Confessions of a Guilty Freelancer

John L'Heureux: The Miracle

John L’Heureux is a member of an endangered species. He was born in 1934 and has been a fairly prolific writer throughout his life. His first book was a volume of poems, Quick as Dandelions, published in 1964. Sixteen other books have followed, mainly fiction. L’Heureux was ordained a Jesuit priest in 1965, and he left the order in 1971. Those dates, more or less, mirror the time span in his new novel, The Miracle. None of that biography should mark him as an endangered species , except that L’Heureux is the epitome of the mid-list author. Throughout the years, he has regularly published novels with commercial presses, and, though none have been exactly bestsellers, big publishing has stuck with him, for a variety of admirable reasons. His career as a writer is not likely to be duplicated by later generations. His cohortisthelasttobenefitfrompublishing’sageofgentility,whichhas come almost completely to an end. L’Heureux has been able to profit from being a niche author, and to chafe at the restrictions at the same time. He fits, not entirely comfortably , among a number of Catholic writers–James Carroll, Eugene Kennedy,ex-priestswhohaveturnedtofiction,aswellaspriestauthors like Andrew Greeley. L’Heureux does not write large, sprawling, commercially successful potboilers, as do those three authors, but rather John L’Heureux: The Miracle 271 272 short, spare novels, ones most often composed in a prose described relentlessly as “deceptively simple,” or, as the language of The Miracle already has been dubbed by the reviewer for the New York Times Book Review, “prose of unaffected simplicity.” Literary Spareness Such spareness gives L’Heureux’s work a decidedly literary cast. His novels have been both praised and damned by critics, but there has beenenough goodpresstooffsetthebad, andtoleave ultimateliterary judgments an open question. But, overall, there is an unsettledness about his work, both in general , and in particular. It pops up in most of his books, and it certainly does in The Miracle. It’s seems hard for L’Heureux to be completely serious. The novel that most tasked that impulse was the harrowing The Shrine at Altamira , published in 1992. In that novel, a father sets afire his young son in retribution for his wife’s leaving him. There have been bits of horror in L’Heureux’s other novels, but none other lingers over it so reverently.Thisterriblemaiming,thishideouscrime,seemstotransfix L’Heureux so much so, that in this novel, alone, is he able to leave aside the occasions of silliness, the itch to make fun, to be facilely satirical, that show up elsewhere in his writing. Including in The Miracle. Its story is not ripped from the headlines, as was the tale of The Shrine at Altamira, which I think is his best, most satisfyingwork.Thatnovelcontainsanoddprologue,acautionarynote, whichstates:“Wehearstorieslikethisontelevisionbutwedonotlook, and when they turn up in newspapers, we glance away. . . .” But, The Miraclewasdoubtlesswellunderway,ifnotfinished,beforeallthelatest dirty laundry of the Catholic Church has been aired out in the press. 273 Indeed, L’Heureux attempts to shut out most of the contemporary world in this small book. The novel takes place, briefly, in South Boston, and at length in a never-never land of a small seaside New Hampshire town, in an amorphous time frame, the very early seventies , which was a quite noisy time, but is not much heard in the village, which is hardly named, and referred to most often as the parish of Our Lady of Victories. The Beatles tune, “Hey Jude,” is said to be new, though that would make it 1969–70, though the Vietnam war has come to an end, which wouldmakeit1975,orlater.ButL’Heureuxisnotexactlyasocialnovelist ,sincethereareotheroddmistakes,likeover-the-shoulderseatbelts being used, which hadn’t yet come into general use back then. He’s more after tracking down social mores, than social material. The Old Sin Sandwich Father LeBlanc–he is not so much whiteness as he is a blank–is exiled to this quaint town, because complaints have been lodged about his downplaying birth control restrictions and other Church sex-related dogma. About hearing confession: “The old sin sandwich: put the easy stuff at the top and bottom and then slip masturbation into the middle where it might not be noticed.” Father LeBlanc is lenient and understanding . So, too, with birth control: “‘Why do you mention this in confession?’ he asks. And then he talks about it slowly, carefully, helping each one realize it is her own conscience she has to...