Saving Grandma

by Frank Schaeffer

Overview

Calvin Becker’s family are good Bible-believing missionaries; it’s their duty to spread the Word to everyone they meet. But now they face their greatest spiritual challenge right in their own home: Grandma. Foulmouthed, foul-tempered, and heathen through and through, she’s staying in the spare room, recuperating from a broken hip—and making it next to impossible for the Beckers to do the Lord’s work.
 
Calvin’s pious mom is determined to save Grandma’s soul, even if she’s doing it through gritted teeth. His father’s spending more and more time in his room, blasting opera records to drown out the old lady’s voice. And Calvin wishes things would just get back to normal so he could go on vacation and see his beloved Jennifer.
 
But now Calvin’s starting to understand Grandma a little better—and appreciate her a little more. After all, misery loves company.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780425157763
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/01/1997
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	638,631
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.95(d)

About the Author

Frank Schaeffer has worked as a director on a number of movies, both theatrical and television. Together with Frank J. Gruber, he also wrote the screenplay for the film version of Portofino. He lives in Massachussetts.

What People are Saying About This

Andre Dubus

"A triumph...you will laugh out loud."

Editorial Reviews

Thirteen-year-old Calvin Becker gets all the best lines in this irreverent, amusing sequel to Schaeffer's 1992 Portofino. Like that novel, this one follows the adventures of the Becker family, Presbyterian missionaries, as they try to convert the people of "Pagan Europe" in the late 1960s. Hapless, accident-prone Calvin, confused by the twin adolescent terrors of sex and the Foreknowledge/Predestination debate, finds his life complicated further when foul-mouthed, chronically sacrilegious Grandma breaks her hip and moves in with the family. While his father goes increasingly insane, Calvin emerges from erotic daydreams about his English pen-pal Jennifer long enough to form an unholy alliance with Grandma and to run off seeking the counsel of an aging Italian painter (befriended in the first book). Schaeffer's slapstick jokes and often tender evocations of youth make for an uneasy but entertaining cross between Portnoy's Complaint and TV's The Wonder Years. His nuanced characterization of Calvinpart malicious prankster, part helpless victim of his absurd familybreathes life into the stock ensemble cast and heavy-handed religious satire. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

With the same humor and warmth that distinguished Portofino (Macmillan, 1992), Schaeffer continues the story of Calvin Becker, his missionary family, and the love his life, Jennifer. No matter how the family tries to convince Calvin to spread the word of the Lord and convert Europe's youth, Calvin is much more interested in getting into trouble. After his grandmother breaks her hip and has to move in with the family, the plot really begins to move. A most interesting relationship develops between Calvin and his supposedly evil grandmother. Born to American missionary parents in Switzerland and raised a fundamentalist, Schaeffer also ran away from boarding school; thus, he can give great insight into his protagonist. Portofino will soon be made into a movie, and one can hope the same will happen to the present work. A fine acquisition for all libraries.Vicki J. Cecil, Hartford City P.L., Ind.

Library Journal

In a sequel to Portofino (1992), Schaeffer offers an uneven, if sweet-natured, comic tale of a boy's struggle for independence from his often-loony missionary family. Fifteen-year-old Calvin Becker is burdened with two squabbling, goody-goody older sisters, a volatile, quixotic father who's often stricken by dark periods the family calls "Moods," and an emotionally overwrought mother who instructs Calvin to pray for wet dreams so he won't be tempted to masturbate. The Beckers run L'Arche, a Calvinist Presbyterian mission in Switzerland; when the supply of converts runs low, they turn their attention to "saving" handicapped children from the home next door. Calvin's only friend, through all this, is Jean-Pierre, a French boy with cerebral palsy who shares with home-schooled Calvin a near-inability to read; Calvin's only true comfort, it seems, is spinning elaborate fantasies about Jennifer, the beautiful English girl he sees for two weeks every year when the Beckers vacation in Italy. Calvin's mom is always crowing about having rescued his father from a coarse, heathen, working-class background, so it's little surprise that when Dad's mean-tempered mother, who spews bad language, racial slurs, and blasphemy in abundance, breaks her hip and comes to stay, the family is thrown into an uproar. Unhinged by stress, Calvin's father manages to escalate an obscure theological dispute with a neighbor into a full-scale feud that almost gets the Beckers expelled from Switzerland. Just when the fracas has settled down, Grandma contracts pneumonia, and when Calvin, who aspires to be a doctor, learns that his parents don't plan to treat her, he smuggles veterinary penicillin to her and saves herlife—creating a strange bond between the two and providing the catalyst for Calvin's realization that it's finally time for him to escape for keeps. Good material, though with jokes that are often overplayed and a scattered, episodic structure that slows the story's drive.

Kirkus Reviews