Volume 49 Number 4 Article 5
June 2021
London Street: A Memoir (Book Review) London Street: A Memoir (Book Review)
James C. Schaap
Dordt University
Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcollections.dordt.edu/pro_rege
Part of the Christianity Commons, and the Higher Education Commons
Recommended Citation Recommended Citation
Schaap, James C. (2021) "London Street: A Memoir (Book Review),"
Pro
Rege
: Vol. 49: No. 4, 36 - 37.
Available at: https://digitalcollections.dordt.edu/pro_rege/vol49/iss4/5
This Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the University Publications at Dordt Digital
Collections. It has been accepted for inclusion in Pro Rege by an authorized administrator of Dordt Digital
Collections. For more information, please contact [email protected].
36 Pro Rege—June 2021
Let me be honest. I have two signicant problems
talking about this book. e rst is that it’s a memoir.
Memoirs aren’t inherently problematic, but they do
make us make judgments about people’s lives, judg-
ments that aren’t always pleasant to make. “Here’s
what happened,” they report, and then they expect
us simply to believe it—or, more to the point, expect
us not to guess that there isn’t more to the events
than we’re being told. I kept wishing Jane Grioen’s
London Streetwas a novel, not a memoir. If it were a
novel, it would be easier to talk about because its truth
would have been ctional and not, as in the case, bi-
ography.
And then there’s this. Jane Grioen’s London
Streetexamines a life that is so close to mine, so exact-
ing with respect to what it felt like to grow up within
the powerful reach of a peculiar American religious
community—mine too—at a particular time in that
community’s history, that at times throughout the
book, I could not help feeling she was talking about
me, and blushing.
Frederick Manfred used to say that ethnic writ-
ers—and he considered himself one—had to be
careful not to use too many “ins,” too much ethnic
minutiae, because readers who don’t share heritage or
background can quickly feel walled out. In the world
of the old-line Dutch Reformed, a Sunday pepper-
mint is as much as a sacrament as communion bread.
Jane Grioen is so precise, so exacting in the
verities of a post-World War II Christian Reformed
world, that the exposition almost hurt. At one point
in the memoir, she uses the lyrics from an old psalm
no CRC ever sings anymore. I started reading those
lyrics without remembering, and suddenly the music
simply returned, eerily drawn from memory’s deep
recesses. I enjoyed that phenomenon, and I loved the
fact that she played with the nuances of a theological
history that tried so hard to keep us—Jane Grioen
and me—well away from “worldliness.”
“Worldliness.” I don’t know that I’ve ever spoken
to my children about the dangers of “worldliness.”
at word would likely have no psychic resonance
with either of them. But darkness still arises in me
when I see that word because the evil that constitutes
its horror is still resonant, even if the word itself has
lost what was once its inherent danger. “Worldliness”
creates abundant darkness in the story Jane Grioen
tells of her life, as well it should, saith the old Calvinist.
And now, since I’m telling you about Jane
Grioen’s life, I am myself falling into sin because I
can’t help the feeling that I’m gossiping. e life she
opens up on the pages of her memoir is so vivid to
those of us who grew up as she did that simply tell-
ing you about it makes me feel I’m talking behind
the back of a member of my own small community.
And I am.
Let me say just a word or two about the genre of
memoir. When I say that I wished she’d written this
as a novel, I mean that the opportunities for her story
to carry universal truth, or so it seems to me, are sim-
ply more available. London Street is Jane Grioen’s
story, right down to her preachers’ names (both of
them, by the way, occupied the pulpit at First CRC,
Sioux Center!). Because I knew both of those preach-
ers quite well, felt their stunning impact, meeting
them in the story actually threw me, and will throw a
reader like me, o the narrative.
Memoir tests the faith of the reader in a way that
ction doesn’t. I kept second-guessing Grioen about
the weave and the fabric of the story. For instance, she
gives scant reference to her husband. I’m sorry that’s
true because his relative absence makes me wonder
about their relationship, which is not, nor need it be,
somehow a part of the story she tells.
While it’s true that critical readers might greet a
ctional account of this life with similar questions,
when the writer’s commitment to veriable detail cre-
ates a narrative that’s as exact as London Street, there
are too many opportunities for me to wonder whether
others who know the story would note some signi-
cantly “other” details of the events—i.e., what does
her father remember of this moment or that, where he
does remember, and how might he tell the story with
a dierent focus?
But those questions have far more to do with
genre of London Street than they do with book itself.
It is a memoir. It is not ction.
On the other hand, the deliberate and convinc-
ing exactness by which she catches the nuances of the
world she grew up in is the memoir’s great strength,
and I loved reading it, all of it. London Street, the
street in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on which Ms.
Grioen was raised, was in every way a small town,
even though she grew up in a city. If you’re Dutch
Reformed and you don’t like the title—too British,
maybe—ne; just rename it Oostburg or Lynden or
London Street: A Memoir. Jane E. Griffioen. Eugene, Oregon: Resource Publications, 2020.
248 pp. ISBN: 978-1-7252-6755-8. Reviewed by Dr. James C. Schaap, Emeritus Professor
of English, Dordt University.
Pro Rege—June 2021 37
Zeeland or Whitinsville, all of which are cut from the
same ethno-religious fabric.
So, ironically, one of the problems I have been
talking about in her memoir is an immense attribute:
by talking about it, I can’t help but feel as if I’m talk-
ing behind her back. She prompts guilt by evoking
scenes so rich within my own memory that I know it
all, chapter-and-verse.
At the bottom of the story, two deep and dicult
concerns eventually emerge. First, mental illness. Much
of the memoir arises from a story Grioen didn’t grow
up with, even though she did, a story of her mother’s
girlhood horror and humiliation, a story which hap-
pened long before Grioen herself was born.
But the shame her mother suered—humilia-
tion at the hands of a family and a community that
simply repressed the story, locked it up behind locked
doors, acted as if it hadn’t happened—is the real vil-
lainy. What happened to her mother put her mother,
her sister, and herself into Pine Rest (and that too is
an “in”—into a mental hospital) at dierent times in
their individual lives.
But Grioen doesn’t stop there. Why are there
stories that really can’t be spoken of in this peculiar
tightly knit community? What she wants to an-
swer—and she does—is that we all would rather not
mention them, given that we (of the old-line Dutch
Reformed cultural and theological ethos) don’t want
to blame a sovereign God we extol as a great lover and
Creator of Heaven and Earth.
Shame, Lewis Smedes says in Shame and Grace:
Healing the Shame We Don’t Deserve, is the dark side
of “family values.” It’s the blessed curse of a deeply
caring family and community.
Some say Calvinism rests on two signicant pil-
lars—the sovereignty of God and the depravity of
man. at dynamic duo is at the heart of things in
the life and the story of Jane Grioen.London Street
is something of a rarity, a memoir that is maybe all
about theological doctrine.
Which is not to say she rejects the doctrine or the
man who dispenses it. Her father, who, late in life,
wanders back into the Protestant Reformed Church of
his youth (that’s an “in” too), is the source of that over-
powering theology, the theology at times you can’t help
thinking she would like to blame for the tonnage of
emotional problems that’s there in her own story.
But she can’t. ere’s still something there in
him she won’t forsake—and, oddly enough, it’s love.
Speaking of her father, she says, “He might be a pris-
oner to his theology, but he hadn’t locked his heart
away.” e source of terrifying dogma that threatens
to lock up the family in its own theological icebox is
her father, a man who has literally given his life—held
down two jobs for as long as she can remember—for
the sake of a family he has always loved hugely, and a
wife who had a child before he married her.
It would be nice if we could nail down the true
villainy in all of this, but Jane Grioen can’t do it,
and neither can we, not with the kind of exactness
some readers might delight in discovering. Puzzle
pieces are missing from this memoir, but then often
enough they’re missing from our own puzzles too.
at’s life. Even for the Dutch Reformed.
Scriptural Reflections on History. K. J. Popma. Translated and edited by Harry Van Dyke.
Aalten. The Netherlands: Wordbridge Publishing, 2020. ISBN: 978-90-76660-57-8, x + 142
pp. Reviewed by Keith C. Sewell, Emeritus Professor of History, Dordt University.
Addressing the American Historical Association
in 1951, E. Harris Harbison spoke of the rise of an
Augustinian-style interest in the meaning of history.
He was right. Beginning in the 1930s, and deepening
in the 1940s and early 1950s, a highly diverse range
of Christians oered their thoughts on the subject,
including Herbert Wood (1934), L. E. Elliott-Binns
(1943), Oscar Cullmann (1945), Emil Brunner
(1947), Eric Rust (1947), Herbert Buttereld (1948/9),
Karl Löwith (1949), Eric Preiss (1949/50), C. S.
Lewis (1950), Jean Danielou (1950), and Christopher
Dawson (1951). It is hard not to conclude that the
deepening crisis of the 1930s, the Second World War,
and the coming of the Cold War had a great deal to
do with this development.
Scriptural Reections on History, now published for
the rst time in English, was part of this movement.
It originally appeared as Calvinistische geschiedenis-
beschouwing in 1945 and was published by Wever of
Franeker. Its author was Klaas J. Popma (1903-86), a
classical scholar who was among those inuenced by
the philosophical work of Dirk H. . Vollenhoven
(1892-1978) and Herman Dooyeweerd (1894-1977).
Many Reformed people in the Netherlands knew of
him for his seven-volume work on the Heidelberg
Catechism, Levensbeschouwing (1958-65), while
English-language readers may know his A Battle for
Righteousness: e Message of the Book of Job (1998).
