The Hallelujah Side

"It had been a Second Coming sky all day, which meant they might be in heaven by this evening," begins Rhoda Huffey's The Hallelujah Side, an unlikely but highly winning coming-of-age tale about faith, fundamentalism, and rock-and-roll. When the longed-for Rapture happens, young Roxanne Fish worries that she'll be going down instead of up. For one thing, she hasn't been saved, in spite of what she tells her Assembly of God parents, and for another, she has discovered a mighty set of rock-and-roll pipes inside her. She also talks to the hedge, whiles away long sermons by drawing big-breasted sinners climbing trees, and squeezes her legs together in church so she'll see the "Northern Lights." But all that is nothing compared to the devil's music. Why, the Fishes aren't even allowed to watch television:

Pastor Fish preached against TV as the one-eyed monster, but Brother Ransom needed it for crop news. Corn was going up and down like a yo-yo. You got it all on the Farmer's Report. Then you turned it off, but sometimes Little Richard was too fast for you.

When, after years of self-imposed deprivation--including stuffing her ears with Kleenex during hymns--Roxanne meets a young Aretha Franklin and gets the chance to sing backup in one of her concerts, it only highlights the real conflict. "You cannot love the world and be saved too. It is one or the other," Reverend Fish tells his daughter, and Roxanne recognizes the true problem: "Now she knew why God would not save her. For she loved the world and all the things thereof. She loved the bushes and the birds that flew. She loved the Iowa dirt."

Rhoda Huffey masterfully evokes that world, down to the last tube of Tangerine Kiss lipstick and can of Campbell's tomato soup. In fact, some of the novel's keenest pleasures lie in its details: Roxanne's personal demon, named Fred; her faith-healing Uncle Roland, who smells like milk and says hello by staring; the Reverend Fish's battered copy of Das Kapital, which he has heavily annotated with Biblical refutations. (Why? "For fun," of course.) If the author occasionally draws her comic strokes with too wide a brush, it's a forgivable flaw: this is one religious family that can be made figures of fun without losing their essential humanity. The Hallelujah Side has funny and moving things to say about God and Little Richard--and even in a book full of miracles, that's no small feat. --Chloe Byrne