Book review: “Only Begotten Daughter” by James Morrow

Julie Katz is in hell — by choice. And she sees this black-bearded, thirtyish man sprinkling water on the heads of one tormented soul after the next, each according to schedule.

“My name’s Julie Katz.”

“Ah, the famous Julie Katz,” the water-giver said cryptically, locking his dark shining eyes on her. A strong Semitic nose, a wide intelligent brow — quite a handsome fellow, really, marred only by the garish holes in his ankles and wrists. “Your arrival is all we’ve been hearing about lately.”

Julie Katz of Atlantic City, USA, circa 1990, meet your half-brother Jesus.

She’d heard rumors he was in Buenos Aries.

“Nope. Dead. Nailed to a cross.” Jesus poked an index finger into his violated wrist. “So how’d they kill you?”

“I’m not dead.”

“Then what are you doing here?”

Well, Julie says, she wasn’t happy in New Jersey and couldn’t figure out her purpose. “And you thought hell would be nicer?” Julie finds Jesus rude.

“Don’t you know how I am?”

“Yes, my well-dressed little sister, I know who you are, and I have nothing to say to you…Please go away, daughter of God.”

 

Our Mother

In James Morrow’s 1990 novel Only Begotten Daughter, Julie Katz spends her life, waiting to hear from her mother.

(Of course, in a novel like this, God is female. Morrow is not the sort of writer who’s tiptoeing through theological gardens when he can wear hobnail boots instead. After all, he’s got a short-tempered Jesus in hell.)

She never does — unless that conversation she has with a sponge named Amanda at the very end of the book is a mother-daughter chat.  The sponge suggests the possibility.

Just a theory, but the data are provocative. I mean, look at me. Faceless, shapeless, holey, undifferentiated, Jewish, inscrutable…and a hermaphrodite to boot.  Years ago, I told you sponges cannot be dismembered, for each part quickly becomes the whole. To wit, I’m both immortal and infinite.

Julie isn’t so sure.

 

“He lies”

She’s just spent the whole novel interacting with Satan, a being who, unlike her mother, is willing to talk to her any time she wants although, as everyone tells her, “He lies. Not always, but often.”

You might even say the same for Morrow although writing fiction about the daughter of a female God isn’t exactly lying. It’s a kind of playacting.

Still, there are a great many people who would find Morrow and his book and Julie Katz terribly offensive. Of course, they’re never likely to read Only Begotten Daughter.

 

Birthing the daughter of God

To those who might consider reading the book, a word to the wise: The more you know about the Bible and Jesus, the more fun you’ll have with Morrow’s story.

But only if you can handle that Jesus is in hell, that God is a woman (or maybe a sponge), and that, on the first day of September, 1974, a celibate Jewish recluse gives birth to Julie Katz.

Well, actually, he doesn’t give birth to her. The sperm he sold at the local sperm bank — it was an easy way to make money, and fun too — spontaneously conceived Julie through “inverse parthenogenesis.”

Wikipedia tells us: “Parthenogenesis is a natural form of asexual reproduction in which the embryo develops directly from an egg without need for fertilization. Parthenogenesis occurs naturally in some plants, algae, invertebrate animal species (including nematodes, some tardigrades, water fleas, some scorpions, aphids, some mites, some bees, some Phasmatodea, and parasitic wasps), and a few vertebrates, such as some fish, amphibians, and reptiles.”

The ”inverse” part of this is that, instead of an egg, the conception occurs in Murray Jacob Katz’s sperm.

(Which, of course, might suggest the idea that Mary’s virgin birth of Jesus in Christian theology was caused by parthenogenesis, a rare heretical idea that Morrow doesn’t grab and run with.)

 

“Odd pleasurable quaking”

Morrow’s having fun in Only Begotten Daughter. He’s not trying to create an alternate universe which “explains” the Bible stories. Like any good comedian, he’s taking the ultimate in sacred and playing with it.

For instance, when Julie carries out her first miracle, curing a blind boy, there is a curious bodily reaction:

Between her thighs she felt an odd pleasurable quaking…The pleasurable throb returned: warm, wondrous shocks fluttering upward from her vagina.

For all her darkness, [Julie’s friend] Phoebe seemed suddenly pale. Yes, friend, God’s daughter isn’t somebody to mess with. Trip up God’s daughter, and your body becomes a sack of blisters.

This, of course, is hugely sacrilegious because it brings to mind the question of how Jesus felt when he worked a miracle. This is something that’s never asked, but, really, what did it feel like for the Messiah?

And, to be sure, it must have been a little scary for the disciples. It’s one thing to talk back to your leader, and quite another to talk back to someone who can send a bunch of demons into a herd of pigs.

 

“Not a crowded place”

Or there is the time Satan and Julie are talking about heaven, and Satan says that heaven isn’t a crowded place. A million souls? asks Julie. No. Ten thousand? No. One thousand? No.

“Four.”

“Four?”

“There are four people in heaven. Enoch and Elijah, for starters. I couldn’t do anything about that — it’s in Scripture. Then there’s Saint Peter, of course. And, finally, Murray Katz.”

“Pop? He was a Jew.”

“Yes, but consider his connections. Of all beings in the cosmos, he alone was selected to gestate God’s daughter.”

No Jesus? “The last time I saw Jesus,” Satan says, “he was working in some hospice in Buenos Aires.”

 

“You did?”

Wow, that’s quite a revelation.  But, as everyone tells Julie, Satan lies. Not always, but often.

And the evidence is there for Julie to see when she decides to go to hell and stumbles upon her half-brother.

And then her father:

“Pop! Pop!”

“Julie?…Were you murdered, honey?”

“I’m not dead. I thought I’d be happier here.”

“You did?”

 

To the edge of logic and beyond

This is Only Begotten Daughter. Morrow pushes the wrinkles of the original gospel stories to the edge of logic and beyond.

He’s not trying to shake anyone’s faith — after all, if your faith can be shaken by a novel, how strong is it?  He’s fooling around with the original story in a slapdash manner.

In this way, Only Begotten Daughter is much different from Christopher Moore’s 2002 comic novel Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal. While pushing for laughs, Moore took the gospel stories seriously enough that he fit his humor within their borders.

Morrow, by contrast, moves the child-of-god story up to modern times and writes it not so much as a theological event but as mythology. He might have written a similar novel about a modern Odysseus returning home to Chicago from the wars or a Romeo and Juliet in Albuquerque.

Only Begotten Daughter isn’t as satisfying as Lamb, but it’s still a fun read.

But only if you can handle a female god who may be a sponge, Jesus in hell, inverse parthenogenesis,…

Patrick T. Reardon

8.24.25