it appears more like a holograph or even a reflected "magic trick." Now, there is no doubt that we are meant to take this vision and her returning encounters with it as real-or at least there is little doubt, as I will explain later. Little or no doubt, because Mary's baby becomes fascinated by the vision too and "bicycled his legs again and rocked his whole body forward." The overwhelming spiritual aspect of Steinke's novel, however, derives not through any one organized religion. This, despite that Mary and both remaining protagonists are members of the Catholic Church. (One is a priest, the other a monk named John who has recently left the monastery in search of God.) In fact, not a single scene occurs inside a church proper. We've seen Mary having visions in her apartment; she later takes to praying in closets, since she claims they so resemble "little chapels." Walter, her friend and the priest in charge of an economically strapped inner city parish, decides that a bar he enters is "definitely holy. Mostly because of the longing. God loved longing and imbued it with sanctity." Similarly, John writes a letter justifying his departure from the monastery: "I want you to know that I now understand . . . that it [is] philosophically impossible for God to even think about evil, that Love is all and we must make ourselves into vehicles of Love." But-and this brings up a huge gap-for John and all the characters "vehicles of Love" persistently stumble into vehicles of sensuality. Mary's sexual encounter with John leads to divorcing her husband, who has clearly been cheating and has lost all interest in her. John himself was warned as he left the monastery that the mystical woman he was leaving to search for was a "robot, an idealized notion of romantic love, impossible to replicate." And the last protagonist, the homosexual priest named Walter, endures a series of devastating and degrading sensual encounters in his quest for stable love. Even Mary's breast-feeding takes on a mystical intensity that cannot be sustained. All this does not indicate a fault in the novel; rather, it indicates Steinke's theme: longing. Mary remembers, upon returning to a husbandless home after her initial tryst with John: "Walter always said that the chief thing that separates us from God is the thought that we are separate from him." John, in a cab leaving the monastery, echoes Christ's prayer, "M

Religious guilt and sexual angst saturate Milk, author Darcey Steinke's poetic and somewhat prosaic novella. Full of kinky, furtive sexuality and religious self-loathing, the three characters in this short, but powerful novel, traverse the snowy streets of Manhattan in a kind of spiritual and pious torment. Tension and desire ebbs and flows, as the god and sex obsessed Mary, Walter, and John, try to find meaning in a world that has been steadily abandoning them. Mary, the central character, is a strangely troubled mystic, who pleasures herself with holy devotion, turning a prayer - ''Come, Lord Jesus, have mercy on me'' - into a lascivious invocation. As Mary tries to feed her newborn baby with her breast milk and cope with a husband who is emotionally distant, she becomes convinced that she has been made out of cosmic refuse - "stardust, and smoky vapor" - and of she concentrated, "she could tease down the life force for her own selfish use." Walter is a gay, conflicted Episcopal priest who has been demoted to an outer-borough church for trying to seduce a teenager at Manhattan's Church of the Heavenly Rest. Although he's pretty much failed as a pastor, he still holds tenuously onto his position, seeking out monies for the economically challenged diocese wherever he can. Walter harbors an ardent desire for boys. He spends his nights cruising gay bars and his days visiting Web sites ''for theologically minded adherents of S-and-M.'' He just can't let go of the ashes of Carlos, his one-time lover, and when he's not wishing to reconnect with the soul of his dead boyfriend, he's busy hating and despising the world. His rage flies out and attaches to objects, and the only place he feels comfortable is in the warm and barely lit bars; his attitude being that "all through his life things outside the church are just as holy as the crosses and the statues inside." And then there's John, an ex-claustrated monk who moves to Brooklyn Heights, and turns to a prostitute whose number he finds in The Village Voice. John has pretty much failed as a monk; "he had not let himself become absorbed into the monastic life; and out of insecurity, he had tried to protect his identity." When he wonders why God has forsaken him, the answer is, ''so you can know yourself." But life on the "outside" sees John preoccupied with carnal pursuits. From the beginning, Milk has an almost rhythmical, supernatural quality, which enchants and captivates at regular intervals. Steinke's prose is floating, fluid, and remarkably balanced, depicting flirtation, and the object of desire for all three characters held just out of reach. The frail Mary is forced to live with a husband who is more concerned with his image - his attempts to look sexy - than with his new family. Surrounded by her husband's ''Star Wars'' kitsch and other artifacts', including a ceramic unicorn, Mary becomes strange. She takes to hiding in closets for long sessions of prayer, and voices instruct her to

Darcy Steinke weaves together a wonderful journey where you observe spirituality, sexuality and the diversity of the human condition through the dark and ambiguous lens that is the writing of Ms. Steinke. There are few answers here because there are no "right and wrong" where these things are concerned. The mundane lives of the characters in this novel hide the complexities that lurk beneath the surface, the desires that drive us to take great risks for small rewards. The command of language is wonderful, and her take on view from the bottom that she exibited in Suicide Blonde is even more developed, so palatable in this book that you can taste the desperation.

Don't let the short length fool you, this is a book that packs a powerful punch. This story of three people, a new mother, a gay minister and a former monk, all searching for meaning in their lives, takes place in a wintry Brooklyn that is as bleakly beautiful as their internal struggles. It is a quiet book yet full of powerful imagry, with a sustained mood that is both hoepful and despairing.