Living with Saints (review)

Living with Saints. By Mary O'Connell. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2001. 227 pp. $23.00.

Mary O' Connell's Living with Saints is the hagiography of teenage girls and the relics of their haphazard passions in the women they become. Is an adolescent's moodiness like a saint's tilting between mortification and glory? "Keep your loaves and fishes; here is quality sperm FedExed to your apartment," says a wry young woman, tricking us into the miraculous plane of the narrative by leaning on the reader's nonmiraculous assumptions (165). The stories are as grotesquely bodied as the Legenda Aurea and as compassionate as the good news. The writing in this first collection of stories is mischievous, the feminism is searing, and the religion. . .well, let's talk about that.

O'Connell does not simply exploit parochial-school Catholicism, she sticks our fingers in the wounds. The wounds, she reveals, are our own. The Christian wounds that are re-opened in these stories are history, dualism, and desire.

The Western religions are loyal to a sacred but linear time: God acts in history while space and time remain reliably strung on a single strand. Yet, the religious experience, mystical or not, confounds ordinary time. O'Connell's dazzling and hilarious anachronisms reveal religious experience imploding in historical time, as well as mythic experience imploding in needle-and-thread narrative time. Dymphna, Ursula, and Veronica, contemporary namesakes, repeat their saints' stories by recitation and twist them by life performance.

Veronica, the jilted woman, grieves in a Laundromat and recalls her version of the Veronica legend, concluding, ". . .the name was a hex. She believed Saint Veronica suffered terribly after meeting Jesus, that she wandered the streets staring at the miracle of his face on the cloth, thinking: What now? What now?" (169).The contemporary Veronica fishes her lost lover's pillowcase out of the washer, rescuing the relic stained by the glam-rocker's make-up. She wads it up in her coat pocket until she hands it over to her replacement. That pillowcase narratively veils the ultimate or true sudarium: an empty, lovely baby sweater, that Veronica will press to her face, imagining, ". . .Emma or Pauline, Matthew or Jack: How I've loved you, how I've dreamed of you" (178). If the image of Christ is in the story, that image is like a fickle, aging player in a rock band, who empties the lives of devotees. Or, is the image of Christ Saint Veronica herself, the bearer of the image? However, it would not do to attempt untangle these webs of narrative, nor would it do for us to try to untangle the "true image." The church, perhaps, is not always comfortable with its own deep necessity in myth, in a fake photograph on a towel. The church, perhaps, is not always comfortable with its linear story of God splashing down once and once only into body and blood, a body left fluttering round its cyclical calendar, baby and corpse over and over and over, life and death and suffering everlasting.

The gem in the collection is "Saint Martha." It's another true image or cunning allusion to false icons. In that story the biblical Martha speaks of her carnal (incarnational) desire for Jesus: "I wanted the King of the Jews to dust the disciples and spend sunny afternoons with me, gathering daisies and wild blue veronica in the bright fields north of Bethany" (89). It's no surprise and no novelty that the erotic and the sacred are peas in a pod, if not simply one pea. It's no secret, either, that dualism has tried to rend body from soul.

The ruthless gospel story of Mary and Martha demeans the kitchen-bound woman and exalts the spiritualized woman, who has chosen the better part, sitting at the feet of the Master who has, after all, come eating and drinking (But not cooking and cleaning). O'Connell's story...