The Lords of Folly

I couldn't help comparing the Son-of-a-b*tchin' Davy Crockett Boys with the Swamp Rats from the MASH series. Irreverent, fun-loving, but with an underlying layer of kindness, these guys are downright loveable in their goofy way. I'd like to follow their lives and know how they age...

Gene Logsdon makes his first appearance as a book-length novelist in The Lords of Folly. A longtime writer of how-to-do-it books and essays on the pratfalls of modern agriculture, Logsdon is an experienced writer. I wondered, though, how successfully he would make the leap to the very different kind of writing practiced by the novelist. The plot is well summarized above. There is more than a little autobiography in the novel, as any reader of Logsdon's 1998 memoir, You Can Go Home Again, can attest. He borrows themes and arguments from that book, but this novel is not merely reheated leftovers. If one way of judging the success of a novel, even a comic novel, is that you care about the characters by the end, Logsdon has certainly accomplished this. Some Catholics will wince at several of the characters' thoughts and activities. But only the most hidebound dogmatists will miss the fact that criticism, even of churches, is often worth scrutiny, even if it is finally rejected. That is how change for the better is accomplished. But one must judge a novel as to whether it is a good story. If humorous situations, plot twists, suspense, and the occasional bellylaugh, make a good story, The Lords of Folly satisfies on all accounts.

The cast of characters in The Lords of Folly reminded me of a Carl Hiaasen novel--some of them crazy but very human in their foibles and fantasies. Logsdon's wierd sense of humor, not only makes it a great read but also allows the reader to enter into deeper questions of religion, morality, faith, sexuality, love and ecology. Even though the novel's setting takes place in a Catholic seminary, its appeal is universal. The Lords of Folly takes us back to a time when seminarians were isolated physically and sexually, as society was entering the sexual revolution and the Catholic Church was beginning to experience one of its greatest reformations since Luther. The characters in The Lords of Folly come of age in this maelstrom of change, discovery and craziness. I laughed a lot and cried a little. I couldn't put it down.