THE CATHOLIC NOVEL - Episode 7: "Mariette in Ecstasy" nettvcatholic on April 5, 2017. This 7th episode focuses on Ron Hansen's novel, MARIETTE IN ECSTASY! "Ron Hansen has written a novel whose language …More
THE CATHOLIC NOVEL - Episode 7: "Mariette in Ecstasy"
nettvcatholic on April 5, 2017. This 7th episode focuses on Ron Hansen's novel, MARIETTE IN ECSTASY! "Ron Hansen has written a novel whose language is so exquisite that the book runs the danger of being praised only for its diamondlike prose, which is often as pleasing as the most crystalline poetry. And yet "Mariette in Ecstasy" is not solely a novel of sensibility, a mere esthete's exercise. For while its descriptions dazzle, they never preen or degenerate into overblown virtuoso riffs. The greatest beauty -- and the fundamental success -- of this gripping novel is that its author has managed to find a voice that is entirely at the service of its strange and elusive subject. It is a subject that some readers may consider alien, or at least difficult.
The story takes place in a contemplative Roman Catholic convent in upstate New York. The year is 1906, and there is about the atmosphere -- echoed effectively, except for a very few lapses, in the prose -- something of the period piece. The farm life of the monastery and its almost medieval simplicity are beautifully linked to the cyclical nature of days divided into prayers rather than hours. All this conspires to create an intense awareness in which the entire universe -- from "wallowing beetles in green pond water" to the wooden reaper, walking plow and hayrick -- seems sentient, even complicit in a silent world that only appears to be passive.
The poetic voice is an inspired choice; avoiding heavy ropes of adjectives, Mr. Hansen (the author of two previous novels and, most recently, the award-winning story collection "Nebraska") strives instead for precision. He goes to the verbs for metaphor, and refreshes even the most mundane action: a nun in a gray sweater and galoshes is "flirting up fresh snow with a broom"; winds "flute through" a chimney; even window washing has a dynamic presence as the panes "yelp with hard polish." Such language serves absolutely the contemplative mind, absorbing the acuity of detail, the eloquent silence of its world. Indeed, much of the novel is devoted to a deft re-creation of a way of life that is fascinating for its own sake, but that is never treated as freakish. However, there's more to this book than breathtaking description; there's also a cliffhanger of a story.
The Mariette of the title is a beautiful young woman, Mariette Baptiste, just 17, who enters the community as a postulant. Her sister, older by 20 years, is the Mother Superior, but Mariette is shown no official favoritism. And yet her beauty, her simplicity and her passionate devotion do make Mariette a favorite. Some of the sisters, soured by their years of unvarying routine, see rekindled in her their own lost passion for their vocation.
And "passion" is the key word here. For Mariette's progress in the devout life is as unsettling to the community, as fundamentally dangerous, as any desperate love affair is to an outsider.
Mariette appears to be modeled in part on Therese of Lisieux, the saint known as the Little Flower. In a graceful bow to that source, Mr. Hansen gives Mariette's sister the same name as one of Therese's older sisters, also a nun: Celine. Like Therese, Mariette is a daughter of the middle class: pampered, pretty, charming. She is the delight and only comfort of her widowed father, a doctor who is enraged by what he sees as her perverse longing for God. And, like Therese, Mariette is an ecstatic. Before long, there are visions, trances. Then, inevitably, the stigmata: "Blood scribbles down her wrists and ankles and scrawls like red handwriting on the floor."
Mr. Hansen succeeds -- miraculously, it is tempting to say -- in sustaining his portrait of Mariette's spirituality as well as her charm amid this drama. He also makes the responses of the nuns real and understandable. And these women, beset with such a challenging phenomenon, respond with everything they have: mistrust, revulsion, fascination, cruelty, jealousy, judgment. There is even indifference, and occasionally compassion.
Mariette's stigmata are the gift, it seems, of a fickle God. At times the wounds disappear. "You put one over on us," one of the nuns says when an inspection of Mariette's hands reveals no marks. She winces and the sister asks if she is hurt. "Christ let me keep the pain," Mariette replies.
The novel pulls its taut plot-thread smartly along from start to finish, weaving flash-forward patches of dialogue from the investigation of Mariette's "case" into the unfolding action of her entry into the life of the convent. The finale is a stunner that takes the novel out of its absorbing period setting, leaping into a world we know to be our own and making it impossible to read the book as something that takes place safely long ago and far away, something that's simply foreign.
This final leap, like a bracing couplet that rivets the end of a sonnet, reveals the hidden subject of the book. Mariette's life is not, after all, a study in ecstasy but in humility. The majesty of the ordinary turns out to be the greatest mark the Lord lays on her. It is a testament to Mr. Hansen's art that it is possible to weep for Mariette's lost glory as if for the death of a great love. HOARDING THE PAIN
Horsetails of gray smoke rise from the candles at Vespers. The December sun goes down in a blood-red light as it slants upwards through the high, stained windows.
At the half-minute pause following the fifth psalm, Mariette hears soft winds outside, hushing like the skirts of a girl rushing up the stairs. She hears Sister Catherine hissing to herself, "Jesu. Mon Seigneur Jesu. Cher Jesu."
And then she flinches and looks down at her hands. She tries to rub the hot sting from one palm with her thumb but the hurt persists like hate inked on a page. Eventually the sisters rise and slowly pass by Mariette as she sits there for a half hour more, hoarding the pain. She hears something skittering along a joist. She hears the red lanterns on the high altar sigh as flames trickily consume them. And then she hears Sister Emmanuelle hesitantly settle beside her. -- From "Mariette in Ecstasy."
Patricia Hampl, the author of the memoir "A Romantic Education," is also the author of the forthcoming "Virgin Time," a personal exploration of Roman Catholic spirituality. NY TIMES
nettvcatholic on April 5, 2017. This 7th episode focuses on Ron Hansen's novel, MARIETTE IN ECSTASY! "Ron Hansen has written a novel whose language is so exquisite that the book runs the danger of being praised only for its diamondlike prose, which is often as pleasing as the most crystalline poetry. And yet "Mariette in Ecstasy" is not solely a novel of sensibility, a mere esthete's exercise. For while its descriptions dazzle, they never preen or degenerate into overblown virtuoso riffs. The greatest beauty -- and the fundamental success -- of this gripping novel is that its author has managed to find a voice that is entirely at the service of its strange and elusive subject. It is a subject that some readers may consider alien, or at least difficult.
The story takes place in a contemplative Roman Catholic convent in upstate New York. The year is 1906, and there is about the atmosphere -- echoed effectively, except for a very few lapses, in the prose -- something of the period piece. The farm life of the monastery and its almost medieval simplicity are beautifully linked to the cyclical nature of days divided into prayers rather than hours. All this conspires to create an intense awareness in which the entire universe -- from "wallowing beetles in green pond water" to the wooden reaper, walking plow and hayrick -- seems sentient, even complicit in a silent world that only appears to be passive.
The poetic voice is an inspired choice; avoiding heavy ropes of adjectives, Mr. Hansen (the author of two previous novels and, most recently, the award-winning story collection "Nebraska") strives instead for precision. He goes to the verbs for metaphor, and refreshes even the most mundane action: a nun in a gray sweater and galoshes is "flirting up fresh snow with a broom"; winds "flute through" a chimney; even window washing has a dynamic presence as the panes "yelp with hard polish." Such language serves absolutely the contemplative mind, absorbing the acuity of detail, the eloquent silence of its world. Indeed, much of the novel is devoted to a deft re-creation of a way of life that is fascinating for its own sake, but that is never treated as freakish. However, there's more to this book than breathtaking description; there's also a cliffhanger of a story.
The Mariette of the title is a beautiful young woman, Mariette Baptiste, just 17, who enters the community as a postulant. Her sister, older by 20 years, is the Mother Superior, but Mariette is shown no official favoritism. And yet her beauty, her simplicity and her passionate devotion do make Mariette a favorite. Some of the sisters, soured by their years of unvarying routine, see rekindled in her their own lost passion for their vocation.
And "passion" is the key word here. For Mariette's progress in the devout life is as unsettling to the community, as fundamentally dangerous, as any desperate love affair is to an outsider.
Mariette appears to be modeled in part on Therese of Lisieux, the saint known as the Little Flower. In a graceful bow to that source, Mr. Hansen gives Mariette's sister the same name as one of Therese's older sisters, also a nun: Celine. Like Therese, Mariette is a daughter of the middle class: pampered, pretty, charming. She is the delight and only comfort of her widowed father, a doctor who is enraged by what he sees as her perverse longing for God. And, like Therese, Mariette is an ecstatic. Before long, there are visions, trances. Then, inevitably, the stigmata: "Blood scribbles down her wrists and ankles and scrawls like red handwriting on the floor."
Mr. Hansen succeeds -- miraculously, it is tempting to say -- in sustaining his portrait of Mariette's spirituality as well as her charm amid this drama. He also makes the responses of the nuns real and understandable. And these women, beset with such a challenging phenomenon, respond with everything they have: mistrust, revulsion, fascination, cruelty, jealousy, judgment. There is even indifference, and occasionally compassion.
Mariette's stigmata are the gift, it seems, of a fickle God. At times the wounds disappear. "You put one over on us," one of the nuns says when an inspection of Mariette's hands reveals no marks. She winces and the sister asks if she is hurt. "Christ let me keep the pain," Mariette replies.
The novel pulls its taut plot-thread smartly along from start to finish, weaving flash-forward patches of dialogue from the investigation of Mariette's "case" into the unfolding action of her entry into the life of the convent. The finale is a stunner that takes the novel out of its absorbing period setting, leaping into a world we know to be our own and making it impossible to read the book as something that takes place safely long ago and far away, something that's simply foreign.
This final leap, like a bracing couplet that rivets the end of a sonnet, reveals the hidden subject of the book. Mariette's life is not, after all, a study in ecstasy but in humility. The majesty of the ordinary turns out to be the greatest mark the Lord lays on her. It is a testament to Mr. Hansen's art that it is possible to weep for Mariette's lost glory as if for the death of a great love. HOARDING THE PAIN
Horsetails of gray smoke rise from the candles at Vespers. The December sun goes down in a blood-red light as it slants upwards through the high, stained windows.
At the half-minute pause following the fifth psalm, Mariette hears soft winds outside, hushing like the skirts of a girl rushing up the stairs. She hears Sister Catherine hissing to herself, "Jesu. Mon Seigneur Jesu. Cher Jesu."
And then she flinches and looks down at her hands. She tries to rub the hot sting from one palm with her thumb but the hurt persists like hate inked on a page. Eventually the sisters rise and slowly pass by Mariette as she sits there for a half hour more, hoarding the pain. She hears something skittering along a joist. She hears the red lanterns on the high altar sigh as flames trickily consume them. And then she hears Sister Emmanuelle hesitantly settle beside her. -- From "Mariette in Ecstasy."
Patricia Hampl, the author of the memoir "A Romantic Education," is also the author of the forthcoming "Virgin Time," a personal exploration of Roman Catholic spirituality. NY TIMES