By Kate Crane

The New Press, 168 pages, $21.95

While Reverend Billy, the creation of Lower East Side activist-actor Bill Talen, has a respectable following in New York and throughout the U.S., there are some people who can't stand him; his anticapitalist, deep-South preacher schtick sticks in their gullets and kickstarts their agita. For them, his white suit and copper-colored Morrissey 'do are the visual equivalent of fingernails across a chalkboard. Maybe that's why reviewers virtually ignored What Should I Do if Reverend Billy Is in My Store? when it was released a few months back. If so, it's a shame, because the good reverend didn't write this book. Bill Talen did.

The Church of Stop Shopping, Billy's organization and entourage, fingers consumerism as the source of America's socioeconomic dysfunction and spiritual malaise. Using theatrics and creative direct action, the group entreats shoppers to step away from the purchase, be it a stuffed Donald Duck or a Starbucks double decaf vanilla soy latte. While What Should I Do is not entirely devoid of Billy's proselytizing rhetoric—you get hit with a "hallelujah" here and there—it is a sincere memoir, covering the development of the Reverend Billy character and musing on life in an increasingly corporatized city and country. Throughout, Talen pauses to point out ghosts of New York history: the old Astor Place Diner, Duchamp in Washington Square Park, the corner where buses picked up Freedom Riders on their way to Birmingham.

You don't have to appreciate the Billy character to appreciate its evolution. Talen's vivid prose depicts a world peopled by other preachers (the ordained variety), the 50-foot models that tower on billboards over city streets ("like erogenous zones the size of national parks") and the tourists and residents who routinely ignore, jeer, cheer and occasionally join him. Talen is frank about stagefright, missed cues and the embarrassment that comes with making an ass of yourself in public.

"The Red Chair" and "The Raven and the Wrecking Ball" (chapters two and five) make this book. In "The Red Chair," Talen describes insomniac sessions in a filthy, foul-smelling red armchair on the stage of St. Clement's. A "raffish little house of God" with soot-caked stained-glass windows near the Lincoln Tunnel, St. Clement's doubled as a theater. Talen was stage manager here, where Tennessee Williams' cousin, Rev. Sidney Lanier, was vicar in the 60s.

During the service, the priest, praying in a lifted voice to God Almighty, stands in the middle of the current play's set, which might be the tenement kitchen of Look Back in Anger, with a big dirty sink and the sensation that a Method actor in a dirty T-shirt is about to enter belching stage left. The contradictions loom. If you are taking communion in St. Clement's, you could find yourself looking up from your knees in the middle of the set of No Exit, Sartre's depiction of hell.

In "The Raven and the Wrecking Ball," Talen recounts the campaign to save Poe House, where Poe wrote "The Raven." NYU, which wanted to replace it with a law school building, claimed Poe had only crashed there occasionally to nurse morphine sickness, and that the internet would meet the needs of history students and tourists. This chapter is a story within a story: In a lengthy sermon, Billy leads a Tishman Auditorium audience through the past year's fight. When he details his arrest after a reading of "The Raven" from the roof of Poe House, there's no inspirational hoo-hah—he had food poisoning, and when he approached the Tombs, "my heart [sunk]. They have…pre-junk-bond-era computers, the sort you'd play Pac Man or Pong on, the sort that could…[lose] your record so that you disappear forever." But at 5 a.m., Billy has an encounter that would impress Poe himself.

Unlike that sermon, the Poe House story doesn't close in a feverish crescendo. Yes, there was a victory—sort of. After the night at Tishman (and a final reading of "The Raven") NYU proposed a reconstruction of Poe House within the larger structure, with the facade retained and a Poe room with a separate entrance. Talen attributes this in part to a legal battle, the intervention of big-name New Yorkers like Lou Reed, and a grassroots campaign, but ultimately he credits "The Raven." "The poem itself had a power that prolonged the life of the house where it was written… One hundred fifty years later, the words of 'The Raven' had saved at least part of the house where the poem's revisions finally ceased."

Talen's belief in the power of literature and storytelling is rarely encountered in activist circles. Throughout What Should I Do, he posits that our culture is constructed on a foundation of stories, but those core cultural myths are increasingly peddled and copyrighted by a few giant corporations: "merchandising vehicles that…never have the qualities of a well-told story, because such a thing would compete with the selling of the products." According to Talen, "A really powerful story is not easily controlled as it passes into the rapt audience. A real story must have in it…the Unknown."

Tousling with the unknown is at the heart of What Should I Do. The Church of Stop Shopping coalesced in 1999 not only to chip away at consumerism, but to "help each other with the Godsightings": snips of serendipitous coincidence and wonder, human interactions that knock us off balance a bit. The book reprints a number of anecdotes that people have sent in: meeting a grizzled former trucker who's got an airplane hangar full of songbirds; goofing with a parent with Alzheimer's; sudden camaraderie with a stranger in a waiting room. They're the experiences that fill us with flashes of joy or make us shake our heads for their sheer oddness. For Talen, who strives to bring out the "odd" in "God," these stories represent a "bright unclaimed space" that begets the weird and the glorious.

"Social change," Talen believes, "will come when we value our own stories more than the media's special effects." o