Best-selling novelist Ron Hansen stood in the nave of St. Vincent de Paul Church on a recent afternoon under the towering stained-glass windows. Illuminated by the high sun in the western sky, the brightly colored glass told story after story””about Jesus Christ, about prophets and saints, about miracles and revelations.
The Catholic faith is a story-telling religion, the writer said a short time later. “The mass itself is a kind of theater, dramatizing the life of Christ,” he said.
The Bible stories Hansen heard in church as a young Catholic boy were central to his decision to follow the vocation of writer, he said. Now 60, the author is widely respected for his fiction and essays despite going against the grain in the literary world by being upfront about his faith.
Hansen was at St. Vincent de Paul to do a reading from his newly published novel “Exiles,” which tells the intertwining stories of 19th Century Jesuit priest-poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, five nuns who died in the 1875 wreck of the steamship Deutschland and the poem Hopkins wrote about them.
I’ve read everything by Hansen I can get my hands on. He’s a genius.
I just finished Exiles. Very worthwile. I like the juxtaposition of the fate of the five “exiled” nuns who die on the Deutschland and GM Hopkins, the exiled Victorian English convert to RCC. This incident brought Hopkins out of poetic exile, but only that. The “Wreck of the Deutschland” was Hopkins first poem in ten years, since his graduation from Oxford and entrance into the Jesuit novitiate. It is an insightful analysis of the sources of poetic inspiration. I liked this book; it brought me closer to a poet that I revere.