Dear James.

Unrequited love, letters never sent, questions of faith, and the rumor-mongering of small-town characters are tied together in Jon Hassler's newest novel, (Ballantine Books, 438 pp., $21).

I can't get it out of my head that the

closing of St. Isidore's Elementary

prefigures the shutting down of

Christendom. I keep foreseeing the

day when the Church will be reduced

to a few wretched old folks

like myself searching for a Mass to

go to, and a few wretched and persecuted

old clergymen like you,

James, going around in disguise

saying Masses in cellars. There's an

ill wind blowing, as I've said, and

the sturdy old vessel of my faith,

afloat for seventy years in the safe

harbor of St. Isidore's, is being

tossed about on a sea of despair.

So I'm going to Rome.

And there you have the hook upon which is hung the story of Agatha McGee, the dominant figure in every way imaginable in Jon Hassler's warm and absorbing novel Dear James.

Agatha's musings about the shutdown of a northern Minnesota parochial school, where she has been teacher, principal, and guiding light for decades, appear in a letter being written to James O'Hannon in Ireland. This is one letter of perhaps a hundred that is written but never mailed to him over the past three years since she discovered on her first trip to Ireland that O'Hannon, her pen pal for many years, is a priest.

A promising beginning for a story? I think so, and so must thousands of Hassler fans. The Minnesota territory of the fictional town of Staggerford is a fixed and reliable center staked out as Hassler Country (just as surely as Yoknapatawpha County belonged exclusively to William Faulkner and Gibbsville, Pennsylvania was all John O'Hara's).

Hassler's concentration on church themes has earned him a reputation as a Catholic novelist, which has resulted in inevitable favorable comparisons with fellow Minnesotan J. F. Powers. Hassler tackles church topics as soberly and thoughtfully as Powers does, and his writing skills are similarly first-rate. (The Powers comparison is perhaps not as apt as it might be since Hassler's priests appear in strong supporting roles rather than as central characters, much as they did, and with the same kind of "right on" effect, in the stories of Edwin O'Connor.

But Hassler's small-town portraits are so deft that they are also likely to put readers in mind of yet another Minnesota writer from an earlier generation, Sinclair Lewis. Hassler does for Staggerford what Lewis did for Gopher Prairie, and some of Hassler's townspeoples' lines--"Rome before I die ... I hear St. Peter's is a hell of a piece of construction," one businessman muses--are worthy of Lewis' George Babbitt.

That letter from Agatha, which, like all the rest, will be carefully torn up and thrown aside as soon as it's finished, is being written as Agatha McGee is waiting for her Thanksgiving dinner guests, a decidedly mixed bag of souls representing all levels of Staggerford society.

The Thanksgiving dinner includes her next-door neighbor Lillian Kite, a 70-year-old widow who is "a dear soul, but tiresome." And there's Myron Kleinschmidt, a former pupil of Agatha's who is now their district's congressperson and a calculating sort who has earned her vote only three times in his seven congressional campaigns.

Agatha's pastor, Father Finn, will be on hand as well, a friend despite the heartbreaking closing of her school, which was more the bishop's doing than his own.

Finn's pastoral associate, Sister Judith, and Judith's father, Sylvester Juba, are also expected. They're long-time Staggerfordians. Judy, as she prefers to be known, is an engagingly pleasant "new wave" nun who insists on calling her pastor "Skipper," and Sylvester is an ailing and cranky widower in relentless pursuit of Agatha. (She could imagine no worse fate than a union with Sylvester; he's the retired lumber baron for whom St. Peter's Basilica represents "a hell of a piece of construction.")

And finally, there's Frederick "French" Lopat, a drifter whose ambition and purpose were shattered after a traumatic experience in Vietnam. A former boarder of Agatha's and still her general handyman, he earns a pittance by dressing up as an Ojibwa Indian each summer at the Staggerford tourist-information center and posing with little children for pictures next to a sign that reads, "Don't Touch the Indian." The rest of the year he collects unemployment and lives at Staggerford's run-down Morgan Hotel.

"My house is open to any lonely heart," Agatha tells Finn--as if explaining the guest list.

At this point of her life, Agatha is something of a lonely heart herself. The closing of St. Isidore's has left her at loose ends, without challenge or purpose. And although three years have passed, she's still suffering from the shock and disappointment she felt when she discovered that James O'Hannon was not only her cherished correspondent and soul mate but a priest, and a faithful one at that. And so Agatha goes through fits of depression and to her great embarrassment even finds herself crying in public now and then.

Her Staggerford neighbors and friends are a comfort but only to a point. In her own way, Agatha cares for them, but they tend to try her patience with superficial chitchat and trivial concerns.

Judy, in particular, manages to push all the wrong buttons. When Finn broaches the subject of church tradition at the dinner table, Judy's response appalls Agatha:

Oh, Skipper, don't be such a bore.

Looking backward is exactly what's

kept the Church bogged down all

these years. We've been liberated

from all that. We're free to think for

ourselves.

It's lines like that, along with Judy beginning the Lord's Prayer with "Our Mother, who art in heaven" or telling members of a study group that they should think of creation as God laying an egg, that have driven Agatha over the edge.

"We've heard a lot of piffle from Sister Judith over the years," she tells Finn in a private moment, "but lately I've been fearing for her sanity."

The trouble is that none of the dinner guests, no one in the tight little world of Staggerford, really shares her interests or her deeply felt values. These were concerns she once confided to James, but now, by her own decision, that door has been closed:

James ... had hurt her severely, had

stolen her heart at an age when

most people had long since put

romance behind them, had deceived

her and left her in distress.

James, however, desperately wants to reopen the door. He has written to Agatha's bishop to explain the situation and ask the bishop's help in changing her mind. When Finn, at the bishop's request, carries the letter to Agatha, her first inclination is just to ignore the letter. But later, moved by the urgency of its tone--with a hint, perhaps, of medical problems--she decides to write back. But this time, as she tells a friend, "My eyes are open."

And so the correspondence begins anew. In his first return letter, James tells Agatha that at 70 years of age he's about to retire and, as he puts it:

I can't say I'm sorry. The duties of a

parish priest grow more and more

complex at a time in my life when

I am more and more inclined to

avoid complexity. Is it the same

with you, Agatha, or am I alone in

my need for simplicity?

James tells her, too, that just as she did, he wrote letters to her that were never mailed. He confesses that the troubles in Northern Ireland haunt and disturb him in a way they had not before. And, just for now, he withholds the news that he has undergone serious surgery for cancer, with a hopeful but far from certain prognosis for the future.

The renewal of letter writing coincides with Agatha's first trip to Rome, as part of a study-tour group led by Finn's brother, a college professor. James decides to meet Agatha in Rome, but the tour departs before his letter arrives. She never gets to read it but an envious Imogene Kite does. Imogene is Lillian's daughter, an unpleasant sort who'd like nothing better than to topple Agatha from her Staggerford pedestal.

And Imogene gets the chance when Frederick invites her in to help him look after Agatha's house. Not only does she unhesitatingly steam open James' new letter but she also stumbles across the cache of old letters that Agatha has stored away and reads them all.

What Imogene finds is bombshell material--not bombshell in the erotic sense, but in James' sympathetic responses to Agatha's critical comments about her fellow townspeople, people she genuinely loves, but also people she genuinely finds tiresome at times. Shocked, Imogene sees to it that all of Staggerford learns this side of Agatha.

Imogene tells Judy:

She's been trashing the whole town.

She's been holding herself up as the

model of virtue around here for

most of the twentieth century, and

all the while she's been running us

into the ground.

For the time being Agatha knows nothing of Imogene's duplicity, and Italy turns out to be all that she had hoped--especially after James meets her, and they savor peaceful days together in Assisi. He talks again of the troubles in Northern Ireland and confides his plans for his retirement mission: to devote his time and efforts to an earnest and intense involvement in the search for peace in Northern Ireland.

These and a number of other loose ends all remain to be tied up--a feat Hassler manages with a professional storyteller's skill. And that is what Dear James adds up to: a good tale, well told, and a story peopled with multidimensional characters worth caring about. (The casting isn't always quite perfect--with Judy, for example, Hassler leans in the direction of caricature, as he also does with the New Age theology she espouses.

But by and large he's on target throughout this book. The dialogue sparkles--both the Minnesota and Irish speech patterns read like the genuine article.

Hassler generally gets it just right when he's writing about the church and church people. This is a refreshing treat: a contemporary work of fiction that manages to handle church matters intelligently and without condescension.

Where does Hassler go next? An English teacher and writer-in-residence at St. John's University in Minnesota, he quickly outgrew the regional writer reputation that marked his early career.

Now at 60 years of age, Hassler ought to have many fine writing years ahead. If he uses them to turn out fiction that's in the same league as Dear James, a contemporary love story with a ring of truth to it, they'll be years well spent.