eviewed by Rae Stabosz
I saved the baby, David, but I couldn’t save Tessa.”… He had tried until there was nothing more to do. The blood kept seeping out, darkening the gauze packing, her life running in small rivulets down his hands. He had washed his hands repeatedly in the white bowl on the bedroom bureau. They were still damp. “Emily has a baby sister.
I have not spoiled Hawks Crossing for you by revealing plot details in the excerpt above. Even were you to go directly from this review to the book itself, the revelation of one woman’s fate will not ruin the surprise of the many secrets uncovered and fates unfolded in the course of the novel. David, Tessa and John are just three of the thirty characters whose lives criss-cross over several generations in the rural Indiana town of Hawks Crossing. What the excerpt does reveal is a theme that runs through the book: that death is the only resolution of loving the one you cannot have — and, sometimes, of loving the one you can.
Hawks Crossing is a novel about memory. Through the eyes of its protagonist, twenty-two year old Kate Brady, it examines the narratives that we shape from memory and tell ourselves again and again, until they damage our ability to find joy in the present. It is a novel written by a poet, with all the descriptive strengths and narrative weaknesses of lyric poetry.
Kate Brady left her home, Hawks Crossing, abruptly when she was five years old. She grows up in the care of a distant cousin, feeling abandoned and unworthy of love. She suffers from recurring nightmares of fire and terror. All that remains from her previous life are a photo album from Hawks Crossing, an occasional letter from her Aunt Jessie, and the legacy of a mysterious fire that killed her father, mother, infant sister, Uncle Ben (Jessie’s husband), and their parish priest.
Seventeen years later, Kate makes an impulsive decision to return to Hawks Crossing. She has just witnessed the marriage of her best friend to the man she loved, and is at her wits’ end. She intends to confront Aunt Jessie and her grandfather with the bitter anger borne of years of hurt. Why did they send her away after the fire? Why had they not kept their promise to bring her home and raise her with what remained of her family?
“Show, don’t tell,” is an elemental rule of fiction writing. Sandra Marek Behringer chooses to ignore this advice frequently in Hawks Crossing, letting her characters tell one another the stories that have shaped their lives. It is a choice that often works. That it does not work completely is a testament to the wisdom of the rule. It takes a strong authorial hand to breach the convention as often as Hawks Crossing does, and Behringer has not yet mastered that hand.
The novel is told in multiple voices, from both first-person and third-person points of view. I count at least twelve narrative voices in the course of the195-page novel. One problem with having so many narrative voices is that readers are often deprived of the emotional resolution to the many conflicts of heart to which they are made privy.
A good example is the Prologue. We enter into the head of third person narrator Kyle Krause, drunk and carrying his dead dog away from the scene of a hit and run accident. Kyle comes across five year old Kate playing with matches in the barn. We discover that Kyle hates Kate’s mother Elizabeth, and we see him cruelly take out his hatred of Elizabeth on Kate. The author has set us up for a later confrontation between Kyle and the adult Kate. But that confrontation never comes. Kyle and Kate separately work out the conflicts depicted in the opening scene. The reader feels cheated.
Having said all that, I found Behringer’s novel absorbing. We often call a novel with multiple characters across generations a “saga”. Hawks Crossing is a much quieter, more personal novel than the leisurely, historically dense narratives we think of when we think “saga”. As in lyric poetry, the author limns the substance of her many characters’ lives in discrete scenes with bare transitions of time and place.
The author provides a list of key characters at the front of the book, to which I found myself returning again and again. Hawks Crossing will reward the patient reader, while leaving her hopeful that Behringer’s next installment in this planned series will have a stronger narrative hand.
You tell what the story is about, naming a recurrent theme, and deftly tuck your single criticism deep in the middle. What I’m still wondering, though, is in what way is this novel Catholic fiction? Wouldn’t it have been an appropriate focus for a review here?
Laura Leigh M
Laura, you pose quite a challenge with your question. How is Hawk’s Crossing a work of Catholic fiction? To answer that, we need some agreement on what we mean by Catholic fiction. From previous discussions, I know that agreement on this is hard to come by.
I’d like to offer an excerpt from a document written by Sr. Kathryn James Hermes, a member of the Daughters of St. Paul, on the subject of Catholic fiction. The Paulines are a religious family dedicated to evangelization through the means of social communication (including mass media). (Full disclosure: I myself am a lay Pauline Cooperator, and share in that mission.)
The excerpt from Sr. Kathryn James’ document is made up mostly of quotes from Catholics who took part in an online discussion of the question, “What is Catholic fiction” two years ago or so. I can dig up the full discussion if you like. But here is what I saved of it, from what Sr. Kathryn James gathered. You will see that one of the comments is from Debra Murphy, who runs this Catholic fiction net, herself.
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The first question would be: “What is Catholic fiction?”
Recently, I (ie. Sr. Kathryn James) read through a blog with a 100 entries from publishers, writers, and Catholic book and magazine editors, discussing how to define Catholic fiction. To answer the question, I want to quote some of the comments verbatim, since the varying expressions help to round out the picture:
? Fiction with underlying themes that feature or jive with a Catholic sensibility: the moral universe, sin and redemption, life after death, sacramentality in creation, Providence, a supernatural order, and so on. Todd M. Aglialoro, Sophia press, editor
? C.S. Lewis wrote that in fiction he could be many men, and see with many eyes, and thereby enlarge his inner life. When fiction is written from a Catholic sensibility, and grapples with Catholic themes, and takes seriously the truths of our faith, it takes its legitimate place in the literary world by adding another “set of eyes”. For those who are trying to live as faithful Catholics, and to see the world as our faith teaches us it really is, why wouldn’t quality fiction that illuminates that world appeal? To quote Lewis again, Catholic fiction is a contribution to the “baptism of imagination”. CNB
? Here’s a thought from the soon-to-be-beatified John Henry Cardinal Newman: “By ‘Catholic Literature’ is not to be understood a literature which treats exclusively or primarily of Catholic matters, of Catholic doctrine, controversy, history, persons, or politics; but it includes all subjects of literature whatever, treated as a Catholic would treat them, and as he only can treat them.” (The Idea of a University: “English Catholic Literature”, chapter 1, p. 1) That being said, I have to second the plug for Ron Hansen. I discovered his novel The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford after enjoying the adaptation for the big screen. I think he’s a kindred spirit to Flannery- Deal Hudson, Director of the Morley Institute for Church & Culture, former publisher and editor of CRISIS Magazine
? While [Edwin O’Connor’s] work used an enduringly Catholic theme, it spoke also to the perpetual concepts of sin, betrayal, and redemption, themes that resonate with all people. That was true of Catholic fiction in general at one time. And it didn’t have to be shocking in vulgar, obvious ways; it was shocking in the way all great literature is: by reminding us of our perpetual dilemmas and sins. That’s how it always broke through secularism. Janice
? This doesn’t mean we need to repopulate the market with priest and nun books (although there is nothing wrong with them if well-written). We want to write in what Ralph McInerny aptly describes (although in another context) as the “ambiance of faith” and such an ambiance is much more subtle and foundational. But it does mean that Catholicism should not automatically disqualify good writing! Eleanor Donlon
? This doesn’t mean that we have to have smells and bells on every page, just that our way of looking to the world, to the people in it, and to the challenges and struggles those people face is going to be wrapped up in a kind of Catholic blanket called transcendence–the notion that this life isn’t all we have, that risking one’s life for others is brave, not stupid or wasteful, and that in the end the person who approaches life without a touch of both humility and gratitude isn’t actually operating properly in regards to the reality in the way that he thinks he is. So the difference between Catholic fiction and other sorts of fiction, it seems to me, has to do with this instinct to portray one’s characters as affected by goodness. Either they’re trying to escape it, or trying to find it, or trying to hang on to a belief in it, or crawling their way back to a belief in it after tragedy or hardship for the sake of their own intrinsic natures–but they know it’s there, and they may even grasp, in some tiny and not-preachy way, that it’s not an It at all. Red Cardigan
? I think it should also be mentioned that a “catholic” mind looking at anything can produce as wonderful a reading experience as a “Catholic” one, for if a novelist is a careful and honest observer, and his work faithfully reflects reality, he’s written a sub-rosa “Catholic” novel whether he knows it or not. Debra Murphy, publisher Idylls Press
? My observation is to go deeper in what works in YA and adult fiction and what is essentially Catholic. It seems to me one needs two things. Readers like a book they can see themselves identifying with by setting or character. Nobody goes to wizard school, but Harry Potter succeeds because the characters are utterly believable and identifiable, even by adults. The second essential is a sense of sacrifice and the accompanying inspiration in the readers that they too could make this sacrifice.
On the negative front, avoid the message. If an author can’t bury it deep in the narrative, just write an apologetics pamphlet instead. Keep in mind young people learn morality from their parents, not from books. Great books challenge already committed people to go deeper, to transcend their upbringing. Todd M. Aglialoro, Sophia press, editor
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The main characters in Hawk’s Crossing are Catholic, although we know this only because of a few mentions of Mass and parish life, and because Kate Brady, our protagonist, meets a priest on her plane trip home to Hawk’s Crossing and immediately recognizes that he is reading his breviary.
In my review, I mentioned that Behringer often chooses to have her characters “tell”, not “show” the stories of their lives. However, when it comes to Catholicism, she very wisely does not do this. We infer that Kate is Catholic from her familiarity with the priesthood and her reflections on how she came to stop attending Mass at college. Catholicism does not play an explicit role in the book.
But commenter Red Cardigan, in the excerpt above, describes the kind of Catholic fiction that Hawk’s Crossing comprises when he or she writes, “the difference between Catholic fiction and other sorts of fiction, it seems to me, has to do with this instinct to portray one’s characters as affected by goodness. Either they’re trying to escape it, or trying to find it, or trying to hang on to a belief in it, or crawling their way back to a belief in it after tragedy or hardship.”
Kate Brady is a woman who has almost given up on a belief in goodness. The tragedies of her life have left her feeling betrayed and despondent. When she meets the priest, she wants to avoid conversation, afraid that he will bring up the subject of religion or God. When she meets Carl Caine and Mike Collier, two attractive men who seem to take an interest in her, she becomes suspicious and withdrawn.
Yet throughout the book, Kate yearns for love. She yearns to feel that she belongs somewhere, that she is cherished by someone. At the end of the book, she meets another young woman, a healer who is in ministry with the priest Kate met earlier, who just might be the one to help Kate cross over completely into a renewed sense of meaning, possibly even faith. As she draws closer to this renewal, she learns the truth behind the tragedies in her life, and she discovers the truth of Christ’s words, “… the truth will set you free.”
The other characters in the book too make conscious choices either to do good or not, sometimes one or the other at different times in their lives. Their choices have consequences, both to themselves and to their children and grandchildren. Hawk’s Crossing depicts a moral universe that matches the moral universe that we, as Catholics, believe to be real.
I hope this helps. Next review I do, I will try to be more explicit about why I think the work is or is not a work of Catholic fiction.
Rae,
Your extensive and thoughtful reply exceeded all expectations — thank you so much! To spare us all my ignorant ramblings, I shortened my original reply to just this.
First, let me question your assertion that we must agree on what Catholic fiction is before you can address it in a review. I don’t think you need to have that agreement, but I do still want you (or any reviewer) to tell me what is Catholic about this piece of fiction. And, in fact, you do it very well at the bottom of your reply. There you give a discreet view of the protagonist, her circumstances and the difficulties that she’s dealing with, enough for me to relate to her and identify common ground. It is only at this point that I became interested in reading the book. It does seem critical to place it in some context, so knowing that the characters are Catholic, that she is dealing with the world without the benefit of her faith, and that she might have met someone who helps put her in touch with that again – all this is Catholic, and it takes no great “agreement” to see that. You do it very nicely all by yourself.
The reason all this is so important to cover in a review is because of what Catholic fiction means to me, that is, how it is important and informs my life. Perhaps you have read “I Heard the Owl Call My Name” or “Maria Chapdelaine”? I think I might have had them way in the back of my mind when I heard the phrase “Catholic fiction.” Not having grown up Catholic, I am interested in knowing what it means to be Catholic, both long ago and now. Catholic works like these two do an excellent job of painting that picture while accomplishing quite a lot more besides.
Contrary to some (apparently), I look to fiction to learn about my faith. I see virtue as well as the ravages of sin. In adult fiction, I am able to draw my own conclusions and identify the moral of the story myself. Still, I like it to be there. I like the author to make a point. “Owl” is so poignant, so tender… I read it every few years, and every time, it breaks my heart for the magnanimity of the love in it, which is just a glimpse of the very love of God. Although the priest is an Episcopalian, this is a Catholic story.
Thus, I can’t resist responding to the idea that young people learn from their parents, but not from books. I cannot deny that young people learn from their parents, but they very much learn from books, sometimes a great deal, depending upon the quality of the parents. Not only young people. We all do. In fact, I will go so far as to say that the very reason we read books at all is to watch others and learn. Other people fascinate us, and we enlarge our circle of acquaintance when we read. That’s why I think it is an important, perhaps necessary, element of Catholic fiction that it illustrate something of being a Catholic, that it present and explore that “Catholic blanket of transcendence.”
Like I said, I am new to the realm of Catholic fiction and ignorant on many levels, but participate here in the hope of learning from you and others interested in Catholic literature.
Thanks again for your wonderful reply!
Laura Leigh M
Laura, this discussion thrills me and gives me renewed belief in and hope for the transformative power of fiction. Thank you! Like you, I too consider fiction an important part of my life, and not just written fiction but film also. I have not read the two books of which you speak, but they are on my radar now. I like what you say about children learning from fiction as well as from their parents, and cannot agree more that through fiction we expand our circle of acquaintance, for weal or for woe. My oldest grandchild, who just turned twelve, has become a voracious reader. Watching her is like a look back into my own past. She is not Catholic, and I am hopeful that she will encounter in books what her parents have not exposed her to at home. She and I bond over fiction. I try to throw good stuff her way, and she helps me keep up with the state of YA fiction these days (in a word: scary.)
We should form a mutual admiration society.
You have helped draw me out of my reticence about writing explicitly about the Catholic elements in the books I review. Thank you for this truly enlightening discussion.
Excellent! I’m glad you’re thrilled ‘cuz so am I! I will watch for your next review with interest. And, I’ll get this book, Hawk’s Crossing, to read and compare notes. Perhaps this will get me into reviewing, which I’ve wanted to do for a long time. Because we do learn from books, it is important to cultivate good taste and an aesthetic formed, preferably, by the Faith. Thus, having good stuff to read is imperative. Goes for movies too. Until last October, I had a little Catholic bookstore and I loved providing these things for our community, but I had to close. I may reopen in a year or so.
My thanks to you both, Rae and Laura Leigh, for a very enlightening discussion. You have both invested a good bit of time in your discussion, and we are all blessed by your contributions. The definition of Catholic fiction interests me greatly since I am a Catholic who writes fiction. I have just discovered this site, and I will no doubt return to it many times as well as recommend it to others.