Ron Hansen, Mariette in Ecstasy (1991). A novel that is recommended for adults, especially we sinners.
A short novel from a Nebraska writer that is partly a meditation on faith in the unseen and partly a study of human jealousy, envy, and love wrought in a spare prose that gives as much prominence to the sway of grass in the breeze as the characters in 60,000 unadorned words.
Mariette, a young postulant in a convent, is more religious, more faithful, more devout, more self-sacrificing than seems humanly possible. Several of the sisters conclude she has been touched by the hand of grace, while others suppose that she is an attention-seeking fraud.
A cult of Mariette begins and in the end it seems best to expel her. She is disruptive in punishing herself, in passing sleepless nights in prayer, in doing the work or two…
When confronted by skeptics, cynics, and disbelievers she submits to their depredations with a beatific smile.
Yet the skeptics, the cynics, the disbelievers, and the conservatives who expel her do so to preserve the delicate balance of convent community. No cardboard villains they.
The reader is left to wonder what the truth is about Mariette, or to wonder if the truth matters at all.
Perhaps Mariette is a saint and this is how saints are now reviled.
The time in the very early 1900s and the place seems to be Canada. But neither of those is important. The only reality is inside the convent.
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