Books like The Search for Maggie Ward

So I read somewhere that the late Andrew Greeley either was or had studied for the catholic priesthood. I downloaded this thinking it would be something along the lines of a Father Dowling mystery. Oh, my gosh! Not so much, folks. Not at all.We are transported instantly to the summer of 1946 from the first page of the book. World War II has been over nearly a year, and Americans have a confident uncertainty about their lives. The war claimed its share of lives, and it claimed another casualty, too—faith. At least, that’s how it is for former navy Commander Jerry Keenan. A member of a devoutly catholic and liberal democratic family, Jerry has determined he wants to see America before settling down to law school and the family business. It is in the act of this discovery that he encounters her! She is ghostly—almost translucent and beautifully and perfectly created. For the faithless Jerry, it is lust at first sight, and that first sight happens in a Tucson railroad station café. He turns on the Irish charm, and the full-breasted slender red-haired woman meets his dazzle with her own, and this book is off to a rollercoaster plot you won’t soon forget.She is an irresistible force; he an immovable object—or so it seems at first. His heart, hardened by war, has lost its ability to feel spiritual things, and a new kind of atheism has replaced the old family faith. She’s a war widow. She lost a baby to what we now call Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, so she is much, much wiser than her 18 years.He decides to include her in his multi-day tour of Arizona stopping as he does at ghost towns and old mines. By day two, they are heating up the already hot car with their in-car frisky behavior. By night two, they are sharing a bed. She is other worldly—almost angelic at times. It is as if she can read his mind and see deep into his soul.At one point in their travels, they encounter a fearsome storm which literally flings them about. The storm triggers a host of remembrances and dreams for him of comrades killed and Japanese lives taken by virtue of his actions as a flyer. When he comes to at the end of the storm, she is gone. This author’s description of the encounter between the two and their car trip is just shy of erotic in spots. My friends, these are most emphatically not squeaky clean Father Dowling mysteries. Greeley’s descriptions of the youthful Maggie Ward, who originally introduces herself to the navy flyboy as Andrea King, are hauntingly memorable for lots of reasons, not the least of which is their sometimes explicit nature.Our navy pilot returns home to Chicago eventually, but the girl has so altered his life that he cannot stop obsessing over her. He begins a cross-country search for her that takes him from San Francisco to the button-down streets of Salt Lake City, to Denver, Philadelphia, and eventually home to Chicago. You just can’t help but root for this guy and hope he finds her. So vivid is the writing here that you want to search for her yourself.There are some fascinating dialogues here about God and the nature of God from the girl’s perspective and from his. Ironically enough, it is he, the war-weary atheist who forcefully teaches her that grace is real and that, no matter what her past is, she is not automatically damned.Greeley masterfully captures 1946 America here. He talks about that element of society that feared a return to the pre-war Great Depression while feeling the confidence to demand more consumer goods and new ways to spend that money they saved during the war. You’ll learn about the songs of 1946 and that year’s movies. If profanity, and sometimes explicit sexual descriptions are a problem for you, you may want to pass this one by. But Greeley deals with interesting topics here regarding God and His persona, if you will, that could make this one an interesting read.I admit I was captured by his writing style and the vivid nature of his descriptions of the effervescent Andrea King/Maggie Ward. Her beauty, giving nature, strong spirit, wisdom, and snappy wit could doubtless make a young ex-flyboy soar higher than ever he did in the best of his planes during the war. But she’s also just a half a breath away from the scary side of crazed and unstable, too. There are her inexplicable fears when they visit certain places in the desolate Arizona desert. Why does she lie to him and tell him early on that her name is Andrea? How is she able to so often and so fully read his mind? There’s a bit of the supernatural here—just enough to make this deliciously fascinating.A word about the narration: I had an unabridged cassette copy of this my public library has and read it that way. The commercial version uses several narrators to do the various voices of the characters. The female voice of Maggie Ward is absolutely melodic and sounds very much 18, and that may have had some impact on my belief that this will be a book I won’t quickly dismiss or forget. I don’t know whether a single voice narration would have quite the same impact.