Catherine Tumber.

Talking with a friend a while back, I ran through a short list of books I thought I might recommend for Commonweal readers' summer fare. After hearing a brief description of each book (one was Paula Fox's 1970 Desperate Characters, reissued in 1999), she paused for a moment, then asked, "But Cathy, where's the summer in your reading?"

The point was well taken, but when I discovered an exquisite work of historical fiction about the Inquisition, I was back to square one. The Good Men: A Novel of Heresy (Riverhead, $24.95, 401 pp.) is a stunning first novel by Charmaine Craig, who has drawn on her background as a medievalist to spin an intricate tale of immense philosophical and theological complexity in elegant plainspoken prose. A "work of the imagination," the novel is based loosely on research documenting the revival of the ascetic, gnostic Cathars, or "Good Christians," in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century France--and, of course, the church's campaign to suppress them and to uphold Trinitarian doctrine. Craig recreates the period's preoccupation with spirit/body dualism by drawing sympathetic characters racked by the seductions of both extremes. From the sensualist priest nearly driven mad with animal spirits and the inquisitor who in his bleakest hours questions his own heretical motives, to the "sodomite" who wishes to please God through marriage--no one is spared the agonies and delights of the "fallen" condition, the need to reckon with the moral claims of the body, and the immanent possibility of grace. In tracing the arc of her characters' lives from their earliest years, Craig also manages to bring alive a prepsychological world of self-consciousness, one that thrives with reference to sin, social hierarchy, simple animism, and rural practicality, and, for the literate, classical myth, the Bible, and the "fancy" of Ovid. (Not to mention those heretical writings for a few others.) The results can be amusing at times, as when a young mother hides in the bushes from her cloying two-year-old, so weary is she of the child's constant demands. But Craig doesn't allow us to snicker smugly at the childlike peasants: we recognize something elemental in her momentary maternal rebellion, as well as in her more literal application of boundaries. Craig accomplishes all this while weaving her stories around a central irony: the Good Men are the only two-dimensional characters in the book, for they have traded the aliveness of life for prideful moral and intellectual consistency.

If recent developments in modern psychology are more to your liking, you probably couldn't do better than Stephen Mitchell's Can Love Last? The Fate of Romance over Time (Norton, $24.95, 224 pp.). A self-described "relational" psychoanalyst, Mitchell takes on the characteristically modern dilemma described in the title as it has surfaced with patients in his clinical practice. In brief, he turns the common view on its head, arguing that overweening devotion to habituation, stability, and order, far from developmentally mature, leads to "psychical impotence," and actually degrades romance in all its forms, which depends on risk and adventure for its vitality. This is not a 1970s-style defense of open marriage, but a plea for learning how to "romance" or idealize the various, often alarmingly alien aspects of self each new shift in life can occasion in one's life partner. No bland I'm OK, You're OK optimist, Mitchell recognizes that the "fantasy" that originally binds couples may not be sustainable over time. In a sense, he's calling for a reconsideration of what signals a strong self. Aside from its rich sources for self-reflection, what is most interesting about this book is the way Mitchell casts his relational approach within the sweep of Western philosophy and science, specifically as a departure from nineteenth-century naturalist thought (Darwin and, of course, Freud), which pitted our animal sexuality against the achievements of civilization. Braced by postmodern thinkers such as Lacan and Foucault, he advances a more sociable view of sexuality--meaning that the way we experience eros is defined by the familial tone and socio-linguistic world into which we are born--and a more "fluid" view of the self. Regardless of what one thinks of Mitchell's view that "fantasies of permanence" degrade those we love while protecting us from the vulnerability inherent in romantic love, or his occasionally unctuous tone, here is a remarkably jargon-free account of the postmodern self, one that seeks to supplement its characteristic sense of irony with agency and romantic passion.

On a lazy summer day, readers may be less interested in a theory of love, than a love story. Justin Cronin's Mary and O'Neil (Delta, $11.95, 243 pp.) is a novel cast as a series of short stories--that is, the stories chronicle the lives of the same characters over time. This allows Cronin to play with the prominence and recession of specific memories in different "chapters" of various lives. It's an interesting idea, if not fully realized in this debut work. Still, we care about the fortunes of the lead character, O'Neil Burke, from the start when he's orphaned as a college student after his parents die in a horrible car accident. Fated by the title to meet Mary, he fumbles through his twenties with no clear sense of spiritual or vocational direction, and an uneven but binding relationship with his married sister. Equipped with little more than a vague sense of the supernatural, he emerges as a quiet stoic, a decent guy who usually does the right thing. "Saint O'Neil" an unlikable character snarls at one point. Well, maybe, if saintliness is measured by the grace with which we endure pain, and continue to love anyway.

Catherine Tumber's new book, American Feminism and the Birth of New Age Spirituality: Searching for the Higher Self, 1875-1910, will be published by Rowman and Littlefield this fall.