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Disciples
Harry Field, an elderly professor looking after his baby granddaughter, allows Oliver, the child's absentee father, to take her to the park. Only too late do Harry and his daughter Judy realize that the child has fallen into the hands of the cult to which Oliver belongs—a group led by Miller, a dangerous man who claims to be God.
353 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 1, 1997
41 people want to read
About the author
Austin Wright
28 books106 followersAustin McGiffert Wright was a novelist, literary critic and professor emeritus of English at the University of Cincinnati.
He grew up in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, son of the geographer John Kirtland Wright and Katharine McGiffert Wright, and namesake of his uncle, Austin Tappan Wright, writer of the utopian novel, Islandia. He graduated from Harvard University in 1943. He served in the Army (1943–1946). He graduated from the University of Chicago, with a master's degree in 1948, and a Ph.D. in 1959.
He married Sara Hull Wright, in 1950. They had three children: Joanna Wright (died 2000), Katharine Wright of Berkeley, CA, and Margaret Wright, and two granddaughters, Madeline Giscombe and Elizabeth Perkins.
He grew up in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, son of the geographer John Kirtland Wright and Katharine McGiffert Wright, and namesake of his uncle, Austin Tappan Wright, writer of the utopian novel, Islandia. He graduated from Harvard University in 1943. He served in the Army (1943–1946). He graduated from the University of Chicago, with a master's degree in 1948, and a Ph.D. in 1959.
He married Sara Hull Wright, in 1950. They had three children: Joanna Wright (died 2000), Katharine Wright of Berkeley, CA, and Margaret Wright, and two granddaughters, Madeline Giscombe and Elizabeth Perkins.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
April 29, 2016
One of those bizarre books where you wonder what type of recreational pharmaceuticals might have been involved in the writing of said book.
Just say No ... JUST SAY NOOOOO!!!!!
By the way ... I've read this book twice and the only way I know that I've read it before is because there is a library card in the back of the book showing that I'd checked it out in 2001.
When a book is so horrid that you can't even remember reading it ... that's BAD.
Just say No ... JUST SAY NOOOOO!!!!!
By the way ... I've read this book twice and the only way I know that I've read it before is because there is a library card in the back of the book showing that I'd checked it out in 2001.
When a book is so horrid that you can't even remember reading it ... that's BAD.
November 24, 2013
At the dawn of American fiction, Charles Brockden Brown wrote a disturbing novel about a young man who murders his family under the influence of a ventriloquist's voice he mistakes for God. For all its contrivance, "Wieland" (1798) dramatically explores potential complications for a new republic loosed from religious and political authority to its own imagination.
As the 1993 tragedy at Waco, Texas, illustrated, the embers of religious zealotry are still smoldering in America, waiting for the right mixture of paranoia and isolation to burst into flame.
Last year John Updike concluded "In the Beauty of the Lilies," a novel about 20th-century American faith, with a fictionalized version of the David Koresh compound. But the book's detached point of view did little to push us beyond the alienating bafflement of watching the compound burn.
Austin Wright's new novel, "Disciples," is a welcome insight on fanatical revelations. The challenge of such a story is to bring the bizarre to ordinary readers without merely confirming our prejudices or excusing a fanatic's danger. Wright avoids both extremes by exploring the tendency toward idolatry in a range of relationships.
The novel opens with a rip in the contemplative life of Harry Field, a professor of the history of science, a debunker of religious frauds and charlatans. When his daughter's estranged lover asks to take his granddaughter to a park one day, Harry foolishly agrees and sets in motion a nervewracking confrontation with a reclusive millennial sect.
His frantic search for the kidnapped baby among a commune of lost souls clinging to their guru only confirms Harry's confidence in the supremacy of empirical science. But in his efforts to repress fears about his health, the novel suggests that his devotion to science is no less a form of faith than the fanatics' faith in a personal god.
The crisis inspires the latent heroism of David Leo, an academic protg, who hopes his risks in the backwoods will win the professor's favor and the mother's romantic attention. However, David, a sophisticated black man, finds himself humiliated by the racist zealots he confronts and then subtly excluded by the white friends he hoped to impress.
He alone eventually comes to understand that idolatry and the numbing reliance it generates are not restricted to isolated communes of fanatics.
At the center of this crisis is Miller, a defrocked minister who survived a brutal mugging and came to believe he could save those who confess he is God.
In an interview between Harry and this one-eyed deity, Miller explains his followers' devotion: "They are stripped of ambition, freed from self. They don't care for doctrine. They shrink from authority voices demanding them to choose, choose, choose. We give them shelter and leadership and relieve them from responsibility."
Wright's lifetime of scholarship on William Faulkner at the University of Cincinnati is evident in the novel's shifting points of view. The story comes to us in a series of private testimonies from characters on all sides of the crisis, from the mother who ignores everything but her baby, to a mentally retarded member of the Miller sect who falls prey to tragically contradictory influences.
The blinding self-righteousness of these characters sometimes creates terror reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe's gothic stories. "Disciples" presents an extraordinary delineation of the causes and functions of fanatical devotion, but it also jolts us from the easy assumption that such tendencies are restricted to the alien world of fanatical groups.
http://www.csmonitor.com/1998/0106/01...
As the 1993 tragedy at Waco, Texas, illustrated, the embers of religious zealotry are still smoldering in America, waiting for the right mixture of paranoia and isolation to burst into flame.
Last year John Updike concluded "In the Beauty of the Lilies," a novel about 20th-century American faith, with a fictionalized version of the David Koresh compound. But the book's detached point of view did little to push us beyond the alienating bafflement of watching the compound burn.
Austin Wright's new novel, "Disciples," is a welcome insight on fanatical revelations. The challenge of such a story is to bring the bizarre to ordinary readers without merely confirming our prejudices or excusing a fanatic's danger. Wright avoids both extremes by exploring the tendency toward idolatry in a range of relationships.
The novel opens with a rip in the contemplative life of Harry Field, a professor of the history of science, a debunker of religious frauds and charlatans. When his daughter's estranged lover asks to take his granddaughter to a park one day, Harry foolishly agrees and sets in motion a nervewracking confrontation with a reclusive millennial sect.
His frantic search for the kidnapped baby among a commune of lost souls clinging to their guru only confirms Harry's confidence in the supremacy of empirical science. But in his efforts to repress fears about his health, the novel suggests that his devotion to science is no less a form of faith than the fanatics' faith in a personal god.
The crisis inspires the latent heroism of David Leo, an academic protg, who hopes his risks in the backwoods will win the professor's favor and the mother's romantic attention. However, David, a sophisticated black man, finds himself humiliated by the racist zealots he confronts and then subtly excluded by the white friends he hoped to impress.
He alone eventually comes to understand that idolatry and the numbing reliance it generates are not restricted to isolated communes of fanatics.
At the center of this crisis is Miller, a defrocked minister who survived a brutal mugging and came to believe he could save those who confess he is God.
In an interview between Harry and this one-eyed deity, Miller explains his followers' devotion: "They are stripped of ambition, freed from self. They don't care for doctrine. They shrink from authority voices demanding them to choose, choose, choose. We give them shelter and leadership and relieve them from responsibility."
Wright's lifetime of scholarship on William Faulkner at the University of Cincinnati is evident in the novel's shifting points of view. The story comes to us in a series of private testimonies from characters on all sides of the crisis, from the mother who ignores everything but her baby, to a mentally retarded member of the Miller sect who falls prey to tragically contradictory influences.
The blinding self-righteousness of these characters sometimes creates terror reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe's gothic stories. "Disciples" presents an extraordinary delineation of the causes and functions of fanatical devotion, but it also jolts us from the easy assumption that such tendencies are restricted to the alien world of fanatical groups.
http://www.csmonitor.com/1998/0106/01...
June 24, 2020
I really liked this book. I loved the innovative way the topic of God was tackled. God, disciples, gurus, religion, atheism & nihilism are some of the topics which are tackled here in this book through a strong prose form. Austin Wright was indeed a very phenomenal writer. The book falls in the category of literary fiction undoubtedly & is a testament to the way disciples tend to depend on a guru because they need to be told what to do. The story is suspenseful right up till the end. Pages just keep turning & yet, the topics dealt with here in 'Disciples' are highly philosophical. I hope to read more of Austin Wright's books in the near future.
November 8, 2022
This was a DNF for me. I did like the first couple chapters that I read but I couldn’t get through the whole thing with the book having no quotation marks when someone is speaking.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews