Dear James.

"Love is best for everybody," remarks Bishop Richard ("Call me 'Dick'") Baker. And Jon Hassler has set out, in his seventh novel, to put some moral zip, humor, and poignance into the bishop's soggily incontrovertible platitude. To that end, Dear James restores to us as principals Miss Agatha McGee of Staggerford, Minnesota, and Father James O'Hannon of Ballybegs, north of Dublin, two who figured centrally in Hassler's A Green Journey (1985), when they were sixty-seven. They are now seventy.

In the earlier novel Agatha and James had become soulmates through their correspondence over several years. When Agatha eventually visited Ireland, however, she learned that James had concealed his priesthood from her--because he feared diminishing the openness of their letters were he to declare his identity-- and no letters have been exchanged in the intervening three years. Their agreement was that she would write first, if she thought she could do so--although it turns out that each has written long unmailed letters to the other, regularly, since that traumatic occasion.

Each is now in dire need of the other. Agatha's beloved Saint Isidore's School has been closed by Bishop Baker and she has grown sour and reclusive between her June retirement from teaching and Thanksgiving, when this book opens. James has undergone surgery for cancer and has also been retired as pastor.

Their need, their author, and God's grace cooperate to let them meet again, this time during Agatha's pilgrimage to Italy with American students. Rome works its spell on three coreligionists, convincingly, despite Hassler's rather heavy-handedly arranging for the pope to single out James for special encouragement. Assisi, however, has an even greater effect, both because it more closely resembles the small towns they know and because it prompts the analogue of Saints Francis and Clare in their intensely chaste love for each other. This kind of love grows between Agatha and James, most movingly, and Hassler is expert in persuading us that such love is possible and healing, spiritually and physically, even as he refuses to wax sentimental or soft-pedal the difficulties of any kind of attachment. Indirectly the book questions the requirement of priestly celibacy.

Hassler wants to cure these two, however, for reasons beyond that healing itself. He wants their religious faith and their love to act on and for others. Thus James discards his bitterness over diocesan politics and over his inability to find intellectual friendship among his parishioners, and determines to spend his remaining years in the cause of Irish peace--a difficult and dangerous mission. Like James, Agatha must discard self-pity and work again for others. Her reversion to type sees her driving James on his speaking engagements, helping to rehabilitate a young Irish boy by moving him to a family in Staggerford, and forgiving Imogene and other Staggerfordians, who have contrived to damage her reputation. Importantly, she tells French Lopat, a troubled Vietnam veteran and local drifter, who he is. He is her only living relative, a grand-nephew, and her ability to overcome two generations' small-minded refusal to tell the truth about his origins marks her own growth in concern for others.

I do not want to suggest that Dear James is a tract, or that the two principals are made to seem perfect. As always, Hassler is conscious of the pettiness, sometimes vicious and sometimes hilarious, of which we are all capable and which we are ever ready to spot in others. The task is to see such facts charitably if we can.

For example, the natives gathered at Thanksgiving and Easter dinners at Agatha's house range from the shiftless and virtually mute French Lopat, to the drunken and lewd old Sylvester Juba, to Juba's daughter, Sister Judith, a liberated nun given to touching and hugging. Judith thinks of creation as God our mother's "laying an egg," and has no use for the doctrine of Original Sin. It is such human behavior, anywhere, that the book's gentle indirectness urges us to see and to ignore or take in stride, trusting in God and the long view as well as in our own works. James speaks of "the tyranny of tradition," by which in large part he means his and Agatha's tendency to cling to pre-Vatican II liturgy, language, thinking. James, Agatha, and Hassler alike finally realize that attention to such tradition for its own sake can detract fatally from true growth in faith and love, and indeed from the reality of Original Sin, which is not to be forgotten and which is not to be resisted by reviving Latin or forcing nuns to wear habits.

In Hassler's novels, loneliness is prominent. It is not purged but is transformed and disciplined by ironic wit and by love, charity. Hassler's development in scope and depth in this regard is clear in his last three novels--Grand Opening (1987), North of Hope (1990), and this new book. Moving both omnisciently and epistolarily from November to July, from Staggerford to Ireland to Italy, and developing a substantial subplot concerning French Lopat and Imogene Kite, he retains his sharp-eyed ability to laugh at silliness in or outside of the church, even as he transcends the topical to give us the sacredsecular picture from long range. Hassler manifests the rare ability to write fiction both popular and important.