Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read?

Hello and welcome to Bookworm.

This is Michael Silverblad, and today my guest is Loisanne Yamanaka.

Her most recent book, published by Faris Strauss and Giroux, is Father of the Four

Passages.

She won the ABA, the American Book Award,

for her last novel, Heads by Harry.

She's the winner of a Lannin Literary Prize.

She's the author as well of the first two books

in her previous trilogy, Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers,

Blue's Hanging.

The trilogy was completed by Heads by Harry, and now Father of the Four Passages.

Loisanne has mentioned to me that she has a bad cold today, and the subject of this book

is going to be pretty tragic as well, so please don't mistake her sepulchral intonations.

Because, in a sense, this book is a very unusual one. It's called the Father of the Four

Passages, and the entire book, as we reach its end, we realize has been written as an act, a spiritual act of healing, both of a character within the book and, if we read the acknowledgments carefully, of a character outside the book as well.

And I wanted to talk to you because the book brings up as a result the contrast between baptism and paganism, which has been a theme of the previous novels as well. And I wanted to talk to you

about the difficulty of asking fiction to function as an act of belief. You know, I always believed,

...