Donna Seaman, Booklist, January 1999
Fuller Man. Oct. 1999. 200p. Moyer Bell.
The Voice That Was in Travel. 1999. 128p. Univ. of Oklahoma.
Two new works about the different faces of faith from the prolific and expressionistic author of Flutie (1998).
In the novel Fuller Man (a term for Jesus), the Williges of Missouri are a family divided, and Hadley, Glancy's serious and observant narrator, struggles to bridge the gap. On one side stand her newspaper-reporter father and his brother, Farley, a gifted photographer. Earthy and adventurous, they revel in the freedom their work grants them. Hadley's mother and her pious and forbidding sister, Mary, occupy the opposite shore. They are dutiful and unhappy women, bound too tightly to the church and rigid concepts of responsibility to family. Hadley and her siblings, Nealy and Gus, flounder among the willful and contentious adults. Gus never finds himself, Nealy becomes a missionary in Nigeria, and Hadley is torn between her faith, her desire for a newspaper career, and her hope for a family of her own. As Glancy insightfully and poetically explores the clash between faith and experience, and between individual passions and the sacrifices required by the church, she infuses her tale with the music of scripture and the emotion of prayer.
Half-German and half-Cherokee, Glancy uses road stories to explore the nature of faith in contemporary Native American life in her fourth short-story collection. Like her novel, these tales dramatize the conflict between the artistic impulse and the tenets of religion, but here her focus is on the overlay of Native American beliefs with Christianity. As her imaginative stories reveal, this forced commingling of faiths continues to ferment as American Indians attempt to keep their culture alive while casinos vie with churches in attracting people who are hoping for miracles.