As we prepare for the beginning of the church’s primary penitential season tomorrow (sorry, I mean Ash Wednesday, not Valentine’s Day), it is a reminder that the church has its own calendar that doesn’t often correspond to that of the secular culture. Our seasons are marked by Advent and Lent, and also by the regular celebration of feasts, memorials, holy days of obligation and days of penance and fasting. It is a culture Ron Hansen captured well in his 1991 novel, Mariette in Ecstasy, where the story is structured around the calendar of saints. Even in the rural, agricultural setting in which the nuns of Mariette in Ecstasy live (the novel is set in 1906), the passage of time is not marked by the changing of the weather so much as by the observance of the liturgical calendar.
Ron Hansen: “Because of my Catholicism, I’m pretty sure Catholic themes or attitudes are at least subterranean in whatever I write."
Mariette in Ecstasy, the story of a young postulant who begins to have ecstatic (and sometimes torturous) visions and shows evidence of the wounds of Christ on her body, received rave reviews upon its release. In 1992, Elizabeth McDonough, O.P., reviewed Mariette in Ecstasy for America, writing that “Hansen’s sparse prose is compelling and actually borders on the poetic.” Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times called it a “luminous novel that burns a laser-bright picture into the reader’s imagination, forcing one to reassess the relationship between madness and divine possession, gullibility and faith, sexual rapture and religious ecstasy.” Although the novel devoted considerable space to Roman Catholic beliefs and liturgy, she noted, “one need hardly be familiar with that church’s teachings to be moved and amazed by this fable.”
A movie version was filmed in 1995—for which Hansen wrote the screenplay—but was not released to the public at the time because the production company, Savoy Pictures, was in financial trouble (and closed its doors in 1997). Longtime America contributor the Rev. Robert Lauder called it an “extremely sensitive and beautifully paced film” and “exciting without stooping to the sensational” in a 1996 review. The film was finally shown to the larger public for the first time at the 2019 Camerimage International Film Festival.
I first read the novel as a college student and have returned to it several times over the years—and have taught it in more than a few college seminars. (It makes for great Lenten reading, by the way.) That introduction to Hansen’s work led me to his broader corpus of novels, short stories and essays. Though Mariette is his only novel with such an explicitly religious theme and setting (well, maybe Exiles as well), Hansen, who was ordained a Catholic deacon in 2007, has regularly explored questions of faith and religious belonging in his writing.
Hansen, who was ordained a Catholic deacon in 2007, has regularly explored questions of faith and religious belonging in his writing.
“Because of my Catholicism, I’m pretty sure Catholic themes or attitudes are at least subterranean in whatever I write,” Hansen said in a 2014 interview with America. “And I suspect many Catholic readers who did not know I was a co-religionist would find an affinity for my fiction without being able to put a finger on why. Certain stances and ways of being just leak through in a book.” Hansen, who completed the full 30-day Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola at a Jesuit retreat house in 2007, said in 2017 that St. Ignatius’ “meditation on the two standards has influenced most of my novels.”
Born in 1947 in Omaha, Neb., Hansen attended Creighton University in his hometown and later attended the famous Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where one of his instructors was John Irving. His first novel, Desperadoes, was published in 1979, with The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford following four years later. In the decades since, he has published everything from a novel for children to a fictionalized account of the shipwreck memorialized by Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J., in “The Wreck of the Deutschland” to a novel about Hitler’s niece and more. His A Stay Against Confusion is another go-to book for me, a collection of essays on faith and fiction.
Hansen retired recently from his longtime position as the Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J. Professor in the Arts and Humanities at Santa Clara University (where he earned a master’s in spirituality). He has also been writing essays, poems and book reviews for America (as well as many other journals) for more than three decades, with his first contribution being a 1991 review of Muriel Spark’s Symposium. His wife and fellow novelist Bo Caldwell also wrote an essay for America in 2003.
America has also reviewed almost everything Hansen has written (I am one of the guilty parties). In 2000, Gerald T. Cobb, S.J., praised Hitler’s Niece as “highly original in conception, the brave novel of a brave novelist.” In a 2003 review of Isn’t It Romantic?, Joseph Feeney, S.J., wrote that “The imagination works wonders. It combines strange things. So does Ron Hansen.” Hansen, wrote John B. Breslin, S.J., in a 2001 review of A Stay Against Confusion, “joins company with Bernanos and Greene as an explorer of the Catholic sensibility.”
A postscript: Several years ago, I had the chance to interview John Irving for America at his office in Toronto. Thinking it would provide valuable background for the story (and because, like most writers, I am a very nosy person), I couldn’t help but look at what books Irving himself had laid out on his writing table. Among them was a huge compendium of Bob Dylan’s song lyrics, a collection of German Christmas stories, Kathleen Winter’s novel Annabel—and Ron Hansen’s 2016 novel, The Kid.
Ron Hansen, wrote John B. Breslin, S.J., “joins company with Bernanos and Greene as an explorer of the Catholic sensibility.”
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Our poetry selection for this week is “Pater Gerardus M. Hopkins, S.J.,” by Ron Hansen. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.
Also, big news from the Catholic Book Club: We are reading Come Forth: The Promise of Jesus’s Greatest Miracle, by James Martin, S.J. Click here to watch a livestream with Father Martin about the book or here to sign up for our Facebook discussion group.
In this space every week, America features reviews of and literary commentary on one particular writer or group of writers (both new and old; our archives span more than a century), as well as poetry and other offerings from America Media. We hope this will give us a chance to provide you with more in-depth coverage of our literary offerings. It also allows us to alert digital subscribers to some of our online content that doesn’t make it into our newsletters.
Other Catholic Book Club columns:
The spiritual depths of Toni Morrison
What’s all the fuss about Teilhard de Chardin?
Moira Walsh and the art of a brutal movie review
Leonard Feeney, America’s only excommunicated literary editor (to date)
Who's in hell? Hans Urs von Balthasar had thoughts.
Happy reading!
James T. Keane
