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Introduction: Gail Donohue Storey's The Lord's Motel
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10475 |
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BOOK WORLD
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1 / 1993 |
371 Words |
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A good man is indeed hard to find, as Flannery O'Connor taught us. But when a girl finds him, will he be any fun? That is one of the semicomic concerns of Gail Donohue Storey's heroine in The Lord's Motel, excerpted in the following pages. The heroine, Colleen Sweeney, is smart, single, and sexy, but jobs, not men, come looking for her. Except for her boyfriend Web: He's handsome, glitzy, and fun, but a world-class manipulator as well. A true love he will never be, and that is what she wants. Is there a doctor in the house?
Since appearing in September the book has won plaudits from reviewers across the nation, including one who called it "riotously funny and profoundly moving"--no mean achievement for a first-time novelist. And Storey does seem able to touch several deep chords beneath the surface hilarity, among them the question of how a person finds true love in a world in which love and sex are almost indistinguishable.
To address this and other questions, two commentaries follow the excerpt. Historian Richard Quebedeaux (p. 288) sees Colleen's dilemma as a familiar vapor rising from the sexual revolution. She and the other young women residing in the Lord's Motel are hungry for love, but they are talking sex not agape--an attitude that reflects the dominant culture of television, movies, and print media. Colleen's difficulty in finding Mr. Right, therefore, is related to the failure of modern religion to turn back the tide of selfishness in contemporary society, Quebedeaux argues. But The Lord's Motel is not simply about finding the right man, writes journalist Carol Troy in the second commentary (p. 294). It portrays a young woman going through an inner, spiritual transformation that allows her to become truly intimate with
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