ODDS & ENDS.

Convent life forever fascinates both Catholics and non-Catholics. This fascination, reflected in a host of novels about religious women, most recently manifested itself in Mark Salzman's new book Lying Awake. It's a story about a cloistered Carmelite nun whose life is touched by either God, medical science, or both. Ultimately, the reader must decide.

Mark Salzman is but the latest novelist in a long procession of writers to capitalize on this perennial interest in women who pursue convent life. The Nun's Story by Kathryn Hulme, published in 1956, opened the mysterious reality of pre-Vatican II convent life to a wider world. The 1959 feature film starring Audrey Hepburn was nominated for eight Oscars.

Less sensational than The Nun's Story, but infinitely more complex, is Rumer Godden's 1969 novel In This House of Brede. The Benedictine abbot who first introduced me to this novel claimed it was the best representation of what monastic life is really like. Godden is better known for Black Narcissus, a novel about a group of Anglican nuns, and the movie, starring Deborah Kerr, which did win two Academy Awards.

This past decade has had no paucity of novels set in convents. Ron Hansen's 1991 novel Mariette in Ecstasy centers on a young nun who, after four months of convent life, manifests the stigmata, the wounds of Christ. This event, ironically, spawns a great ambiguity of faith that stalks the convent and spills over into the surrounding community.

Joseph Roccasalvo's 1995 novel Portrait of a Woman paints a great picture of Mother Ambrose, who has come to the convent late in life. Marriage, a daughter, and resistance work during the Second World War are among many experiences that contribute to her amazing ability to touch people's hearts, especially the heart of one young agnostic.

Another novel published just last year, Altar Music by Christin Lore Weber, centers on difficult subject matter. Dark sides of sexual, artistic, and religious passions are explored through three generations of women in one family. The woman of the third generation enters a convent. This book, no Sunday School picnic, is "an austere landscape told with a poet's eye," according to one reviewer. To another reviewer, however, "the book was a real insult to religious orders and those in them."

The authors of these novels are all over hefts halt acre. Hulme and Godden both converted to Catholicism and were never in the convent; Lore Weber was a nun for several years. Three of the aforementioned novelists are male, and one man is not Catholic. Salzman identifies himself as an agnostic raised in a nonreligious family. Hansen is Catholic, but his other novels are far from explicitly religious--focusing on Jessie James, the Dalton Gang, and the great Nebraska blizzard of 1888. Roccasalvo, a Catholic priest, appears to be the most likely male to write about religious life. Yet his novel is perhaps the most secular of the bunch, focusing on the years before Mother Ambrose entered the convent.

Salzman is the latest male author who writes about women in the decidedly female precinct of the convent. Lying Awake challenges today's politically correct idea that only women can and should write about women. This novel also stands in testimony to imagination transcending the borders of experience.

Perhaps what we have termed convent life is more universal than initially appears.

PETER GILMOUR ([e-mail]) teaches at the Institute of Pastoral Studies of Loyola University Chicago.