Beauty & the priest.

The Miracle John L'Heureux Atlantic Monthly Press, $24, 221 pp.

The biblical epigraph for John L'Heureux's new novel, The Miracle, is taken from the book of Deuteronomy. It's short and sweet, but decidedly in the imperative mood. "Choose life," it reads, in its entirety. Since this phrase sits at the entrance to a work of fiction--an art form given to complexifying things--the sophisticated reader might reasonably expect that an author known for his wit and ironic sensibility is about to play a series of elaborate and intriguing variations on that command. How do we individually decide to choose life? Let the novelist count the ways.

Alas, the reader--sophisticated or otherwise--is doomed to disappointment. The Miracle is a relentlessly didactic novel, so determined in preaching its message that nearly every character in the story becomes the mouthpiece of the author.

Yet you have to admire L'Heureux's chutzpah for taking on a subject--priestly celibacy--that is not only hotly contested in church and society but also one in which he is an interested party. After seventeen years with the Jesuits, in 1971 L'Heureux left both the society and the priesthood. He is widely considered to be one of America's most distinguished writers of fiction and has taught as a professor of creative writing at Stanford for more than thirty years.

L'Heureux's first novel, the archly titled Tight White Collar, came out just a year after he became a layman. In The Clang Birds (1993) he published a broad satire with a large cast of oddball priests and religious. The title is taken from an eighteenth-century treatise of Saint Gomer, the fictitious founder of a fictitious order, the Thomasites: "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."

The Miracle is also a comic novel, but it isn't a satire. It is closer in spirit--or at least, in intention--to a Shakespearean tragicomedy or late romance, where the redemptive ending arrives in a moment of melancholy, after passion and strife have led the characters to the very brink of catastrophe.

The protagonist of The Miracle is Father Paul Leblanc, a handsome, idealistic, and earnest young priest serving in an Irish, working-class parish in South Boston in the early 1970s. He is quickly marked out as a troublemaker for anti-Vietnam war slips of the tongue at Mass and a seemingly cavalier attitude in the confessional toward matters of sexuality, especially birth control and masturbation. Eventually he is summoned to "the Kremlin," the local clerical nickname for the archbishop of Boston's residence, for a meeting with Monsignor Glynn. Though he labors hard to be a decent guy, the lack of imagination in Glyann reveals him as little more than an organization man. Not long after this meeting, Leblanc is betrayed by a fellow priest who provides Glynn with the proverbial smoking gun. Leblanc is swiftly exiled, for safe keeping, to a small parish (Our Lady of Victories) in a New Hampshire beach town.

His job there is to assist the ailing and cantankerous Father Moriarty, who is bedridden, wasting away with Lou Gehrig's disease ("It's my own goddamn disease, not some baseball player's"). As it turns out, Moriarty is all bark and no bite. He's given to speaking about God with the ritualistic addition of the phrase "if there is a God," and his spiritual apercus are thoughtful and humane.

Into the confines of the rectory come two beautiful young women: the housekeeper and single mother, Rose Perez, and Annaka Malley, a native of the town returned home from a string of bad relationships.

Sparks fly between Rose and Leblanc while Annaka quietly and shyly pines for him from the pew. For his part, Leblanc suffers agonies of guilt over his struggle to remain chaste and obedient to his vows, resorting to flagellation to tame his raging desires. None of it does him any good. As the narrator tells us, "Moriarty had diagnosed sanctity as Leblanc's problem within the first week of his arrival."

Unfortunately, what begins as a promising Shakespearean plot, full of infatuation and mistaken identities (with God himself playing one of the lovers), quickly devolves into a wooden morality play. The diction of both narrator and characters is closer to that of an op-ed piece than colloquial speech. Late in the novel the narrator still finds it necessary to say: "Back when he was studying canon law, [Leblanc] decided that the problem with the church is that very early in its history it got into the sex business." And of Rose Perez we're told: "Deep down she suspects the Virgin Mary doesn't take sex as seriously as the priests do."

A more fundamental problem stems from the main character. Leblanc's name presumably indicates that he is in some ways innocent, white as the driven snow. But could it also be that he is a blank, a nothing? It would seem so. We're told that he is an All-American nice guy, but it's obvious there isn't much going on upstairs. When pressed by Glynn to explain his decision to enter the priesthood in the first place, he protests that he became a priest because "I felt I could and therefore should and therefore did."

Now it may well be that Catholic education in America in the mid-twentieth century was guilty of turning out plenty of blanks, but here's the problem: The thesis behind The Miracle is not that the church suffers from too many mistaken vocations, but that the very essence of priestly celibacy is wrong. L'Heureux depicts celibacy as a matter of misdirected energy, a repressive, fearful stifling of our full humanity. If Monsignor Glynn is emblematic of the priesthood in the gospel according to L'Heureux, then quashing eros may well turn you into a bureaucrat.

Of course, the doubting believer Moriarty is intended as a counterpoint to the other two priests, and he certainly is the single most compelling character. At one point in the narrative he croaks out an Old English ditty with the refrain "Sing hi, sing ho, hey nonny nonny"--a clue that his role is that of the Shakespearean holy fool, someone who has passed through cynicism into a sort of mystical innocence. But because his sexuality has been eliminated by his disease, he isn't an adequate example of someone living out a vocation to celibacy. In short, he can't serve as the novel's alternate take on the imperative to "choose life." In the end, even his holy foolery seems more glib than wise.

A friend of mine who has also read The Miracle commented that the priests he knows are at once more "skeptical and strange" than those portrayed in the novel, a comment that rings true to my ear. By the end of the story, didacticism's twin, sentimentality, takes center stage. The eponymous miracle of the title turns out not to be the inexplicable resurrection of Rose's daughter from a drug overdose--another case of mistaken identity!--but the fact that Leblanc finds true (erotic) love. As he takes his final leave of Glynn, Leblanc says, with feeling, that in his new life "I'll have to find out who God is." Clang.

In comedy, everything comes full circle; after all the heat of passion has died down, the characters learn to cherish what they had always taken for granted. Needless to say, that doesn't happen in The Miracle. Here the ending involves change, and frankly it comes as an enormous relief to all concerned--including the reader, sophisticated or otherwise.

Gregory Wolfe is writer-in-residence at Seattle Pacific University and editor of Image: A Journal of the Arts and Religion.