Review: Is there redemption after a lifetime of lies?

Review of: Saints for All Occasions

Author: J. Courtney Sullivan
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf   
Source: Purchase, Half Price Books
Grade: A

There’s only one thing more horrifying for widowed Nora Rafferty than learning her oldest son, the one she always called “my Patrick” has been involved in a drunken car crash, a crash that will end his life before she can even reach him in the hospital. It’s having to call her long-estranged sister with the news. The sister who, unknown to Nora’s three surviving children, is the woman who really gave birth to Patrick 50 years earlier. The sister who, in J. Courtney Sullivan’s Saints for All Occasions, fled to a convent soon after the birth, leaving her infant son to be brought up by Nora and her newly-married husband, Charlie Rafferty.

 It started with the 1958 voyage of Nora Flynn and her younger sister, Theresa, from their farm in Ireland to a new life in the United States. Nora was engaged to Charlie, the son of a neighboring farmer, who had already immigrated to the States and was waiting to marry Nora when she arrived.

But Theresa had never known any mother except Nora, who had cared for her since the death of their mother while Theresa was still a baby. How could she leave Theresa, still in her teens, at home, to the mercy of their father’s uncertain temper and increasing thirst for whiskey?

What will happen to Theresa when Nora and Charlie are married? “She can come with us if you like,” Charlie replied when Nora wrote to him. Little did he realize, an ocean away, that Nora is having second thoughts about marriage, that she dreads the whole prospect of leaving everything she knows to go to a strange land, bearing the responsibility for the increasingly lively and rebellious Theresa.

Or that Theresa, never the stay-at-home, will defy her sister’s too-gentle authority to sneak out of the rooming house where they live until Charlie and the increasingly-reluctant Nora can wed. Or that Theresa will meet a dashing man who will leave her pregnant and unwed, a desperate situation for a naïve Catholic teenager in the 1950’s.

When Theresa refuses to give her baby up for adoption, Nora proposes an alternative: that she and Charlie will house Theresa and the child, with Nora counterfeiting pregnancy to pass baby Patrick off has her own. In return for Charlie’s participation in this well-intentioned but disastrous charade, Nora will finally agree to their immediate marriage.

When Theresa walks out in the middle of the night, Nora at first hopes she will return, then comes to dread Theresa’s return. Because Patrick is really and truly Nora’s son. Or isn’t he?

From one seemingly small evasion of truth, more spread ripple outward. If Patrick’s mother can’t be acknowledged, perhaps, Nora thinks, she shouldn’t acknowledge that she even has a sister who is that unknown mother.

If Nora’s husband Charlie isn’t the father of Patrick, Nora doesn’t dare acknowledge the source of funds she blackmailed the true father out of, money that enabled the Rafferty family to move to a neighborhood where nobody knew their history. Finally, no family member’s issues can be acknowledged, not the same sex partnership of Nora and Charlie’s daughter Bridget; not the infertility of son John and his wife, and certainly not the reason for Nora’s extraordinary dislike of John’s political clients; not Patrick’s alcoholism or the possibility that his death was a suicide; or the failed career of the Raffertys’ youngest son, Brian.

And so on, as the family guilt, lies, and resentments rise to a climax with Patrick’s death.

Despite her good intentions, Nora is not a likeable character, but Sullivan makes even her worst aspects understandable, even pitiable. And Saints for All Occasions keeps the story moving with shifts between its host of secondary characters, and between past and present time periods, tantalizing the reader with the possibility that even a clan as entangled as the Raffertys can find redemption. 

Adventure classics -- Nun-sense & sensibility

In This House of Brede

by Rumer Godden

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I admit there was a time when I wept joyfully but in secret over Rumer Godden’s religious books. Wasn’t there something hopelessly sentimental about reveling in the tribulations of misunderstood innocents? That Reader’s Digest tended to issue them in its condensed versions, as if for beginning readers, further shamed me into keep my Godden addiction hidden.

It wasn’t until I reread the book some consider Godden’s masterpiece, In This House of Brede, that I’ve come out of the closet about my Godden addiction. In the same way another writer may maroon a character on an island to explore her psychology under pressure, Godden’s study of the unworldly isolation of cloistered nuns intensifies every aspect of their character.

Godden headed the chapter in her autobiography about Brede’s writing with a quotation from a real nun, Dame Felicitas Corrigan of Stanbrook Abbey, the prototype for the fictional Brede Abbey. “I wish,’ said Dame Felicitas, “that someone would write a book about nuns as they really are, not as the author wants them to be.”

Not that Godden was a novice at writing about nuns before publishing Brede in 1969. Her first bestseller of thirty years earlier, Black Narcissus, dealt with a group of European nuns in a convent in India. But although she knew the setting of the earlier novel, having grown up in India, she didn’t really know much about nuns. In gratitude for prayers she credited with helping her daughter through a difficult pregnancy, Godden determined to learn about the those who prayed.

Just one problem, though. The contemplative order’s cloister was closed to outsiders.

“I was given a plan of the Enclosure and soon seemed almost as familiar with it as if I had lived there,” Godden wrote in the second volume of her autobiography, A House with Four Rooms.

She was also allowed to talk privately to nuns. But because she pledged not to divulge anything about their personal lives in ways that would identify them, it’s impossible to guess whether the agony of protagonist Dame Philippa Talbot, entering the cloister as a middle-aged widow after an unhappy marriage and the death of her young son, mirrors the experience of any woman other than Godden herself.

It was no secret that Godden felt an out of wedlock pregnancy trapped her into marrying a man she had nothing in common with. The child died at four days old, a death that became “a piercing grief, a sadness I carry with me for the rest of my days,” Godden said, as the death of Philippa Talbot’s young son would haunt her, even in the cloister.

None of the other nuns are immune, either, to frustrations, betrayals, and heartbreaks as severe as any in the world outside their cloister. There’s only the motto “Pax,” with which the story opens: “but the word was set in a circle of thorns.”

The community of nuns Godden knew, founded by Sir Thomas More’s descendent Gertrude More, no longer live at the Victorian abbey where they had resided since the early nineteenth century. In 2009, they moved into a new abbey at Wass, in the North York Moors National Park. The former Stanbrook Abbey in Worcestershire is now operated as an events venue.

Many of Godden’s books, including the two volumes of her autobiography, A Time to Dance, No Time to Weep; and A House with Four Rooms, are readily available.

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics turns to a January of true-life drama, beginning with Oliver Sacks’ Awakenings. A list of books for the first quarter of 2013 is included on the 2013 preview page of this blog.)