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The Clang Birds
Copyright © 1993
by John L'Heureux
Penguin (Macmillan, 1973)
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"The Clang Bird is a rare creature that
flies in ever decreasing circles at ever
increasing speeds until with a terrible
clang it disappears up its own ass. It is
only because of the will of God that the
Clang Bird is not yet extinct."
— St. Gomer, O.S.T., Founder,
Order of St. Thomas, Novissima Verba, 1717
In the old house on Winter Place everyone
was holy, or meant to be. They had taken
vows ... if what they said and did were
not always the words and actions of holy
men, it was because even holy flesh is weak
and because the vows had been made a
long time ago.
Five of these holy men, Reginald Body
and his friends, decide to leave the
sheltering old house on Winter Place to form an
experimental religious commune in a shabby
duplex. They want to live lives of Radical
Christianity. Relevance. Creative Protest.
Becoming involved.
They become involved all right. Reginald,
a handsome and charming Thomasite priest,
waits for the Spirit to move him to break
down doors and burn draft cards and, while
waiting, falls in love and agonizes over his
vocation.
George St. George, another Thomasite
priest, neither waits nor agonizes. He
pursues first Natalie Meyer, and then Doris,
and finally Barbie, and he discovers, while
running the race, that he is something of
a sexual athlete.
There are other Thomasites: Hans, who
is plagued by "a sting of the flesh," Sean,
who cannot choose between the religious
life and gourmet cooking, Jim, who is a
doctor and has all the answers, Billy
Biggins, who is a psychologist and has none.
And there are the non-Thomasites. The
Emerging Nun has never emerged so briskly
and with such devastating consequences as
Doris and Barbie. Doris discovers Malfoof,
a coal-black Lebanese who believes wholly
and solely in passion; Barbie discovers the
relationship between sex and power. And
then there is the enigmatic and disturbing
Natalie, liberated but determined not to be.
A single Jesuit, a group of Christian
Brothers, a dogged policeman, and two of
the rottenest kids since Ship of Fools
complete the cast.
They are involved, all of them, in the
lunatic fringes of the religious life and of
the world outside: the world of protest
picnics, draft board raids, Panthers,
Weathermen, the F.B.I. The catastrophe that ends
their year of radical Christianity is tragic
and hilarious and inevitable. Poetic justice
has never seemed quite so justly ironic or
quite so brutally just.
Only an American could have conceived
The Clang Birds, and only a born satirist
could have written it. L'Heureux writes
with an astringent wit that, like acid, burns
away the hypocrisy and exaggeration of his
characters. But they are real, and he loves
them all indiscriminately. He rejoices in
the almost infinite variety of human folly.
This is a wicked and hilarious novel.
John L'heureux, for many years a
contributing editor for The Atlantic, is the
author of four volumes of poetry, an
autobiography, and a novel. His poems have
been anthologized in The Young American
Poets, Modern British and American Poets,
and in The Borestone Award Collections,
among others. His story "Fox and Swan"
appears in the Martha Foley collection of
Best American Short Stories of 1972. — from the jacket
John L'Heureux gives the Roman clergy and sisterhood that
sonorous and regal raspberry that Philip Roth gave the Jewish
mother in Portnoy's Complaint. ... Well-contrived, fast
paced, and stylish. It compares favorably with the wickeder
works of Honor Tracy and Evelyn Waugh. — Washington
Sunday Star
Mr L'Heureux's way with his characters is at once splendid
and sympathetic. ... A dazzling juxtaposition of ironies. — The
New York Times Book Review
This funny and intelligent novel is certain to scrape like
heavy-grade sandpaper against a good many thin
skins ... L'Heureux's satire stings all the more because it has the
authenticity of personal experience. ... A wise and delightful
book. — Washington Post Book World
In the great tradition of ecclesiastical satire: done from the
inside with cleansing savagery. — James Dickey
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Comedians
Copyright © 1992
by John L'Heureux
Viking Penguin
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Here is a new collection of stories by the
author of Desires and A Woman Run Mad.
Comedians is funny, shocking, ironic,
perverse, and profound. The characters are
like anybody you might run into on the street,
except that all of them are artists or saints ... and
sometimes both. Whether we are shown
the parabola of their entire lives or only that
telling moment when their lives change
forever, we know these people and we see
that they are us.
"The Comedian" is a stand-up comic who
discovers she is pregnant with a fetus who
sings and will not stop. "María Luz Buenvida"
is about a contemporary South American
saint and martyr whom no church will ever
canonize because of her morally questionable
life. The nine stories in "Brief Lives"
explore the inner resources from which
artists and saints create, and the outer
resources by which they live: their professions
range from painter and priest to writer
and musician, and they include an artist of
the motorcycle as well.
"The Terrible Mirror," the novella at the
heart of Comedians, concerns a complex
and unforgettable couple: Hunter, an eminent
sculptor who creates out of his wife's
inspiration — until she has a vision, and
leaves him; and Rachel, a lost woman who
finds herself only when she has squandered
her ample resources on an exploitative
marriage, promiscuous sex, and a long fling as a
romance novelist. Her salvation, in the end, is
his as well.
In Comedians L'Heureux once again
writes what The New York Times has called
"oblique, ironic moral fables ... in spare,
elegant, and witty prose." — from the jacket
God is not dead in John L'Heureux's stories; He's simply
absent, joking,
or malicious. ... his idea of the thread pulled by God — an allusion,
perhaps to the "twitch
upon the thread" in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead
Revisited — recurs
throughout Comedians. Always on the lookout for
reassurance that
some kind of divine order exists, Mr L'Heureux's
characters are
constantly being surprised by the twists and turns
that fate actually places
in their way. As one character observes: "Faith isn't something you
choose; it's something you're given, except that in a way you have to want
to choose it." ... As in his last book, a widely acclaimed
psychological mystery called A
Woman Run Mad, Mr L'Heureux demonstrates his
remarkable capacity
for narrative invention — his ability to pack a single slender
story with
enough incident to fill a novel; his ability to summarize
entire lives in a
couple of pages. ... beguiling moral fables that illuminate the
possibility of the miraculous in our time. — Michiko Kakutani,
New York Times
L'Heureux is a master craftsman. ... [He] paces his stories perfectly,
constructs each scene with extraordinary skill, represents dialogue
persuasively — all so coherently a reader is not conscious of pace,
scene, dialogue. ... In his readiness to explore the nature of an ironic
God, to chart his characters' search for meaning and chaos, to document the
spectacle of an artist who fails and is failed by his art, L'Heureux is an
extraordinary writer ... — San Francisco
Chronicle
These, then, are oblique, ironic moral fables, and
they are written in a
spare, elegant and witty prose. The tone is one of
extreme detachment, a
methodically distanced wry remove — as if all earthly
passion and purpose
were futile, the locutions of everyday speech necessarily
hollow and any
full-bodied, acknowledged emotion somehow absurd.
"What's the use,"
says the baffled academic husband in the story
"The Anatomy of Bliss."
"What's the use of anything." ... The desire for transcendence
is the preeminent desire in Mr L'Heureux's
fiction. Some of his characters seek it in mystical
union with God. Mr
L'Heureux, in stories like "Departures" or "The Priest's
Wife" (an
astonishingly beautiful story, austere, shapely and imbued
with a sense of
wonder), achieves another kind of transcendence
through his art. — Johanna Kaplan, New York Times
Comedians is a treasure. ... L'Heureux's prose is fascinating and
elegantly powerful. It's a strange, witty, sexy book that's both wonderful
and impossible ... impossible to put down. — Cleveland Plain Dealer
With his elegant, spare prose providing a bridge across the gulf of such
treacherous subjects as God, death, and man's failure to live with integrity,
John L'Heureux finds and expertly maintains his footing in
Comedians. — The New York Times Book Review
John L'Heureux's elegantly composed stories cast a cool eye on, and speak
in
a dispassionate voice of, varieties of religious feeling and experience
whose
expressionist contours suggest the presence of madness or miracle (or
both. ... Brilliantly fashioned. — Philadelphia Inquirer
With his elegant, spare prose providing a bridge
across the gulf of such
treacherous subjects as God, death and man's
failure to live with integrity,
John L'Heureux finds and expertly maintains his
footing in Comedians, a
collection of 11 short stories and a novella.
Running broadly through the
entire book is the question of faith, as each
character in Comedians
eventually reckons with his own awkward need
for an omniscient power
in a universe riddled with dangerous spiritual fissures.
Unlike the latest of
his four novels, A Woman Run Mad, which was
limited by a
distractingly lurid plot, this book invites close scrutiny
and repeated
encounters, requiring its readers to stretch for
meanings, subtle and
profound. ... Mr L'Heureux, it seems, would remind
us that to commit one's life to any
sort of human cause, especially such a profound one
as individual
freedom, is the closest we can come to finding God. — Linda
Gray Sexton, New York Times
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Desires
Copyright © 1992
by John L'Heureux
Penguin (Holt, Rinehart,
& Winston, 1981)
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John L'Heureux's stories, appearing in
recent years in The Atlantic, The New
Yorker, Harpers, Esquire, and the
literary quarterlies — and anthologized in The
Best American Short Stories and Prize
Stories: The 0. Henry Awards — have
made a vivid impression upon readers in
search of fiction that eludes the
commonplace. Gathered together now in
Desires, their cumulative effect proves
even more striking. Here is a
contemporary master at his most provocative and
adventurous, equally at home with Catholic
and secular themes. Whether his subject is
farcical or deeply serious, his style
traditional or innovative, John L'Heureux
enlarges the boundaries of the story, and
casts a new, sometimes alarming, light on
human experience. — from the jacket
The functions
of American art, religion and philosophy are what
L'Heureux is concerned about. He seems to be saying, isn't our
20th-Century insistence on the perfectly
realized, "realistic" external detail just essentially
and eternally boring? Wouldn't it be
better, for our art if not for our own individual
lives, if we recognized other, larger
grids on which to play out our dramas; wouldn't it
make sense to postulate a
supernatural good, an ecstatic Absolute, and then
order our own lives as if those
things existed? It would be more exciting, that way,
more "meaningful," more elegant. ... their [the stories'] demands are
refreshing. They are the opposite
of a "good read." They are difficult, cranky,
beautiful works of art. — Carolyn See, Los Angeles Times
John L'Heureux ... should be a household name. — David Madden,
San Francisco Chronicle Book Review
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Family Affairs
Copyright © 1994
by John L'Heureux
Viking Penguin
(Doubleday, 1970)
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This is a diverse collection of luminous short stories, written by a
respected novelist and poet, ranging
from the psychologically unnerving
to the wildly humorous. Throughout,
Mr L'Heureux displays a talent for
clarity of image and a sense of the
unexpected that allow him to stand
on his own among modern short
story writers.
... the stories put flesh on the
bones and blood in the veins of persons as strange to the layman as
interplanetary travelers: that is,
Catholic priests and nuns. This is
more difficult to do and more
interesting to read than science fiction ... — Jessamyn West
John L'Heureux's stories are models of craft and
illuminators of experience. Taken together with his novels and
verse, they reinforce the conviction that he is one of the
truly valuable writers of his generation. — William Abrahams
John L'Heureux is a magnificent hold out. In an age of
tour-de-force technique, three-ring-circus virtuosity,
L'Heureux builds stories the way the Shakers built chairs;
in an age which has cut the imagination free, an age of
hippogriffs and seven-legged maidens, L'Heureux sits,
stodgy as old Chekhov, observing real human beings and
putting them on paper, pore by pore. With those
brilliantly imagined images from life — Mother Humiliata
crazily grinning as she smashes herself and a cow to
Kingdom Come, ex-Jesuit Paul Gregoire, sneaking true holiness
past customs officials — he makes you abandon
hippogriffs forever. And then he slips in a hippogriff, or at any
rate a troll and a cat out of hell. He's a wise writer, with a
wisdom old as the hills. — John Gardner
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The Handmaid of Desire
Copyright © 1996
by John L'Heureux
Soho Press
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It is impossible to read The Handmaid of Desire
without laughing out loud — the funniest novel
about the petty ambitions of academics since
Randall Jarrell's Pictures From an Institution.
It is wonderfully merciless, taking no prisoners
from amongst the self-congratulatory,
self-referential, and self-absorbed intellectuals.
They are wicked and hilarious, especially Olga
Kominska — the vain feminist theorist — who is
newly arrived and instantly enlisted by Zachary
Kurtz to deconstruct the English Department.
(When not secretly reading novels — for
pleasure — Kurtz schemes his colleagues' downfall,
and his ascendancy.)
Olga Kominska: beautiful, brilliant, a
chameleon with foreign accents that come and go,
seems to have strange, mysterious powers. Olga
promises to give the various scholars and
writers whom she has come among "whatever they
want." "But beware of answered prayers," she
warns. No one heeds her: and so she proceeds
to fulfill all their desires — up to a point.
As politically incorrect as they come, and
full of human foibles and fumbling sex, The
Handmaid of Desire has something to offend
everyone. This is John L'Heureux's funniest
book: satire just this side of tragedy. — from the jacket
... wickedly entertaining ... — Evelyn Toynton, New York Times
Should be required reading for every starry-eyed college student.
— Wall Street Journal
Here, in the book's
penultimate paragraph, we glimpse at last the thematic
thread that runs through all the author's fiction.
"Beholder" or "believer"? L'Heureux was 17 years a
Jesuit. His first novel dealt with a young Jesuit who
endures a crisis of faith, and all his work since then has
been a lament for the lost assurances of theodicy.
Thus, if I have got it right, "The Handmaid of Desire" is a
satire wrapped around an allegory, a subtle literary joke
that reflects the unique intelligence of a deeply thoughtful,
intensely serious man. — John Derbyshire,
Washington Post
Book World
A splendidly witty book. — San Jose Mercury News
A delectable and diabolically clever lampoon of pretension in all
forms, literary, political, and sexual. — Booklist
Sinfully satisfying ... it will make you laugh out loud. — Trenton
Times
Four years after his searing novel, The Shrine at Altamira
(Penguin), Stanford University's John
L'Heureux presents his readers with a story that might be
perceived as a resuscitation from that
novel's mortal horror. Set in a nameless but prestigious
northern California university, L'Heureux has
formulated a satire that playfully mocks ambition and
success in academia. Preoccupied by the
pervasive desire for the fulfillment of one's greatest wishes,
L'Heureux asks, "What happens when
those wishes are granted?" Olga Kominska, a feminist
theorist, is invited to teach at the university by
Zachary Kurtz who wishes to see the English department
subjugated to his will. However, Olga
remains in charge, treating the academics like characters in a
living novel of which she is the
author — a novel about "power ... and the folly of answered
prayers." L'Heureux has written a
delightfully witty novel about the political
machinations of his own turf. — Elliott Bay Book Company
Witty ... A biting satire of academic life and the petty struggles for
power and
influence that animate every campus. ... John L'Heureux ... should be
a household name. — San Francisco Chronicle
Mr L'Heureux writes with amusing liveliness and a sharp eye
for human folly. — The Atlantic Monthly
A tale of academia told with
splenetic gusto. — Atlanta Journal and Constitution
Far funnier than Moo, Jane Smiley's look at academia,
The Handmaid of Desire paints a picture of a
department gone mad with the pursuit of power.
The most power-mad among the faculty has a
secret vice: he (gasp) reads novels for pleasure, but he is
not certifiably insane like the next
department chair. Read this and laugh. A great stocking-stuffer
for the academic
on your list. —
Inkslinger
In this sendup of academia of the literary kind,
L'Heureux takes on the battle between Theory and
Literature. The book — the "text," I should say — is set in the
English Department of a major
university; the forces of Theory have declared the author
dead and would clear out the similarly dead
wood — you know, the foolish professors who actually
like literature and read novels for pleasure.
L'Heureux deconstructs the deconstruction with his main
character, Olga Kominska, the Author
Herself, whose existence (and actions) in the "text"
are a big nose-thumb at post-modernism's
premature reports of literature's death. — Amazon.com
Handmaid is a wickedly funny book. — Palo Alto Weekly
As Suzie Sweezie, a rotund undergraduate and a
post-Christian feminist lesbian, observed
from her aerie deep in the bushes outside
the apartment of her unfaithful professor/lover:
"They were immoral, teachers, the whole pack of
them." The morality of professors and
the lives they lead stalks the background of John
L'Heureux's fifteenth novel, The
Handmaid of Desire, another farcical romp through the bedrooms and
dinner parties of the
overeducated and oversexed whose salaries we pay with our children's
tuition. If the plot
of this L'Heureux soufflé were any lighter it would rise from the
bookshelf, yet he
manages to supply a few good laughs without causing us to knit our
brow over the state of American higher education. — Steven E Alford
Book Review
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Having Everything
Copyright © 1999
by John L'Heureux
Atlantic Monthly Press
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John L'Heureux's previous novels have established him
as a consummate prose stylist, a witty and ferocious
ironist, and a depth explorer of the dark sides of men and women.
Having Everything is a pitch-perfect novel in which
L'Heureux's many talents are on full display.
Take a man who has everything — youth, looks, an important job,
a devoted family — and ask: what could make this man jeopardize it all
for a moment's flirtation with the forbidden? Having Everything is
the story of Philip Tate, just such a man, and the nighttime drive that
opens a door to his suddenly inevitable future. Behind that door live the
Kizers — beautiful, troubled Dixie, and brilliant, kinky Hal. By
stepping, without knocking, into the Kizers' house and into the midst of
their sad marriage, Philip sets in motion the near ruin — and perhaps
the salvation — of his entire world.
Fierce, ironic, and beautifully told, Having
Everything reminds us that sometimes — in marriage, and in
life — having everything is not enough. — from the jacket
Had Diogenes lived today, instead of searching for an
honest man, he would have been swinging his lantern in hopes
of hitting a well-balanced psychiatrist. Or so fiction would
generally have one believe. Psychiatrists in novels generally fall
into one of two categories: they are either cold, insensitive, and
all-around clueless when it comes to their nearest and dearest
(see Fear of Flying's Benjamin Wing) or they are wackier than
their patients — often in dark and twisted ways. Philip
Tate, the hero of John L'Heureux's Having Everything, belongs to
this second group. ... In Having Everything, L'Heureux suggests that
success is only skin deep, and demonstrates how difficult it
really is to have it all. — Margaret Prior
Though the book’s atmosphere is rarefied — few people live in such an analytical,
intellectual subculture — L’Heureux’s work is distinguished by his writing about
adults, his fine ear for the poetry of dialogue that often exists between husbands and
wives, and the frequent irony of parent-child exchanges. Recommended for all fiction
collections. — Library Journal
A kind of biblical sojourn among the very lost tribes of
Harvard, as L'Heureux (The Handmaid of Desire, 1996,
etc.) envisions the sorrows of Job being visited upon a
righteous psychiatrist. ... Witty and interesting. — Kirkus
Reviews
L'Heureux once again explores the dark sides of men and women, in this
tale of a
man who has everything, who stumbles upon the sad marriage of a beautiful
but sad woman and her kinky husband. — Amazon.com
There are any number of reasons to admire and respect the novels of
John L'Heureux, among the most important of which are their firm roots in ordinary
American reality. — Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World
As the book moves forward to a conclusion that readers will sense is going to be
catastrophic, it is impossible to stop turning its pages. Even with all the clues
to the contrary, one hopes that in the end, each character will just dust himself
off and settle down. But at its core, this book is a moral fable about what you
have, what is too precious to squander, what you value too much, or value too little. —
Washington Times
Having Everything is a gracefully written, fully familiar look at adulthood.
The writing is so sharp and clear, in
fact, that Having Everything is an Andrew Wyeth painting of a novel, in which every
gesture, every blade of grass cuts through to some emotion, traveling a distance from
skin to heart that could exist only after at least four decades, like a molecule with
all eight rings from its nucleus to its outer shell, with no need to bond. —
Los Angeles Times
Readers will find themselves pulling for the Tates as they struggle to put their lives back
together. Having Everything is a fascinating exploration of what happens when "having
it all" isn't nearly enough. — BookPage
Thoughtful and gracefully written. — Salon
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An Honorable Profession
Copyright © 1991
by John L'Heureux
Viking Penguin
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"I'm a weak man," Miles Bannon says, "and
perhaps I'm stupid. Certainly I've done many
foolish things. But I did not molest Billy Mack."
Why, then, are the police investigating him?
Why do so many people think he's guilty?
In An Honorable Profession, John
L'Heureux turns from the world of passion
and obsession he explored in his best-selling
A Woman Run Mad and sets us down in the
crowded, ambiguous, middle-class world of
Malburn High, where teaching is an
honorable profession and where teachers' lives
seem as simple and as honorable as the daily
task they perform. They are smart, caring,
ambitious men and women, they are likable
and devoted teachers — never mind that
some of them have problems with alcohol
and loneliness and the need for love, or what
they think is love.
At the center of this world is Miles Bannon,
a good man and a popular teacher. He has
nursed his mother through her long illness,
until her death leaves him free to marry
Margaret — a battered wife, a widow — who
sees him as her salvation. But then he falls in
love with Diane. Their affair, for Miles, is his
salvation. He is loved by two extraordinary
women. He is in love with both. He feels a
pleasant sort of guilt. And then a student with
a crush on him precipitates a public crisis
and, almost without warning, Miles Bannon's
world collapses. He is accused of molesting
a student.
What happens to a man at such a
moment? Miles, like all of us, is guilty of
many things. He has loved neither wisely nor
well. He has been imprudent in speech and
action. He sometimes wakes in the night and
covers his face in shame. But molesting a
student? It is unthinkable. So why don't
people believe him? They say he did it, and
what they say is repeated on the radio, on
television, in the newspapers. And in the
corridors of the school, in the restrooms, in
his class. He is left with nothing to survive
on except what he is.
Can any of us, publicly accused, ever be
innocent again?
An Honorable Profession is John
L'Heureux's best novel so far. The writing is
elegant, witty, ironic. The story is taut and
compelling. This is a rewarding book, rich
and profoundly generous in its humanity. — from the jacket
What Mr L'Heureux does best is portray the
psychological
consequences of Miles's actions. By dovetailing
the false allegations about
Billy Mack's suicide with Miles's own feelings of
guilt (about his mother,
his sexual escapades, his cheating on Margaret),
he is able to slowly
reveal the recesses of Miles's personality. Like so
many of the author's
earlier heroes, Miles emerges as a self-absorbed fellow,
obsessive in his
habits, defensive in his posture toward the world, and
forced, finally, by
the hyperbolic events in this novel, to confront the
truth about himself. — Michiko Kakutani,
New York Times
An Honorable Profession is ... a tautly written psychological thriller.
L'Heureux's generous vision of humanity makes this a novel of
redemption. — St. Louis Post Dispatch
... An Honorable Professionis brilliant and
complex. ... Miles
emerges from his crucible of pain and guilt a stronger,
more self-aware
man. He survives with dignity. Indeed, it is this quality
and the irony and
humor in the book that save An Honorable
Profession from becoming
relentlessly melodramatic. ... a rich, interesting work. ... He
is a deeply ambitious novelist, one who isn't afraid of dealing
with dark themes and what it means to be fully human, especially in the
frightening and ecstatic world we create behind the darkened bedroom
walls. — Robert Ward, New York Times Book Review
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Jessica Fayer
Copyright © 1993
by John L'Heureux
Viking Penguin
(Macmillan, 1976)
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The scene is Boston on a hot summer day.
Jessica Fayer climbs Beacon Hill with
labored breath, fair game for the young
hyenas lounging in doorways. When she
rests for a moment in the shade of
Louisburg Square, they swoop down, rob her,
and leave her for dead. Heat from the
broiling cobblestones rises around her.
Before her mind's eye swirl fragments of
her long life — as orphan, nun, wife, widow,
mistress. She has loved and been loved
by so many, and yet it has taken almost
all of her seventy-five years to enter life
fully and live it freely.
In telling the story of Jessica Fayer,
John L'Heureux convincingly transports
the reader into the very consciousness of
this complex woman. The shifts,
dislocations, metamorphoses that have marked
her life, he fuses with extraordinary
psychological insight. There is humor in the
novel, there is pain, and there is genuine
compassion.
Jessica Fayer is a brilliant portrait
of a woman who discovers life on the day
it ends for her. It is a romantic affirmation
of personality in conflict with the fact of death.
It may easily be John L'Heureux's best work
of fiction to date. — from the jacket
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The Miracle
Copyright © 2002
by John L'Heureux
Atlantic Monthly P
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John L'Heureux has been acclaimed as "[a] master storyteller ... elegant, cunning, and wickedly
funny" (The Washington Post). Now, in a pitch-perfect, deeply satisfying work of fiction,
he enters the world of an unorthodox young priest whose faith is put to the test. Young and
extremely charismatic, Father LeBlanc has just been transferred out of Boston because of his
dangerous ideas on sex, marriage, and birth control — and his failure to maintain proper
decorum. Exiled to a summer beach community, he looks after elderly Father Moriarty who,
on the edge of death, is beginning to question his belief in God. While Father LeBlanc is
guarding his own sanctity, two compelling women come to him for answers. Then a miracle
occurs — the impossible happens right before his eyes — and Father LeBlanc
finds his faith
and his vows, his life itself, all called into question. Witty, profound, and deeply moving,
The Miracle is L'Heureux's finest work. "A writer who picks up his readers by the
scruff of
the neck and won't let go." — Chicago Tribune "John L'Heureux is perhaps today's
most
frightening novelist because his characters ... are the people we see and know...." —
Richard Wakefield, Seattle Times — from the jacket
L'Heureux takes a wry but revelatory look at the connection between faith and love in his
latest novel, about a charismatic, self-absorbed, 34-year-old priest named Paul LeBlanc
who gets transferred out of his South Boston parish for challenging church doctrine. ...
L'Heureux's strength is his ability to expose the all-too-human foibles and flaws of his
outstanding ensemble cast, as he connects the dots with short, punchy scenes that instantly
get to the heart of the matter. As usual, L'Heureux also looks unflinchingly at a variety of
tough moral issues, balancing the serious stuff with humor in a deceptively light style that
makes this book entertaining as well as challenging. ... a balanced, wise book.
— Publishers Weekly
There is great humanity in this well-crafted story, expressed largely through the appealing
characters, and a final message: choose life.
— Booklist
It takes a miracle to shake the faith of young Father LeBlanc, who has stirred up the
hierarchy with his worldly ideas. Poet/novelist L'Heureux is a former Jesuit. —
Library Journal
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The Shrine at Altamira
Copyright © 1992
by John L'Heureux
Viking Penguin
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In The Shrine at Altamira, John L'Heureux
confirms his position as a master explorer of the
intricacies of the human heart when it is set
upon by love.
It is a simple story. Maria Corazón Alvarez
meets Russell Whitaker at a school dance. He has
blue eyes and fair hair and a good American
name. If she married him — if she loved him — she
would be Mrs. Russell Whitaker. Maria A
Whitaker. Their son would be John Whitaker and
she would get out of this ghetto at last and they
would live on the west side of town. But only if
she loved him, of course.
Maria asks him to dance, but Russell
doesn't know how, and so she sits and talks with
him — and sets in motion a love affair so strong
and elemental it should last forever. But the
balance shifts, and as Maria loves him less, Russell
loves her more, possessively, madly. When a son
is born, Maria gives him all her love and Russell
is pushed aside. How can he exist without her
love? What can he hope for? His love runs wild.
It is a fire, and the fire spreads, and in the end it
has become a conflagration that consumes them
all. Consumes and — in a way — redeems.
"This will be terrible; do not deceive
yourself," the Prologue warns us. "We hear
stories like this on television but we do not look,
and when they turn up in newspapers, we glance
away, because we know there are crazy people
and people who are mad with love, but we refuse
to know any more than that."
In his newest novel, John L'Heureux
explores the enigma of love, with its passions, its
cruelties, and its infinite power to forgive. He
writes with a hard brilliance and a relentless
compassion. The Shrine at Altamira is an
experience you will never forget. — from the jacket
John L'Heureux is one of our finest writers. His work is consistently
original, incisive, always compelling. The Shrine at Altamira
meets and perhaps exceeds John L'Heureux's own exacting standard.
A moving book about the strange zones of intersection between love and
cruelty. — Scott Turow
The final scene is a dark and glorious triumph,
a resolution for which all the painstaking development of character and
event, all the delicate construction of a metaphor system, have prepared
us — yet it is so unexpected and so grotesquely right that it takes the
breath away. The effect is to arouse a
complicated moral reaction in the reader, in which
understanding and compassion are
as strong as shock and outrage, the impulse to forgive
as vivid as the impulse to
condemn. ... The Shrine at
Altamira is a novel that works both as a powerfully effective piece of
drama and as a serious reflection on the violent abuse of children.
— Patrick McGrath, New
York Times Book Review
Mesmerizing ... a powerful and effective story about love's most anguished
and distrubing permutations. — Cleveland Plain Dealer
L'Heureux has never been a writer to turn away from stories others fear.
Perhaps his most ambitious novel, The Shrine at Altamira, is also his
most successful; ... Around the central drama of sinner and sinned against,
L'Heureux in brilliantly economical strokes, sketches the range of human
faith, from Maria's mother, whose belief accepts all, to Clark's psychiatrist,
who says God is no more than an invention of the weak-hearted.
Ultimately, only the old priest can explain a story such as this: "God
sanctifies us — he makes us saints — in his own way. Not in our way. It never
looks like sanctity to us. It looks like madness, or failure, or even sin."
John and Russell are so sanctified, and readers of this luminous novel will
marvel that John L'Heureux has somehow conspired to redeem the
unforgivable. — Kathryn Harrison, Los Angeles Times Book Review
This well-written, disturbing novel resembles a Greek tragedy. The fateful
pattern of abusive family relationships presages the catastrophic outcome.
Fate,
religious faith (and lack of faith), and the healer's self-doubts are
prevalent and
interwoven themes. The author is an ordained Roman Catholic priest who left
the priesthood. Dr. Clark, a highly sympathetic character, horrified by
man's
inhumanity to man, is like the priest who has lost his faith. His torment
could
form the basis for a discussion of professional distance/involvement and
physician "burn-out."
The burn victim's perceptions and surgical restoration are vividly and
accurately
detailed; the mother's inability to cope with his disfigurement is also
striking.
Many other important issues are depicted as well: the yearning for cultural
acceptance; the adolescent's ambivalent struggle for independence; the
woman's need for a life of her own outside of motherhood; the nurturing
(sometimes tyrannical) role of the grandmother in a disrupted family;
and the child's need for love, even from a murderous parent. —
Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database
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A Woman Run Mad
Copyright © 1989
by John L'Heureux
Avon (Viking Penguin, 1988)
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A Woman Run Mad is funny, shocking,
profound, and compulsively readable. John
L'Heureux, with the high style and unbridled
imagination of his prize-winning stories, has
spun out a full-length novel — of love and
obsession — that is at once a metaphysical
mystery and a page-turning thriller, a book that
is impossible to put down.
There was a scandal once in Boston that was
not totally hushed up ... a debutante named
Sarah Slade ... her Buenos Aires lover ... rumors
of foreign sin and rumors of kinky sex ... murder ... a
bloody bed ... perversions,
mutilation, a plea of insanity. What ever
happened to Sarah Slade? But that was years and
years ago when Boston was a different place.
No one cares now, no one even thinks of it.
Certainly Quinn is not thinking of it. Quinn
has quarreled with his wife again and now all
he wants is peace. He's in Bonwit Teller to buy
her a handbag, to make up with her, to be
friends once more. But a tall cool blonde gets to
the handbag first, and takes it without paying.
Quinn follows her. And someone follows
Quinn. And propositions him. And Quinn
refuses. But Quinn comes to know the woman
and from that knowledge all their lives unravel.
Because the woman is Sarah Slade. Quinn's
pursuer, Angelo, is her bodyguard. And from
this moment, Sarah and Angelo and Quinn and
his wife, Claire, will never be the same.
Driven but full of hope, these unforgettable
characters try to master their obsessions, and — in
ways they would never have dreamed — they
succeed; even Angelo, the world's most unlikely
and unwilling candidate for sanctity.
A Woman Run Mad is witty and wicked and
profoundly serious. — from the jacket
This is a master's novel: not a stroke wasted, not a detail omitted,
economically imagined, unflinching, and, above all, exciting — the kind
of book that can keep a cigarette addict, out of supplies,
nailed to his chair for two jittery hours. — George V. Higgins
A Woman Run Mad is an intellectual, sexual thriller written
with great wit and elegance. It will be a crime if it's not a
best-seller. — Dan Wakefield
What a wonderfully hideous, gruesome, grueling horror-marathon of a
book! A cross between a Henry James novel and the Texas chain saw
massacre. I loved it. — Carolyn See
John L'Heureux's imagination is wild and wooly; a shameless,
fearless marvel. His new book, A Woman Run Mad, is a
risky ride, at once erotic,
funny, smart, and scary. The book goes too far, which, in a cautious
time, satisfies the heart's longing for excess, danger, and, finally,
release. — Beverly Lowry
A Woman Run Mad held me in thrall all the way.
L'Heureux has written a taut, terrible
story and done it superbly, mixing intelligence and wit with a strong
dose of the macabre. — Maxine Kumin
The damned thing is amazing ... Question: Is there any rule L'Heureux
doesn't break? Answer: Probably one or two. But it doesn't matter
since he gets away with everything. He ought to be shot. We like our
geniuses dead. — David Bradley
A Woman Run Mad
will fascinate you, from its title to its perfect final sentence.
L'Heureux has created a layered, twisted, altogether compelling
circle of desires. — Chicago Sun-Times
A superior suspense story. ... Along the way there are concealed ironies,
sudden
reversals, threats from unexpected directions. ... A drama of interlocking
obsessions and overheated imaginations. — New York Times
L'Heureux is elegant, cunning, and wickedly funny. The reader will feel
played
with, but it's that kind of novel, a psycho-philosophic thriller — and
more. — Washington Post Book World
His breathtaking novel A Woman Run Mad,
published in 1988, provided
one of the most intense reading experiences I've had
in recent memory.
While it was billed as a novel of sexual obsession,
it was much more than
that: it had a strain of hilarious black humor mixed
with many kinds of
gender confusion, grisly murder, philosophy and
sweaty, guilt-ridden
religious angst. This may sound like an unlikely,
volatile mix, but Mr
L'Heureux pulled it off. A Woman Run Mad
was impossible to put down. — Robert Ward, New
York Times
A book that is blithe, witty, and so coolly laid
back ... it is easy to
admire it and its author extravagantly. ... A Woman Run
Mad is quirky and unbalanced. Its excesses at the end
hardly seem excessive, and
that is the author's remarkable achievement — Richard Eder,
Los Angeles Times Book Review
Witty and literate. ... this is Grand Guignol for
grown-ups. — Newsweek
Though written by an American and set in contemporary
Boston, John
L'Heureux's novel A Woman Run Mad ... has a
brisk British
touch. Its somber matter is treated wittily. It doesn't
trivialize, but it reads
as if it weighs less than it does, reminding one of Iris
Murdoch (referred to
more than once in the book), or Muriel Spark, or EM
Forster.
Yet A Woman Run Mad is unlike any novel I know.
Its events are
freshly peculiar. They are not always believable, but they
are always
pleasurably unpredictable. ... unusual intelligence and
personality are alive
throughout the book. — Richard P Brickner, New
York Times
John L'Heureux rises to this particular
black comedy with a sly and
sensuous storytelling style that plays at
repelling us while it absolutely
enthralls us. — The Boston Globe
... a drama of interlocking obsessions and overheated
imaginations. ... exciting. — John Gross, New York Times
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What the Critics Say
