Disciples

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY MAR 31, 1997

A kidnapping and a series of murders at a religious cult prompt meditations on religious belief, death and dying in the latest from the maverick author of Telling Time and other novels. Harry Field, a retired 70-year-old history of science professor, is babysitting his infant granddaughter, Hazel, when the toddler is abducted by her father, Oliver Quinn, a drifter who is estranged from Judy, the child's mother. The devotee of a religious leader named Miller (who calls himself "God"), Oliver objects to Judy's relationship with David Leo, a black English professor. As David embarks on a cross-country rescue odyssey to rural New Hampshire, he is implicated in the death of Oliver, who falls from a waterfall overlooking the cult's compound. David is spirited by Miller's disciples to a remote island in Maine, where he's tried by a kangaroo court and then abandoned. Meanwhile, Lena Fowler Armstrong, an old flame of Harry's, preoccupied with astrology and mysticism, is seduced by Miller and eventually resolves to live among Miller's disciples. Narrated in the alternate voices of its many characters, the novel is well-paced, and Wright's approach to topical events is refreshingly unsensational. But his prose and characters are so mechanical that the underlying moral questions posed by this novel, about the meaning of death and the culture of Waco, never really come to life.