In September of last year I wrote a piece for Godspy on Ron Hansen’s Exiles a haunting and beautifully written meditation on priest-poet Gerard Manley Hopkins and the composition of one of his masterworks, “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” about a shipwreck that took the lives of five Franciscan  nuns in 1875. Hansen’s earlier novel, Mariette in Ecstasy, is widely and wisely considered one of the very best novels by a contemporary Catholic writer. It was so good that the novel managed to evoke the deepest mysteries of the Catholic faith while being heralded for its technical and artistic brilliance by secular publications like The New York Times and Village Voice, neither of which are inherently sympathetic to the cause of Catholic fiction. Even so, I was a little mystified when Hansen’s Exiles did not make any year-end “Books of the Year” lists (please correct me if I’m wrong!) since Exiles is nearly as beautiful and compelling a work of art as Mariette in Ecstasy, and certainly better than a wide swathe of books that made the best-of lists. Simply put, if you’re a Catholic bibliophile you can’t do any better than Ron Hansen right now.

Here’s an excerpt from my Godspy review:

Exiles is a novel filled with “the fell of dark, not day,” a beautiful and exacting account of mankind’s fallen state – exiles from Eden, from Heaven, from God. It is the latest from much-lauded Catholic novelist, Ron Hansen, whose 1991 novel, Mariette in Ecstasy, is one of the masterpieces of Catholic fiction in the 20th century.

Mariette proved that a Catholic novel could earn praise from the secular press so long as it was indisputably brilliant and kept its Catholicism at a polite temporal distance – say, a hundred years ago. The historical element helps critics account for the deeply-felt faith of Hansen’s protagonists as an anthropological curiosity rather than a spiritual reality.

Exiles, like Mariette, situates its Catholic protagonists in an historical context. Hansen turns his attentive gaze to a kindred spirit: a priest-poet who reveled in nature as a signifier of God’s bounty, of God’s grace, as expressed in the first lines of “God’s Grandeur”:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed…