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.

Mariette in Ecstasy by Ron Hansen

She pets Mariette's wrist and kisses a knuckle. She whispers, "We are so privileged." She holds the palm open and kisses it. "You have turned your face from me too often. You have been frightened by my affection."

With reverence Sister Hermance licks the blood inside the hand wound. "I have tasted you. See?" Tears streak shining paths down her cheeks as she says, "Ever since I first met you, I have loved you more than myself."

Mariette Baptist is a teenager when she leaves her home to join an order of French nuns living in upstate New York. Her sister, Mother Celine, is the prioress at the nunnery, and their father is a severe and skeptical doctor who is befuddled and disappointed by his daughters' calling. As a "postulant"--that is, a probationary not-yet nun--Mariette distinguishes herself through her piety. She confesses to the nunnery priest, Pere Marriott, that she often has visions of Christ in which they converse, and during which she begs to experience the kind of suffering that will bring her closer to him. And yet her piety--and her beauty--are not prized by everyone; to some of the nuns it looks like pride or arrogance. These differences are brought to a crisis when Mariette begins to manifest the stigmata: the wounds in Christ's hand, feet, and side received at the crucifixion.

Is Mariette a saint or a liar? Hansen, as you might expect, offers no clear conclusion to the question: it seems equally likely that the dreamy, aloof Mariette experiences a miracle as it does that she wounds herself, either through a pathological need for attention or a real psychotic break. (Equally likely, that is, if you come into the book willing to believe that such things are possible.) The question dogs the nuns, too, who are divided into pro- and anti-Mariette camps: gossiping, sending letters to the Pere, et cetera. As the Prioress Saint-Raphael--whose responsibility to keep the nunnery together is threatened by Mariette's ecstasy--notes, it is hard to understand God's intention in afflicting Mariette this way. There is no gain, material or spiritual, for the nunnery or anyone else in Mariette's stigmata, not even, it seems, for Mariette. As the Pere observes, the stigmata are gratia dei gratis, given by God's will and not through any desert or lack thereof; saints and reprobates both have manifested the stigmata throughout history. In this way the very uselessness of the stigmata may be part of their miraculousness: a reminder that God's will is inscrutable.

Mariette in Ecstasy is an interesting contrast to Sylvia Townsend Warner's book about a nunnery, The Corner That Held Them. While the latter applies a Marxist lens to the nun's life, showing the ways that even spiritual lives are ultimately shaped by the relations of capital and labor, Mariette in Ecstasy really asks us to consider what the spiritual life of a nun demands. Hansen often lingers on short scenes of pastoral life--the tedium of wash day, the family of skunks that have gotten into the corn cob, stuff like that--in a way that reminds us that a nun's life is one of contemplation and stillness, a life that Mariette's miracles must inevitably interrupt and transform. The antipathy of the anti-Mariette factions may be a kind of jealousy, generated by those who submitted obediently to a life of quietude only to find ostentatiousness rewarded. On the other hand, there is a queer sensuality--queer in both senses--to the pro-Mariette factions captured neatly in the above passage, where Sister Hermance literally licks the wound in Mariette's hand.

I really enjoyed Mariette in Ecstasy. Its pastoral simplicity seems borrowed from the Cather tradition of American writing, but it belies a crypticness that is not easily solved. The question of skepticism--are Mariette's miracles real or fake--is only the most superficial of several questions about faith, belief, and obedience that give the book a quiet power.

The Corner That Held Them by Sylvia Townsend Warner

A good convent should have no history. Its life is hid with Christ who is above. History is of the world, costly and deadly, and the events it records are usually deplorable: the year when the roof caught fire, the year of the summer flood which swept away the haystacks and drowned the bailiff, the year when the cattle were stolen, the year when the king laid the great impost for the Scotch wars and timber for five years had to be felled to pay it, the year of the pestilence, the year when Dame Dionysia had a baby by the bishop's clerk. Yet the events of history carry a certain exhilaration with them. Decisions are made, money is spent, strangers arrive, familiar characters appear in a new light, transfigured with unexpected goodness or badness. Few calamities fall on a religious house which are not at some time or other looked back upon with wistful regret.

There is nothing much remarkable about the convent of Oby. Tucked away in a corner of the English fens, the nuns of Oby toil at their psalters and their embroidery. The convent is sometimes rich and sometimes poor, sometimes smiled upon by the overseeing Bishop and sometimes deplored; the nuns are respected and treasured by many of their neighbors and hated by others, sometimes the nuns themselves live harmoniously and sometimes the rule is resentment. A passerby might not even know it's there, at least until its spire is built at last, a project that takes decades and heaps of money, foiled once by a complete and deadly collapse. (If you ask me, Sylvia Townsend Warner's account of the raising of a spire is much more convincing and engaging than William Golding's novel The Spire, substituting as it does a kind of clear-eyed realism for Golding's high-pitched Freudian drama.)

The Corner That Held Them describes thirty years in the life of the Oby convent, beginning in the 1350's with the outbreak of the Black Death. As nuns come and go, so do the characters of the novel: entering as novices or dying, or simply appearing or vanishing in the way that real people sometimes do in the life of an institution. By 1380, the cast of characters has turned over almost completely, with the exception of Sir Ralph, the convent's resident priest, who keeps for many decades a horrible secret: he isn't really a priest. Nuns drift in and out of the novel's focus: tedious Dame Johanna, kindly Dame Isabel, melancholy Dame Lilias, shrewd Dame Lovisa, simple Dame Adela. Their individual stories are touching or heartbreaking, and well-crafted, but together they complete an image in the life of a community. As one of several prioresses thinks to herself:

And here am I, she thought, fixed in the religious life like a candle on a spike. I consume, I burn away, always lighting the same corner, always beleaguered by the same shadows; and in the end I shall burn out and another candle will be fixed in my stead.

Though well-steeped in both Biblical knowledge and the religious life of the 14th century, The Corner That Held Them is not very interested in matters of the spirit. It is money, rather, that is at the heart of he novel: how it is made, how it is kept, how it is spent. How can the convent collect the tithes of the parsonages that fall under its purview? How pay for the materials to build a spire, or mend clothes, or plant vegetables? As the Black Death fades from view, another threat emerges: violent Lollards who resent the church's hoarding of wealth. At one point the nuns, fearing an invasion, have their gold and silver buried by their bailiff--who is killed before he can tell them where he's buried it. And though individual nuns have their consciences pricked time and time again--Lilias dreams of becoming an anchoress, Adela steals the embroidery to sell for the poor--the convent as a whole moves on stolidly, too caught up in economic contingencies to tend to something as poor as souls.

I'm impressed by the wonderful range of Townsend Warner's novels; the convent of Oby seems--and is--miles and years away from the Polynesian missionary of Mr. Fortune. Even that novel's thematic focus on the nature of belief seems foreign to The Corner That Held Them, a novel in which belief seems secondary to the price of potatoes. Yet both novels share an interest in how strong ties are made and broken between people: "There can hardly be intimacy in the cloister," the prioress thinks, "before intimacy can be engendered there must be freedom, the option to approach or move away."