Leo Bebb

Leo Bebb is a fictional clergyman who is featured in The Book of Bebb, a tetralogy by Frederick Buechner. Cynthia Ozick calls him a "lustily flawed hero".^[1]

Background[]

Leo Bebb is the head of a religious diploma mill in Florida who had once served five years in a prison on a charge of exposing himself before a group of children. Buechner says of Bebb that "he came, unexpected and unbidden, from a part of myself no less mysterious and inaccessible than the part where dreams come from."^[2]

Physical appearance[]

When Bebb is first introduced, in Lion Country, he is described as follows:

A workable, Tweedledum mouth with the lines at the corners, the hinge marks, making an almost perfect H with the tight lips. A face plump but firm, pale but not sick pale. He was high-polish bald and had hardly a trace of facial hair, beard or eyebrows even. The eyes were jazzy and wide open and expectant, as if he'd just pulled a rabbit out of a hat or was waiting for me to.^[3]

Evaluation[]

W. Dale Brown asks the question,

"Is it possible that the unlikeliest of vessels, the obvious shyster, that round ball of contradictions and failings, could function as an instrument of grace?"^[4]

Brown goes on to suggest that "Buechner's repeated use of ambiguous protagonists as channels of grace suggests Graham Greene, J. F. Powers and Robertson Davies."^[5]

References[]