One of the enduring Christian mysteries is the existence of stigmatics (``people who bear in their bodies the injuries of Christ's crucifixion''). Hansen's third novel (astonishingly different from his Western historicals, Desperadoes, 1979, and The Assassination of Jesse James, 1987) is about a young stigmatic in an upstate New York priory in 1906. Mariette Baptiste is a 17-year-old postulant seeking to join the Sisters of the Crucifixion, a 200-year-old order with its motherhouse in Louvain, Belgium. The narrative covers the six months of Mariette's stay at the priory. She arrives in August, already ``the gossip of the summer'' because of her beauty and background. She is the daughter of the wealthy local doctor and the sister of the prioress, Mother Celine, 20 years her senior. The doctor, miserable at losing a second daughter in this way, feels Mariette is too ``high-strung'' for the convent; but for Father Marriott, the old priest who hears the sisters' confessions and becomes Mariette's most ardent champion, she is not neurotic but chaste. Hansen sets Mariette's preternatural experiences against the rhythms of priory life and the all-encompassing rhythms of the natural world. He is particularly good at dramatizing the central tension of priory life: the nuns' need for mutual affection, ruled impermissible because it distracts from their ``grandest passion,'' Jesus Christ. Mariette first feels Christ's wounds on Christmas Eve, as her sister is dying of cancer. Soon hundreds of lay people are coming to the priory, hoping to glimpse the stigmatic. The new prioress, initially skeptical, becomes convinced that Mariette's wounds are miraculous after the doctor has examined them; nonetheless, alarmed by the disruption of priory life, she sends Mariette home. Since the reader never doubts the authenticity of Mariette's experience, the only suspense element is the priory's response to it. But what Hansen has achieved, through his immaculate narration and (in the Joycean sense) his invisibility, is a notable act of witness.
Pub Date: Oct. 23, 1991
ISBN: 0-06-018214-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1991
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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