Charlottesville Words

A beautiful young girl arrives at a convent as a postulant. She quickly attracts the admiration of many of her sisters, and the envy of some. Before the year is out, she will exhibit signs of God’s grace in her own body. Or are they signs of Satan’s curse? Are these the manifestations of holiness, or of wickedness? Does it matter, and how does it matter — to the girl, to her Church, to the world?

Ron Hansen explores religious faith, disillusionment, skepticism, and human nature in Mariette in Ecstasy. The book is written in the same spare prose that marks “Wickedness,” his story of the blizzard of 1888 from his collection, Nebraska. He writes as if he had challenged himself to tell the deepest, richest story possible in a mere 179 pages.

Here’s a short passage about a simple, everyday event, but out of everything in the book this especially stayed with me:

Hard white sunshine heating the frost, and the blue sky high and wide behind iron-gray trees tattered by golden leaves. The hills are tan and rose and magenta. Chimney swifts toss and play in the air. Sister Anne and Sister Agnes heave heavy avalanches of wash onto a gray wool blanket and then go inside for more, and Mariette hangs sweet wet sheets on the clotheslines until she is curtained and roomed by them.

Sister Agnes slinks through a gap in the whiteness with a straw basket of underthings that they silently pin up in the hidden world inside the tutting, luffing, campaigning sheets.