'The Book of Longings,' by Sue Monk Kidd book review

July 07, 2024

Jesus’s wife is back.

The kids won’t believe it now, but in 1988 the biggest thing we had to complain about was Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ,” a Hollywood adaptation of a novel by Nikos Kazantzakis that includes a vision of Jesus married to Mary Magdalene. Protesters picketed theaters, and in Paris they set one on fire. Scorsese received death threats. Several countries banned the film.

In 2003, the trouble with Mrs. Christ erupted again over a theological thriller called “The Da Vinci Code.” Weaving together a hodgepodge of hoaxes, hokum and anti-Catholic propaganda, Dan Brown reignited speculation that Jesus had married Mary Magdalene. The Vatican was not amused.

A decade later, the matrimonial theory seemed to receive the imprimatur of the Harvard Divinity School. In 2012, Karen King, one of the country’s most renowned religion scholars, rocked the Christian world by revealing an ancient fragment of papyrus that contains the phrase, “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife. . . .’” A subsequent investigation by the Atlantic reported that the so-called “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” had been “discovered” by a man who once ran pornographic websites featuring his clairvoyant wife who talked with angels. In response to that revelation, Professor King bravely conceded, “It tips the balance towards forgery.”

Behold: Into this controversial arena now steps Sue Monk Kidd with “The Book of Longings,” a novel about Jesus’s wife. Such a story from Kidd makes sense. Although best known for her 2001 blockbuster, “The Secret Life of Bees,” she began her writing career by publishing spiritual memoirs that described her move from the Baptist theology of her youth to the insights of Christian mystics old and new. In the 20th-anniversary edition of “The Dance of the Dissident Daughter,” Kidd said she was motivated by a desire to introduce “readers to the lost history of the sacred feminine and to the jolting idea that God can be visualized in feminine ways.” Naturally, that jolting idea was not welcomed in some quarters.

This time around, there will be a little fulmination on a few websites that traffic in Christian bile, but, otherwise, “The Book of Longings” is not likely to inspire much newsworthy condemnation. Though no more probable than ever, the hypothesis that Jesus was married has lost most of its ability to shock, and, thank goddess, the once controversial affirmations of feminist spirituality have attained bumper-sticker currency.

Besides, Kidd has no desire to offend with this fervent story. “I am deeply and reverentially aware that Jesus is a figure to whom millions of people are devoted,” she writes in the author’s note. “His impact on the history of Western civilization is incomparable.”

That incomparable impact is the context of “The Book of Longings,” but not its focus. For better or worse, Kidd has succeeded in writing a novel about Jesus’s wife, not Jesus. She also sidesteps the Mary Magdalene controversy by presenting a fully invented character: Her narrator-wife is Ana, the brilliant daughter of Herod’s head scribe. If the idea of Jesus marrying into Herod’s court sounds audacious, just wait: Ana is also Judas’s sister.

And you thought your family was complicated!

Raised in relative wealth and sophistication, Ana can read Aramaic, Greek, Hebrew and Latin. Encouraged by the radical ideas of an impudent aunt that every precocious girl should have, Ana develops a passionate interest in the silenced stories of the Scriptures. Determined to alleviate “the sting of being erased,” she secretly writes the lost histories of Eve, Bathsheba, Jezebel and other nasty women. But she’s not just an illuminating feminist historian, she’s also a brave activist. When a friend is raped by a Roman guard and then brutally punished by her family, Ana lashes out at the sexist cultural and legal standards of the day.

Alas, in A.D. 14 Galilee, there are not many appropriate positions for a teenager with a degree in women’s studies. Much of the early drama of “The Book of Longings” involves Ana’s inevitable conflicts with her parents as they struggle to find someone to marry their scandalous daughter. In the middle of one of these family squabbles, Ana meets a young man named Jesus hanging out in a local cave. “I could tell you were different from other women,” he says. That this pickup line works should be counted among the greatest miracles Jesus performed.

Kidd has constructed the plot to keep Jesus offstage through much of the novel. That’s crucial to elevating Ana’s position but tends to reduce her beloved to a really sweet guy with gorgeous eyes. “He could set me free,” Ana swoons. He’s not just the Righteous One, he’s Mr. Right. (He’s even okay with her using contraception.) Although we get a few Christly platitudes here and there — “Jesus liked to say we shouldn’t worry about what we’d eat or drink” — there’s nothing particularly striking about his message, little of the discomfiting radicalism of the Gospels. In deference to our enlightened skepticism, here Jesus’s ministry is scrubbed of the spontaneous healings that are so prominent in the New Testament. And like some other writers before her, Kidd has transformed the story to make Jesus the naive tool of more violent reformers.

I have no objection to creative reimaginings of the life of Jesus, and I was raised in a Christian tradition that emphasizes the feminine qualities of God. But the tares and the wheat grow side by side in “The Book of Longings.” The period details are fascinating, but the dialogue can feel over-starched: “I’ve lived all twenty years of my life with this stigma,” Jesus says. “I know the pain you speak of.” Pronouncements such as that mingled with casual banter make the book sound like a costume drama trying to find its tone. Also, Ana’s feminist consciousness seems immaculately conceived, wholly uncontaminated by the trappings of her culture. Her angry critique of the Male-Only Disciples Policy would make Catharine MacKinnon proud.

Confined in Ana’s earnest narration, the story provides no critical distance, no irony, no real thematic ambiguity. Despite its efforts to deconstruct Christian orthodoxy, “The Book of Longings” insists on its own orthodoxy. If Jesus is the Son of God, Ana is the Daughter of Sophia, the feminine personification of Holy Wisdom. She even performs her own clever resurrection stunt.

The best historical fiction disorients us by demonstrating the uncanny nature of the past — a world like and not like ours, woven through with strands of ancient DNA. Unfortunately, “The Book of Longings” rarely confronts us with anything that might challenge our contemporary liberalism. The novel finally ends up in a commune where Ana and her gnostic sisters discuss “a plethora of other ideas about women that turned traditionally held beliefs upside down.” That agenda feels entirely preordained.

Ron Charles writes about books for The Washington Post and hosts TotallyHipVideoBookReview.com.

The Book of Longings

By Sue Monk Kidd

Viking. 432 pp. $28

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