Overview
From a writer of remarkable depth and courage, a brilliant and haunting novel that explores the intersection of spirituality and sexuality.
Mary is a new mother transformed by the birth of her baby. She is infatuated with the tiny creature, yet feels abandoned by her husband. As her baby sleeps in his crib, she doesn't know whether to kneel in her coat closet and pray or fantasize about sex. She seeks refuge in her old friend Walter, a lonely gay Episcopal priest, who privately struggles with his own contradictory desires. Still grieving over the death of his boyfriend, he finds himself dangerously attracted to a teenage boy. How can he lead his church when he is overwhelmed by nascent desires? Meanwhile Mary meets John, a monk who has just left his monastery after fifteen years because he feels abandoned by God and craves intimacy with a woman. These three characters' lives come together in ways that reveal how even our rawest, most confused impulses may contain elements of the divine.
Synopsis
From a writer of remarkable depth and courage, a brilliant and haunting novel that explores the intersection of spirituality and sexuality.
Mary is a new mother transformed by the birth of her baby. She is infatuated with the tiny creature, yet feels abandoned by her husband. As her baby sleeps in his crib, she doesn't know whether to kneel in her coat closet and pray or fantasize about sex. She seeks refuge in her old friend Walter, a lonely gay Episcopal priest, who privately struggles with his own contradictory desires. Still grieving over the death of his boyfriend, he finds himself dangerously attracted to a teenage boy. How can he lead his church when he is overwhelmed by nascent desires? Meanwhile Mary meets John, a monk who has just left his monastery after fifteen years because he feels abandoned by God and craves intimacy with a woman. These three characters' lives come together in ways that reveal how even our rawest, most confused impulses may contain elements of the divine.
The New York Times - Virginia Heffernan
At 131 pages, Milk completes its character studies using prayers, sex scenes and hallucinatory descriptions of the characters' shared neighborhood in winter. But if there's something suspicious about so heavy a novel being built on so little, the effect of the transpositions in ''Milk'' is unexpectedly exciting -- a throwback to the sordid religiosity of Jean Genet. Steinke has summoned a state of mind, the one required for both prayer and masturbation, that is abject, asocial, and she does not shy from giving it full representation.
Editorials
LA Times
"If the novel had an essence, a pithy core, Darcey Steinke would be its genius."Madison Smartt Bell
"Milk may be the most intense and extraordinary fusion of the erotic and the mystical since Bernini met Saint Theresa of Avila."New York Times
"Hallucinatory. [Suicidal Blonde] is a disturbing, poisonous fable of the dire consequences of derailed passion."New Yorker
"Steinke's prose repeatedly hints at the divine in tangible things."Newsday
"Fascinating."Time
"Erotic, beautifully crafted prose."Vanity Fair
"The characters in novelist Darcey Steinke's Milk (Bloomsbury) - a new mother, a gay Episcopal priest, and a lonely monk - form an erotic and spiritually enlightening threesome."Village Voice
"A jarring wisp of a novel."Washington Post
"The conjunction of sex and the spirit, bodies and souls, is fascinating."The New Yorker
Steinke’s idiosyncratic, unsentimental fourth novel continues her examination of sexual and religious obsession. While caring for a small baby and waiting for an absent husband, Mary sees her kitchen ceiling produce showers of sparks. She encounters a lapsed monk named John who suggests that her sparks may be an “aleph, a point in space that contains all points.” After sleeping with John, Mary abandons her husband and moves into the church where her friend Walter is the pastor. Walter is dogged by the memory of his dead lover, Carlos, even as he trawls New York for erotic excitement. All the characters struggle to establish a relationship with God through contact with those around them, but Steinke’s prose repeatedly hints at the divine in tangible things.Virginia Heffernan
At 131 pages, Milk completes its character studies using prayers, sex scenes and hallucinatory descriptions of the characters' shared neighborhood in winter. But if there's something suspicious about so heavy a novel being built on so little, the effect of the transpositions in ''Milk'' is unexpectedly exciting -- a throwback to the sordid religiosity of Jean Genet. Steinke has summoned a state of mind, the one required for both prayer and masturbation, that is abject, asocial, and she does not shy from giving it full representation.— The New York Times