Deeply moving and personal, told with restraint and great skill.
A finely crafted story of a young priest’s crisis of faith (and love) is the latest success from novelist (and ex-priest) L’Heureux (Having Everything, 1999, etc.).
Anybody who was ordained in the 1960s faced pretty stiff casualty rates from the start, and Father LeBlanc—idealistic, intellectual, liberal, and more than a tad naive—is the sort who is bound to find Church life hard going at the best of times. Assigned as the curate to a large working-class parish in South Boston, he alienates his superiors (and not a few of his parishioners) by preaching and counseling against the Vietnam War, segregated schools, and the pope’s condemnation of birth control. Reassigned to a small parish in an out-of-the-way resort town in New Hampshire, he is forced to cultivate the virtue of solitude as well as humility. His pastor, Father Moriarity, is an invalid dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease, lovingly tended by Rose, the parish housekeeper. Rose’s teenaged daughter Mandy is somewhat wild in the manner of teenaged girls, and one day she overdoses on cocaine. Pronounced dead by the doctor, she regains consciousness after Rose prays over her. A miracle? Just good fortune? Father LeBlanc (who was present at the scene) is in no doubt whatever and becomes more and more obsessed with Rose, whom he believes to be a saint. Around the same time, Annaka (a somewhat disturbed woman from the parish) develops an obsession of her own—with Father LeBlanc. Eventually, Father LeBlanc gets himself into trouble with both Rose and Annaka, and the miracle turns out to be much more problematic than it first appeared. Father LeBlanc has to decide whether he should remain a priest—and what he wants to do if he leaves—and, more importantly, whether he still believes in God.
Deeply moving and personal, told with restraint and great skill.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-87113-857-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Old wounds are healed and new loves found on Starbridge Close in this, the final novel in the bestselling sextet (Glittering Images, 1987, Mystical Paths, 1992, et al.), which, like its predecessors, transforms the private lives of English high churchmen into an absorbing novel of intrigue and mysteries, divine and temporal. In a nice symmetrical touch, the narrator is again Dr. Charles Ashworth, whose adventures began the series. Now in his 80s, Ashworth, prompted by the obituary of old nemesis Neville Aysgarth, recalls the events of ``the year of my third catastrophe.'' That year is 1965, and Ashworth is a bishop ``famous for defending tradition at a time when all traditions were under attack.'' Such rigid adherence to absolute truths is asking for trouble, and sure enough trouble is soon on its way. An elderly homosexual vicar is found beaten up; to avoid scandal, Ashworth hides the old man's porn collection from the police; son Michael threatens to marry a most unsuitable girl; Aysgarth is being suspiciously cagey about the Cathedral fund-raising accounts; and Lyle, Ashworth's beloved wife, suddenly dies. As Ashworth responds to these crises, grief and the knowledge that he had not helped Lyle when she needed it makes him behave erratically. He sleeps with a widow, drinks too much, quarrels with his sons and Aysgarth. He has a terrifying encounter in the Cathedral, which convinces him it is possessed by demons. But spiritual peace and new love—an old flame from the past turns up—only come to the bishop when charismatic Lewis Hall conducts a dramatic exorcism that reveals the Cathedral's demons to be Ashworth's long-suppressed guilt, and when aging mystic Jon Darrow elicits confessions from both Aysgarth and Ashworth. A superb climax to a sequence that has triumphantly vindicated that ill-assorted gang of four—plot, prayer, perfidy, and priests. (Book-of-the-Month Club selection; author tour)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-41206-9
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994
Japanese writer Endo (The Final Martyrs, 1994, etc.) continues his exploration of faith and anomie—in a deceptively simple and well-told story of spiritual inquiry that movingly explores all the big questions. The opening pages briefly introduce four people who will shortly, for varying reasons, join a Japanese tour-group travelling to India: Isobe, a businessman whose deceased wife, believing she would ``be reborn somewhere in this world,'' made him promise he would look for her; Mitsuko, a volunteer at the dead woman's hospital, who is troubled by her own past and her obsession with a former classmate; retired industrialist Kiguchi, still haunted by wartime memories of Burma's notorious Highway of Death; and Numanda, a gentle writer of children's books who wants to repay his debt to the bird that saved his life when he was desperately ill. The book investigates the role religion plays in contemporary Japan, where relatives attending a funeral politely question the Buddhist priest conducting the service, while ``not one of them really believed anything the priest was saying.'' As the trip gets under way, more disquiets are explored: Isobe can't forget how he ignored his wife when she was alive; Mitsuko hungers for love but can't abandon her cynicism; Kiguchi recalls a fellow veteran who saved his life by eating human flesh but then drank himself to death trying to forget what he had done; and Numanda muses on the central role nature has played in his life. The four finally experience their epiphanies on the banks of the Ganges at Varanasi, where the old and afflicted come to die and the faithful immerse themselves in the river. In this richly detailed setting, Endo offers a faith that, using the river as metaphor, comfortingly blends all the great religions together. Conflicts a bit too neatly resolved, but saved from mawkishness by strong and original characters.
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8112-1289-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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