Jeremy and Carol, open-faced towards mutual adventuring. Between the interweaving farm 50 miles from NY city and NY city itself, where the characters, naively, stoically, or deliberately, wait to transcend those bars to get at each other’s plot. It’s as if something is already pent up in this book, too. “In the shadows of a butcher’s window, hanging carcasses and the goose-pimpled body of a turkey pressed against the metal bars like creatures in a cage.” “Children were holy, a gift from the Lord a woman’s body was His sacred instrument.” There is a hushed and fearful aura over this book, too, a book that I have covered in white paper to disguise its resemblance to a market stall paperback shocker of yore… Sarr’s wife, meanwhile, with unthinking talk, ripe for child-bearing when the time is also ripe…Yes, interweaving with the simultaneous chance but fateful encounters of the city, like Jeremy and Carol, whereover, whomover the same jet flies a few seconds after it flew over the farm…or so I guess. The reticence of Sarr’s mother, “The Lord don’t mean for us to love one another too much”, reticent with power. Interweaving, too, of the Poroth farm, the huge earnestly shaped and decorated cottonbread turned to a yellow mass by hungry harvest helpers’ fingers, like this old book now has yellowed pages that would have been mulched by never being read, I guess, but I have taken it up to loosen its pages. Jets flew high above the Earth, where angels played there was room up there for both.” Primitive symbolism, perhaps, but it worked he was certain of it. “Fertile women meant fertile crops their long straight hair meant long straight stalks of corn. I cannot do justice to the plot, merely my entrancement by a book that I have long wondered why it is so legendary….till now. It is certainly a compulsive style that is perfect for itself, and if for itself, for you, too, as Jeremy Freirs journeys towards Sarr and Deborah Poroth’s farm, in the midst of naive close-walking semi-Amish people, their “other ways of knowing”, and their “drowsy” isolated country, the Poroths naive themselves, Deborah with a hint of attractiveness beneath the serious clothes, together with the ominous fateful hints of the Troets, the Old One, the Poroth mother, and how Jeremy was destined to read the advert in New York, away from where it was pinned up, for accommodation here… That question notwithstanding, I have now progressed from being captivated to being captured by this text. “How long had it been since his citified cock had been touched by actual sunlight?”

The Ceremonies by T.E.D. Klein