“Close your eyes and think of your favorite animal. What is it?”
“A lion.”
“Have you ever pet a lion?”
“No, a lion would bite me.”
“In paradise Jehovah will make all the animals peaceful with humans. We can pet lions and tigers and even have them as pets.”
In his debut novel Confessions of a Teenage Jesus Jerk, Tony DuShane has created a highly engaging narrative that is as hilarious as it is deeply moving. From the book’s opening sentence—“One long pubic hair sprung out from my baby-smooth pelvis area” —DuShane’s fictitious protagonist Gabe Dagsland is a mess of raging hormones. Like any other teenage boy confronting his impending manhood, Gabe preoccupies himself with his best friends, video games, style, and his never ending obsession with girls. Unlike his “worldly” peers, Gabe and his close circle of friends spend weekends proselytizing door to door as Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Moving in chronological order through Gabe’s high school years, the novel reads more like a memoir than a work of fiction. DuShane holds a close lens to the Kingdom Hall’s intricacies and inner-workings and, through Gabe, provides an exposé on life as teenage Jehovah’s Witness. The tension between Gabe’s typical teenage desires, his growing awareness of sexuality, and his religion results in awkwardly hilarious situations which are so realistically conveyed that one can only guess DuShane himself must have experienced it, at least in part. When Gabe awakes from a weird dream with a fever, he assumes “demons are messing with me,” and remembers “Sister Sheehand told me about a time when the demons took all the blankets off her bed and held her down for a minute. The elders traced it to a Fleetwood Mac album where Stevie Nicks was dressed like a witch.” The novel fills pages of similarly amusing personal anecdotes: the shame of preaching at an attractive classmate’s door, the embarrassment of being called out to leave class during sex ed, the strange interrogations of a sexual nature that are commonly experienced by church members.
When a church member calls to confess sodomy to Gabe’s father, a church “elder,” Gabe listens to the entire conversation through another line: “We started to have sex… and in the heat of the moment, I stuck my penis in and started going in and out… I didn’t know my penis was in her butt.” Before issuing judgment, Gabe’s father asks, “How many times did you go in and out?” In an organization so sexually repressed as to think that hand holding and kissing are inappropriate forms of affection, Gabe and his “brothers” (fellow Witnesses) are made to think of their bodies in terms nearly criminal. While this provides endless humor via similarly ridiculous interrogations made by the Church’s elders, we see clearly the psychological backlash it has on Gabe and his friends as they attempt to negotiate their own sexuality within the strict doctrinal expectations of their faith.
Interestingly, however ridiculous the organization and its doctrine seem through Gabe’s eyes and to his best friend Peter, we see that they are infinitely bound to their religion. Taught that Armageddon is looming, they believe Jehovah’s Witnesses will be saved, resurrected, and live eternally in the “new system,” an earthly paradise. Gabe and his friends legitimately buy into this. While they have no qualms with writing curse words in the margins of the Watchtower during bible study, and talk endlessly about girls and breasts and sex, they also believe that if they jeopardize their status within the congregation, they might lose their shot at getting into the coveted new system. In their vision, this earthly paradise also means sex multiple times per day with a beautiful wife. Like many believers, they conform, doing what they’re told to do without much questioning until circumstances force a change.
In this respect, Gabe is at times a difficult protagonist. As much as we feel for his plight as a young Jehovah’s Witness dealing with the complexities of teenage-hood, his blind faith is somewhat jarring; Gabe is a boy who needs a good shake. Through his eyes, readers see how ridiculous this organization is, and yet he stands by it. Again, this speaks volumes for the stronghold the church has on its members, and one can only imagine that DuShane must have experienced this type of relationship with faith himself. However hard it is for an outsider to understand this level of unwavering belief, the novel’s intriguing plot, paired with DuShane’s fresh narrative voice, keeps the reader highly engaged.
With crisp dialogue and well-developed, intriguing characters, DuShane’s debut is an all around success. A wholly unique coming of age story, it elicits laughter, maybe even a few tears, and once begun, it’s almost impossible to put down.
(February, 2010)
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