A Portable Egypt is a religious novel for people who are drawn to religion against their better judgment. It centers on four people who have become embroiled in abortion politics: Mim Como, who does not feel at home in religion but to whom religion is a recurrent necessity; Alan Lonigan, who feels at home nowhere else, but whose religion puts him in an impossible position; Sarita Bunge, to whom religion is alien because she has art; and Bob Morgenzahl, to whom religion is unnecessary because he has compassionate action.
The Egypt of the title is not the geographical but the mythical Egypt: the place of slavery from which the biblical Israelites escaped. Mim — compulsively drawn to Jewish unorthodoxy after a damaging brush with Catholic orthodoxy — doubts that the tyranny of the womb can be escaped. She has become an eloquent extempore speaker at abortion rights rallies, but has been underemployed in an office job for years; ever since fleeing her marriage to Alan, and ending the pregnancy he had persuaded her into, she is afraid of her capacity to hurt.
Alan, still a defender of Catholic orthodoxy, writes opinion columns against abortion and modern liberties in general, but is broken-hearted at losing Mim and still wonders how her soul might be saved. Bob, the doctor at the local abortion clinic, found Mim an appealing patient and is happy to meet her again years later at a dangerous time for his clinic and a difficult time in his life — but is not sure what to do with a woman who loves his rejected religion and whose earlier decisiveness has given way to an endless vacillation.
Sarita is a dressmaker, and a visionary: she tries to intervene on the others’ behalf through her exuberant satirical encounters with the Virgin Mary, the snake from the Garden of Eden, King Arthur, Sigmund Freud, and other denizens of the beyond, discovering both the satisfactions and the limits of art as a political tool.
In an unusual juxtaposition of irony and tenderness, Catherine Madsen has approached a contentious issue through the wounds and tentative recoveries of characters who are trying to learn how to live.
"A PORTABLE EGYPT is that rare, almost unheard-of creature: a ´political´ novel that treats a divisive issue not as a chasm that runs between people, but as one that runs within them. This is a brave work that avoids easy answers." —Dara Horn
"A PORTABLE EGYPT is a beautifully written and positively brilliant book. Catherine Madsen explores the issue of abortion, not as a political abstraction, but as that issue is struggled with and struggled against in the lives of women and men. In an era when the great mysteries of life and death are being reduced to a war of bumper stickers, Madsen´s novel confronts the reader with the many dimensions of what it means to be human. The measure of her achievement is in how she extends humanity even to those whose politics some readers might find reprehensible. In doing so, she respects the humanity of us all." —Julius Lester
"Catherine Madsen is one of the most original thinkers I know, and an addictive storyteller." —Lindsy Van Gelder
