In This House of Brede by Rumer Godden

Rumer Godden, who died in 1998 at age 90, was a prolific writer. This book was her fifteenth, and is a multilayered presentation of life in an English Benedictine convent from the late 1950’s to the late 1960’s. The “House of Brede”, the Benedictine convent in the book, is fictional, but Ms. Godden lived for three years in a gatehouse to an English monastery, so that she became well acquainted with Benedictine organization and their way of life.

The author vividly characterizes many of the inhabitants – two of the postulants in particular. One, Phillipa Talbot, is the principal character, whose story opens and closes the book. She comes to the abbey in her 40’s, a career woman who has risen high in a government ministry, who has her life “beautifully arranged.” Yet God has called her, it seems – for when she wanders into a church, someone beckons her to take his place in a line for confession, and she finds herself asking the priest for a meeting. In a crisis Phillipa did not expect, she says not that things in her life seemed empty, but that she began to look beyond them “into an emptiness.” Ms. Godden borrows these and many other expressions from Christianity to explain why faith and these faith communities persist. She does a good job of showing how, although living apart, the nuns are linked to the outside world through prayer, visiting and correspondence.

When the book was first published in 1969, one reviewer found the book lacking in its depiction of spiritual struggle, of what really happens to those who decide to enter monasteries. Yet the book has attracted readers with a wide spectrum of faith experience, from the very religious to agnostics and atheists. Suffice it to say that stories of sacrifice to a cause have always found an audience, and that this story, with its endearing and personable personalities, is above all, “a good read”.

Secrets of Eden / by Chris Bohjalian

A Brooklyn native, Chris Bohjalian and his wife decided to move away from the city to Vermont after a harrowing experience inside a taxi cab driven by a terrorist permanently ended any plans for raising their two young children in New York City. Their subsequent years lived in peaceful suburban tranquility would ultimately enmesh itself into much of Bohjalian's later fiction. A novelist since the late nineties, he's been critcally acclaimed for his books Before You Know Kindness, Skeletons at the Feast and The Double Blind--all New York Times bestsellers--as well as Midwives, an Oprah Book Club selection. His most recent novel, Secrets of Eden, examines mental and emotional dissolusionment of a small town pastor, Rev. Stephen Drew, after one of his parishioners is murdered.
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"Believe no one. Trust no one. Believe all of our stories are suspect." p. 16

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Rev. Stephen Drew thought it a bit odd the way Alice Hayward, a 35-year-old married mother of one, had behaved at her baptism--a little too morbid. A few hours later, after the bodies of both Alice and her husband George had been found dead of an apparent murder-suicide, Stephen knew he wasn't mistaken. Shock and dismay inevitably follow in the immediate wake of the tragedy and, as well might be expected, Stephen himself is confronted with a severe crisis of faith as the theological doctrines and long-attenuated personal convictions of divine sovereignty are replaced by doubts, fears and perpetuating uncertainty. His angst and tormented soul are only somewhat quieted after meeting Heather Laurent, the author of several humongously popular books on alternative spirituality. Heather, coincidentally, witnessed the murder-suicide of her own parents and is fittingly in a position to relate to Katie, Alice's now orphaned adolescent daughter who may seem to know more than she's telling. Heather is also able to proffer some encouraging words and comforting inspiration to Stephen, and with time the pair develop an unlikely bond.

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But just as Stephen and Heather's relationship begins to blossom into something more and Stephen (a bachelor) begins to see the world and his life with a different outlook, new questions arise in the case, particularly about whether Alice's husband George actually killed himself after all? Was George murdered as well? Were both Alice and George killed together with the act only arranged to look like a murder-suicide? When the state's attorney uncovers new evidence, strange illegible passages in Alice's diary, which link Stephen himself to the crime, it seems the true nature of things may run a bit deeper than originally thought and more than one person may share responsibility for this horrible tragedy.

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Bohjalian hasn't turned out a bad book yet and this effort keeps the streak alive. The storyline more than the characters, who at times can come off a bit flaky, gives the book its appeal, employing the similar but no-less-likable tactic used in Before You Know Kindness and Skeletons at the Feast of an initial traumatic event highlighting the beginning pages and allowing the multi-perspective narrative to work in the context. Readers unfamiliar with Bohjalian will find his themes and featured topics fit the same mold as Jodi Picoult and Anita Shreve, who share an affinity for New England serenity and domestic disquietude. The mood reflects a more removed setting, and conversely, a more personalized atmosphere. Despite the grisly nature of the proceedings and accompanying investigation, the novel's neither mystery nor hard-boiled crime fiction and could barely be categorized as a thriller with the action focusing more intensely on intuitive reflections, character observations and relationships.

The Second Coming: A Novel / by Walker Percy

A native of the American South, Walker Percy (1916-1990) was born into a family of distinguished lineage and one which held particularly tragic heritage. When he was thirteen his own father committed suicide and then, two years later, his mother was killed when she drove off a bridge (an act Percy also considered a suicide). Throughout his life, Percy would feel the impact and impression these events had on his youthful conscious and subsquent life, struggling for years to come to terms with his family's tragic legacy. His second-to-last novel, The Second Coming, is a book--among his most autobiographical works--which explores the themes of clinical depression, existensialism, semiotics and faith in a cleverly entertaining way.
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"The lives of other people seemed even more farcical than his own. It astonished him that as farcical as most people's lives were, they generally gave no sign it. Why was it that it was he not they who had decided to shoot himself?" p. 4
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Fed up with what he feels is an utterly useless existence, wealthy bachelor Will Barrett decides on a course of action which, conceivably, will bring about his end on earth. Rather than shoot himself, he moves from his comfortable existence in his opulent house situated on the green of a golf course to a cave, where, without food and only a little water, he plans to extinguish his life through natural deprivation. Figuring that, if there is a God, his life and faith will be somehow restored, Will follows through on his plan, living out his literal 'dark night of the soul', gradually, as the hours then days, then weeks pass by, growing weaker, fainter and less in touch with reality. At long last when he's brought to the point of no return and as hallucinations begin overtaking his sanity, he inadvertently tumbles out of the cave, down the hill and into the backyard of a neighbor where a peculiar, memory-challenged young woman named Allison, herself having just escaped from a mental institution, sits watering the plants in a greenhouse.

Percy's 1980 novel was actually a sequel to his earlier book The Last Gentleman, which concerned Will Barrett at an earlier point in his life. And while this volume presents many of the same characteristics and quirky running narrative about its protagonist which were prominently featured in the first book, The Second Coming sits at a higher intellectual plane. Much more of the author's own existential and spiritual consternations highlight the story as Will's inner turmoil, his philosophical assessments of his life--deeply rooted in suicides of both his father and grandfather--and that of the world around him resonate from page one till the final dialogue between Will and Allison. The world of internal emptiness which depression evokes is uniquely manifested through Percy's prose.
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