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
Gradually deepening work that gives, by end, a view of the monastic life that’s steady, whole, intelligent, and moving.
A cloistered monk debuts with the increasingly captivating tale of a 19-year-old who becomes a novitiate and then a full-fledged monk in Canada, near Winnipeg.
Average readers may respond as does the lady, sitting next to Paul Seneschal on the bus, when he tells her that he wants to become a monk. “Why would anyone do that?” His answer, “To find meaning in life,” may trigger incredulity, and some readers, may even feel put off, as Paul’s parents do, especially his brash and outspoken mother, back in Paul’s hometown of St. Jean-Baptiste. In the monastery, after all, the monks wear wool habits, have shaved heads, attend prayer and song each day, sleep in one big room, and almost never speak except by sign language. Why would a normal young man choose such a life—working in the barn, bakery, piggery, or cheese house, in the fields during harvest time, and going entirely without, well, sex? At the start, in fact, Paul seems one-dimensional, almost shallow, and sexless to the point of the unrealistic—until he becomes infatuated with a muscular Scot named Martin and another form of cliché comes to the fore as Paul struggles against his desire so fiercely that he even considers—and tries—self-castration. And yet, near this point, Rougeau’s story also begins to grow richer, find its voice, and draw the reader in as Paul (renamed Antoine) matures, witnesses the deaths of other (sometimes eccentric, even outright crabby) monks, hosts a small group of Buddhists, learns the humility of taking life for exactly what it is, and, a handful of years later when he at last takes vows, discovers that the truth of the monastic purpose is “to discover his weight as a human being”—a notion that, by then, has meaning for the reader too.
Gradually deepening work that gives, by end, a view of the monastic life that’s steady, whole, intelligent, and moving.Pub Date: May 17, 2001
ISBN: 0-618-09499-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
Good and evil do battle again in this folksy follow-up to an Essence magazine bestseller.
The Southern-based Gospel United Church is in trouble again. The African-American church has thrived since its introduction in Church Folk (2001), but as it has spread across the United States and Africa, corruption has followed. The good Reverend Theophilus Simmons now heads up a congregation in St. Louis, where in addition to his own crew of colorful sinners, he must also plan for an upcoming conference. That conference should allow the righteous folk the chance to rein in some errant bishops. But Simmons and company may not be prepared to deal with thieving church officials who want to peddle an African Viagra-like, watermelon-based medicine stateside, using the international church as cover. Bowen (Up at the College, 2009, etc.) never leaves her readers in doubt that the godly will triumph and order will be restored, but she could have had more fun along the way. Although she lays on the colloquial language, making even her educated characters sound like stereotypes, she falls flat when it comes to description. Good is explained simply as being obedient and really meaning it, with more than one church-going character described as lax: “even though she technically qualified for salvation, she never went farther than getting saved.” Evil is much more fun, consisting of sex and drugs and corruption. But even that is anemically depicted, with tired sexual clichés for when the watermelon drug, used to boast energy and prowess, wears off, leaving men feeling “like a plop of poop.” Since these salacious scenes are probably the real draw, couched as they are in avowedly moral storytelling, the slathering on of adjectives might work for those who limit themselves to strictly Christian fiction. However, that appeal is limited. Figure in the loss of the hometown camaraderie that made the first Memphis-based book a success, and it's hard to see how this simplistic morality tale will sell.
Pub Date: July 28, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-57776-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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