Love Lies Bleeding

I read "Mariette in Ecstasy"

Creatures, I’m in London… giddy London… is it home of the free, or what? Our hotel room is graced by a giant eagle that spits water into the bath, and the heat of the water is controlled by what appear to be tiny dragons. I’m re-reading Tim Powers’s Declare and let me tell you, it makes this bathtub unsettling.

In this edition of your doughty dancing Dragon, a Catholic novel about being used in some greater story by a hidden God and, perhaps, infernal opponents. Not Declare. I’m talking about Ron Hansen’s Mariette in Ecstasy, in whose wintry shelter I passed the transatlantic hours. Mariette tells a simple story, about an outbreak of strange events centering on a young postulant at a New England convent in the early 1900s—about, I think, how even God’s flashiest displays leave Him in some way hidden. (In its attention to the questions raised by what seem to be big bold answers from the Lord, Mariette would be a good companion to Carlos Eire’s controversial and brilliant history, They Flew.)

There’s a stripped quality to the book. It’s short and feels shorter. Characters’ inner lives remain cabineted away, probably unknown even to themselves. Hansen gives you some of their thoughts, but only some of the experiences roiling behind the thoughts. Often he dips away from tight third-person right when you expect him to get inside somebody. Maybe this is why the book made me feel with such poignancy how all these people, in and through their choices and experiences, are like words being spoken in a story told by someone else. How astonishing to be a word spoken, if the Speaker is divine. And also how emptied they feel when they notice they are being useful in this way.

The whole book is in present tense, appropriate for a story of surprises and conflicting interpretations, and it’s keyed to the liturgical calendar, every day named by its saint or feast or fast. There are electric scenes here—including a startling scene involving the Song of Songs, that swerves in one direction and then suddenly, incredibly powerfully, in another.

Mariette’s story stands out against the stark, ink-and-paper portrait of New York nature, as shaped by villagers and nuns. I was captivated from the very first paragraphs, which just tell you what you see and hear in an August night of this time and place. Later on there are ultra-brief, resonant sketches of work, as physical and attentive as one of those long-take scenes in a Dardennes brothers movie:

White clouds travel and infest the horizon. Fruit trees shift their feet like hired hands. Sister Marthe is standing on a paint-spotted ladder inside a pear tree so that her wooden sabots alone are unhidden until a great branch cracks away and her whipsaw flashes silver in the sun.

I looked around a bit for people I knew talking about this book, and didn’t find anything. So if you’ve read it, share your thoughts—I loved it.

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Links Losers Like

The New York Times ran a portrait of neighboring, and how we come to neighbor one another in a damaged place: “An Idyll on the Shores of a Toxic Lake.” Seems to be a recent theme with them, cf the “dirtbag Narnia” piece from last week.

I wrote about John Bellairs’s delightful satire of immediately pre- and post–Vatican II life, St Fidgeta and Other Parodies, for The Lamp. Subscribers-only for now.

That’s all for now. More as events warrant.

Bernini’s Teresa, which is also the cover to the paperback of “Mariette,” photographed by Saiiko and used under a Creative Commons license.