Girl power.

Living with Saints Mary O'Connell Grove/Atlantic, $23, 228 pp.

The saints live. Nowhere is this clearer than in New Orleans, where voodoo shops sell plaster saints alongside figures of good luck and bad luck, mojo, herbal cigarettes, dried and powdered unicorn horns. According to the pale young clerk behind the counter--the one who couldn't find the Nat Sherman's Cloves I wanted--Saint Francis sells best, with Saint Clare figurines loping in, a close second. The little red Santa Lucia I ended up buying had a tag affixed to her shrink-wrapping: "For single women." For? For keeping them single, or for reeling in suitors? For: the mighty preposition of utility. Much of saintly devotion falls under this pragmatic category. Think of all the Italian grandmothers loyal to Saint Anthony of Padua who are out there repeating "Tony, Tony, please come round" every time they lose their car keys, or their cars.

If you are reading this, and thinking nervously, "But hey, I am enlightened! I am beyond that kind of Catholicism ...I think." Think again. What you need to read is Mary O'Connell's new collection of short stories, Living with Saints. Throughout O'Connell's stories, saints show up as protagonists, omniscient narrators, or influential points of reference. O'Connell creates a world in which the saints do everything from smoking to swearing to running tattoo parlors while they do what needs to be done: conferring grace on the earthbound.

Unlike other recent attempts to reanimate the lives of the saints, like Saints Preserve Us! (Random House, 1993), O'Connell's fiction reclaims the radical orneriness of these God-obsessed women. These stories aren't clever send-ups or sappy parables. No cheap laughs here, no complaints devoid of ideas for reform. Faith may have some cheesy trappings, but these trappings are exactly what hold the faith and its mysteries together.

Some of O'Connell's stories take place in Saint Bridget's Catholic High School for Girls, a setting swarming with plaid-skirted teenagers who don't need any of this saintly crap, thank you. Life is that bad. In one story, "The Patron Saint of Girls," the filmstrip "How Christian Girls Blossom into Maturity" makes Saint Agnes (yes, she is the protagonist--suspend your disbelief, okay?) wonder: Why teach the disdain for fleshly pleasures, when even a saint can't protect the lives of girls from ending in car accidents and suicides? In another story, "Saint Therese of Lisieux," a homework assignment on the Little Flower seems irrelevant to the class valedictorian--until, that is, a mysterious cloying odor of roses saves her from the sexual advances of her father.

O'Connell's imagination and her skill at linking the saints' lives to the lives of ordinary people stretch beyond the tribulations of the teenage years. For example, a story set in biblical times but uncannily modern in its tone sets the gospel story straight: Lazarus's kid sister, dissed by Jesus, runs off with Judas--another disillusioned groupie.

In "Saint Catherine Laboure," the Blessed Virgin (yes, she's the protagonist) concedes that "a girl's life is hard." Unable to explain her own life losses, she confesses, "I know how hard it is to be the one left behind."

But who else has been left behind? Living with Saints subversively suggests that both the outdated holy women and the post-Vatican II material girls whose lives intertwine throughout this book have been. The "enlightened" expulsion of saintly kitsch from the Catholic mainstream effectively keeps the saints out of the kitchen; that is, where the girls are. We lost a traditional form of feminine religious devotion, but the heartaches of women's lives that these devotions once assuaged only ache more, and more often. These saints offer empathy, and even transcendent recognition of the more homebound virtues.

The reader will overlook the fact that O'Connell sometimes has her characters vanish inexplicably in a "shower of peppered shrimp" and "licorice whips." Such escapes may seem like cheating, but the author's punch lines usually compensate for the occasional tics in her plotting and prose. The first story in the collection, "Saint Dymphna," is the best example: The schoolgirl Dymphna hates her name, her life, and the homework assignment she has to write about her patron saint. Worse, the abortion she endures drags her into the war of the pro-lifers who "out" her to her classmates and teachers. Not that the Women Center's "escorts," whom Dymphna characterizes as little more than boys "eager to protect their right to f--without condoms," offer much of an alternative. A pawn in this bogus game, Dymphna finds refuge in a miraculous power--like that of her saintly namesake--to enter the bodies of others. This power knocks Dymphna from cynical detachment into compassion, precisely because she inhabits the body of a nun whose kindness she had earlier dismissed as naivete. She emerges from her conversion experience ready to do battle with the belligerent pro-lifers assembling in the parking lot of Saint Bridget's High School, their flyers plastered to car windshields reading: "wanted for the murder of her baby: dymphna malone."

O'Connell's saints know when to claim, often militantly, the rightful inheritance of the wronged. That's the brilliance of her stories, and that is what they invite the reader to rethink, to reclaim, relive.

Mary DiLucia teaches literature at Villanova University.