A PILGRIM'S DIGRESS: My Perilous, Fumbling Quest for the Celestial City

The tradition of satirizing the manners and morals of America's faithful is a long and mostly honorable one, as deeply rooted as religious practice itself in this still God-fearing nation. But in this series of vignettes by a "lapsed Protestant" and Internet humorist, it is often unclear whether he is fully committed to the role of rueful bystander he has assumed. An admiring profile of a chaplain in Las Vegas jostles a rather patronizing account of a visit to the Christian Booksellers Association convention, where the music company videos "basically spin the same simple message about sin and salvation." Blessed with apparently unlimited financial resources and a pleasantly blank Day-Timer, this gifted loose cannon experiences and narrates the pleasures of the Berkshires' Canyon Ranch spa, and reveals the wonders of a homegrown Garden of Eden in Lucas, Kansas. Given the paucity of explorer-adventurers in our overscheduled era, it is also truly wonderful that someone (else) has 36 days to make a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela and report back. Yet after a while, the changes of scene and subject become jarring, the insights a little less than profound. If Spalding had started his pilgrimage with something more than skepticism and an incisive pen, it would have given this erratically entertaining book the consistency and form that ultimately evade it. (Mar. 4)