EPILEPSY OR ECSTASY?

Lying Awake
By Mark Salzman
Alfred A. Knopf, $21, 181 pp.

Central to the novel Lying Awake is an examination of conscience by a nun trained to judge her conduct under the Carmelite rule she prays will lead her to God. Although the novel's setting is far from the worlds Mark Salzman has investigated in earlier works, its emphasis on discipline, the attempt to practice a rule which can govern and give meaning to experience, is familiar. In the past, as he recounts in Lost in Place, Salzman pursued discipline in a manner fanatically undisciplined: studying Kung Fu with an alcoholic and sadistic master; playing jazz cello with an intensity abetted by marijuana; sitting for hours in a capsule-size cardboard box as a young boy in order to prepare to become an astronaut. But here, in his third novel and fifth book, Salzman has discovered a rule that permits him to be freed of himself and to discipline his talent. The result is so superior that it is not unreasonable to call this his masterpiece.

Lying Awake tells the story of Helen Nye, who becomes Sister John of the Cross, a Discalced Carmelite. Deserted in childhood by her mother, she desires not only to serve Christ but to join herself to a lover who will never forsake her. But in the years following her final profession, she feels forsaken, the routine of her convent life dry, not all of her sisters easy to love, and herself living by rote.

The first, imperfect, easing of this pain comes through an act of charity. Learning by chance that her mother lives not far from her convent, she writes, waiting for an answer with receding hope, just as she did as a child. When at last a response comes, it disappoints, again as the answers did when she was a child. Her mother comes to visit not to reclaim her daughter, but to ask Sister John never to write again. Her mother has a new family who knows nothing of her past, and she wants to protect them--and herself--by keeping her early failure hidden. Tempted to lash out, Sister instead sees her mother as she is: afraid, ashamed, and pitiable, and she frees herself of the futile longing for reunion that has dogged her all her life. She asks to see a picture of her half-siblings and to learn their names so that she can pray for them, and gives her mother the gift she craves--a daughter's silence.

After this renunciation, Sister John throws herself so Salzmanesquely into the physical demands her vows impose that she is far too busy and tired to heed her doubts. But the sense persists that she is no nearer the God she seeks than she was when her vocation began.

The aridity ends unexpectedly when she begins to suffer almost unbearable pain from what are first diagnosed as migraine headaches. As her conventual discipline requires, she yields to the pain, accepting it as what God is asking of her. In accepting the pain, she transcends it, is taken out of herself, and experiences God as having pulled her into himself. This sensation both frees and enraptures her, inspiring her to write poetry so good that the proceeds from her book enhance the community's meager income enough to enable the sisters to look forward to a most mundane blessing--repairs to their convent's leaky roof.

But the pain becomes more severe, the transcendent experience more extreme. She is "out of herself" so absolutely and for so long that what had seemed a blessing to the community as well as to Sister John becomes a burden her sisters fear will be too heavy for them to carry. Her superior insists she consult a specialist. When she does, she discovers that she suffers not from migraine headaches but from a mild case of epilepsy, a condition which surgery can most probably correct.

Sister John is caught. That she has experienced oneness with God she cannot doubt, even though it is epilepsy that has triggered the vision. But she cannot ignore the cost to her sisters. Yet if she undergoes the surgery, she will lose the rapture. Can she bear to face again the dark night from which her mysticism has rescued her? How she copes with her quandary--through a rigorous examination of conscience, an almost pitiless dissection of her motives--and how her sisters cope with it--through charity--is the crux of the novel, and a beautiful crux it is.

The book's brief chapters, even those in flashback, are titled according to the day of the liturgical year on which each event takes place, a framework that leads the reader into the rhythm that has shaped Sister John's soul. We almost hear her think in quotes from the Scriptures, the saints, the rule. Thus we are led, as she is, to realize what community means to a religious, and to follow her as she is made ready to accept herself and her place in God's plan.

Lying Awake is stripped to essentials, free of the intrusive if charming asides that pepper Salzman's earlier work. This story seems almost to be told through him rather than by him.

One wonders why this sortie into a discipline carries him to so much higher a plane than his earlier attempts. Mother Mary Joseph, the convent's "living rule," would doubtless say, as she says of Sister John, "God showers this one with graces." Could be she'd be right.

Marian Burkhart lives in New York City.