Agatha of Little Neon by Claire Luchette

The four of us were born in different months of the same year, each of us twenty when we became novitiates, twenty-two when we made our vows. We were twenty-nine when we moved from Lackawanna, just south of Buffalo, to Woonsocket. Back then, our chins were bald, our minds sharp. Our faith was firm and founded. We were fixed to one another, like parts of some strange, asymmetrical body: Frances was the mouth; Mary Lucille, the heart; Therese, the legs. And I, Agatha, the eyes.

There were a lot of parts missing, I suppose. But for a while we didn't realize it. For a while it seemed like enough.

Agatha is one of four Catholic sisters who are called to Woonsocket, a struggling industrial town in the clogged northeastern corner of Rhode Island, to live at a halfway house. The house is called Little Neon for its bright green color, and it houses addicts and the needy: Baby, Pete, Horse, Lawnmower Jill, who rides a lawnmower around because she lost her license, and perhaps most notably, Tim Gary, from whom cancer took half a jaw. Though Agatha is quieter and more reserved than her sisters, she's excited to start this new chapter of her religious life--see how she dreams of one day growing chin hairs of her own, like the beloved Mother Superior she and the others leave behind in Buffalo--but the experience at Little Neon threatens to challenge her more than the other three.

It begins when Agatha is asked by the diocese to fill in as a geometry teacher at the local Catholic high school. She is peeled away from Frances, Mary Lucille, Therese, who spend their days planning Bible Studies and rummage sales. At school she struggles with a characteristically understated attraction to Nadia, a biology teacher, and watches a young and troubled lesbian student with motherly anxiety. The harsh disciplinary atmosphere of the school, combined with the house's cascading failures to help its several charges, challenge Agatha's commitment and lead her away from her longed-for future, her many-haired chin.

Agatha of Little Neon is the third book I have read this year about nuns--though, as Agatha chides, I should say, "sisters religious," because they are not cloistered away in a monastery like true nuns--and, with The Corner That Held Them and Mariette in Ecstasy, it forms a really fascinating trilogy. Like those novels, it concerns itself with the nature of a community of women, but Agatha's anxiety to do good in the world updates and revises those novels. The Corner That Held Them is a kitchen-cabinet book and Mariette a book about religious ecstasy, but Agatha of Little Neon is a book about disenchantment: not the loss of faith, necessarily, but the loss of religious vocation. It is about, among other things, the failure of old models of religious life to deal with the most desperate needs of 21st century people.

There is a pointed MFA quality about this debut novel: the short chapters, each of which is fairly contained and luminous, as well as, one gets the impression, meticulously workshopped. Minor characters--especially the not-stoic-enough Tim Gary--capture all the attention while Agatha sits back, a pair of "eyes" only. This can be frustrating, but it gives the book a quiet power, also, as if it is centered not on an ecstatic saint, like Mariette, but one of the background sisters who only want to make a good living in a world that loves mystics but overlook saints.