His sister’s protracted decline in the cancer ward of a hospital in Manhattan engenders in Tono a slowly increasing sense of numbness, as he is gradually overwhelmed by grief.

Tono’s attempt to investigate The Church of Holy Love, Inc. is thwarted by Bebb himself, who lifts the inquiring mind of the would-be journalist away from his apparently shady dealings and his wife’s dark past, and fixes it upon the fair frame of his adopted daughter, Sharon.

Finally conferring sole stewardship of the Church of Holy Love upon Brownie, the preacher speedily moves north to Connecticut, where Tono (now known by his full name, Antonio) Parr has settled with his wife Sharon, their baby, and his two teenage nephews, Chris and Tony.

Antonio, whose life as a father, English teacher, and amateur sculptor is hazy and unrewarding, numbly observes Bebb’s energetic efforts to launch this new ecclesiastical endeavour.

His church finally ready for its congregation, Bebb sends out the ads and throws open the doors, only to be greeted by a small flock, not consistent with the exclusive New England crowd for which he had hoped.

Upon realising, following a heavily coded telephone conversation with Brownie, that Lucille has fled south back to Florida, Bebb and Antonio make their way down to Armadillo, only to discover that she has committed suicide.

Leo Bebb’s friendship with a wealthy septuagenarian, Gertrude Conover, which began while on the voyage to England at the close of Open Heart, becomes the basis for a new, explosive ministry partnership.

When only a small number turn up to a banquet prepared for over a hundred, Bebb preaches from Luke 14 – the parable of the great feast – and sends his inspired guests out into the highways and byways in search of the hungry, the lonely, and the passer-by.

In an extraordinary string of events consonant with the contemporary ‘Jesus Movement’, the banquet hall is filled with hungry guests, and a revival, led by Bebb and a young woman named Nancy Oglethorpe, breaks out in Princeton.

His decision to retreat to Gertrude Conover’s centre in Princeton yields little comfort, as he discovers Bebb embroiled in a battle with a professor of history, Virgil Roebuck, whose atheistic rants are disrupting the preacher’s meetings.

Still beset by uncertainty, and not knowing that Sharon has herself fled south to Florida, Antonio finds himself back in Connecticut, heading for a sexual liaison with an ex-student, Laura Fleishman.

Bebb’s homiletical musings on his humble beginnings in Poinsett, South Carolina, and his gift of an old house located there to Antonio and Sharon in his will, prompts them to discuss the possibility of some sort of pilgrimage to the old preacher’s home town.

The implied suggestion that a secret worthy of discovery lies in wait there for Sharon ensures that, accompanied by Gertrude Conover, the couple will make the journey south, leaving their children in the care of Tony and Laura.

Their shared, though hardly believed, suspicion that Bebb might be speaking to them from beyond the grave – a notion heartily supported by Gertrude – is made more difficult to refute by Antonio’s dreams, which are haunted by his deceased father-in-law, and his obligatory mysterious pronouncements.

Brownie joins the pilgrims in Poinsett, not knowing that this will be his last journey and resting place, as, following a bruising exchange of words with Babe, Bebb’s old friend suffers a heart attack and falls down dead.

Unwilling to fully abandon her theosophism, however, Gertrude begins to search for Bebb’s reincarnated soul, and finds it in the newly born local baby boy, Jimmy Bob Luby.

After graduating from Sutton High, where I taught English, he was accepted at Harvard, where he went with every intention of becoming Elia Kazan if not Tennessee Williams only to become instead Merrill, Lynch, Pierce, Fenner and whoever it is rolled into one.

He started a typing service his freshman year, branched out into Xeroxing as a sophomore, and by the time he was a junior was earning more than his tuition and switching his major from Drama to Economics.

These, he suggests, are: Belief versus unbelief, the ambiguities of life, the nature of sin, human lostness, spiritual homesickness, the quest for self-identity, the need for self-revelation, the search for meaning, and the possibility of joy.

In his autobiographical work, Now and Then (1983), Buechner remembers the inception of the novel:I was reading a magazine as I waited my turn at a barber shop one day when, triggered by a particular article and the photographs that went with it, there floated up out of some hitherto unexplored sub-cellar of me a character who was to dominate my life as a writer for the next six years and more.

[15]Critic Dale Brown adds further detail regarding the ‘particular article’ that Buechner found so compelling, noting that it was a 'Life magazine exposé of the Reverend Doctor Herman Keck Jr.', pastor of Calvary Grace Christian Church, based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Brown notes that he was ‘Famous for his advertisement, “Answer God’s call – start preaching today,” and for the mail-order theology degrees he dispensed to all who could pay the fees.

'[19] Elsewhere in Now and Then, Buechner claims that this fascination with the character of Bebb ‘supremely and without any question’ became the driving force behind his immediate commencement with a second novel centered around the mercurial preacher, and subsequently a third and, finally, a fourth.

[22] Brown further argues that this critical predilection for finding homilies in Buechner’s fiction is unfair, and largely unsupported by the novels themselves: ‘I’d be hard pressed to believe’, he writes, ‘that any uninformed readers of The Book of Bebb imagined that a minister was pulling the string behind the curtain’.

[23] David R. Ebitt strongly agrees with this assessment, asserting that:To describe Lion Country as deeply religious novel is to risk turning away some readers who would enjoy it enormously.

[24]Despite the common suggestion that Buechner’s work was becoming increasingly Christian in tone and preoccupation, Brown points out that the manner in which Lion Country was received by critics was generally ‘extremely positive’.

[30] Martin Waldron even suggested that, ‘This sometimes explosively funny novel reads as if it were plotted by Nathanael West or James Agee, with dialogue by Peter de Vries.’[31] Noting that the novel is ‘very different from anything else this major writer has yet produced’, Barbara Bannon writes that ‘Lion Country is a human comedy of complexity and persuasion […] two quite disparate elements fuse brilliantly in a novel that is genuinely entertaining and also genuinely moving.’[32] Both Harry T. Moore and Reynolds Price are similarly laudatory, the former claiming that ‘Buechner now reaches a new high level with the absorbing, tender and comic Lion Country’,[33] the latter that:Lion Country is Frederick Buechner's richest work, an unprecedented comedy which resounds with a depth and length that reconfirm not only his high position among living novelists, but our overdue doubt of attention and gratitude to him for craft, stamina, wisdom, and now laughter.

Literary critic Michael Putney called Open Heart ‘a wise book’, writing that this ‘extraordinary new novel’ was ‘antic, introspective, belly-laughing funny, eerily other-worldly, ribald, and devout.’[39]  In a review published by the Library Journal, B.M.

[40]The tetralogy as a whole drew positive reflections from a number of critics, including Roger Dione, who argued in the Los Angeles Times that Buechner remained ‘one of the most underrated novelists writing today’.