Books: Giggles from the Choir Loft

THE INNOCENT CURATE by Paris Leary. 203 pages. Doubleday. $3.95.

U.S. satirists are sometimes at a loss to find a really big fat Establishment to skewer. The American college, Big Business, Suburbia and Madison Avenue may still make young men angry, but who is mad at the Episcopal Church? It is not even, like its parent body within the Anglican Communion, Established. Paris Leary, a 32-year-old poet, has rashly ignored all of these considerations in a first novel that invites the reader to share his evident hilarity at High Anglican priests, parishioners and monks at a small college town in upstate New York.

The curate of St. Clement’s, Schinderhook, N.Y., a beautiful young man of stupefying idiocy whom everyone calls “Sonny,” is visited by the stigmata—the five wounds of Christ. He bleeds in reproach to the worldly and the clever, it is supposed. But any serious social or theological point is hopelessly compromised by Leary’s relentless facetiousness, extracting what fun is available in copes, albs, chasubles, incense and the osseous relics of saints with humorous names. The pity is that Leary has evident talent and high spirits; if he could be persuaded to stay away from church for a while, he might write a good book.