Temptations.

TEMPTATIONS

Paul Wilkes

Random House, $20, 256 pp.

Paul Wilkes writes about religious matters for the Atlantic and the New Yorker, and with the recent books derived from his New Yorker work the surprisingly affecting In Mysterious Ways: The Death and Life of a Parish Priest (Random House) and then The Education of an Archbishop (Orbis), about Rembert Weakland--he has established himself as one of this country's most active journalists covering religious affairs. In those books, Wilkes's virtues were largely negative ones. He practiced useful arrangement rather than artistry, worked by elucidation rather than striking insight. Above all, he eschewed appeals to this or that understanding of the Christian life, appealing instead to the common sense he picked up during his Catholic childhood in the 1950s, a fondly recalled time when "the Catholic church was strong, monolithic and growing, and her best young men could think of no higher calling than the priesthood." Such common sense--as seen in the parish priest Joe Greer of In Mysterious Ways, and in Archbishop Weakland--is for Wilkes the highest of the virtues. Lucky for him, because the appeal to common sense is also his main journalistic tool, allowing him to muddle through vexing issues without giving undue offense to his many readers. Thus in a 1989 state-of-the-seminaries piece which his publisher deems "controversial" (divinity school officials ambushed him at a subsequent conference on journalistic ethics), Wilkes played radicals and conservatives off one another while positing no idea of just what shape a good modern seminary might take; in a recent Times op-ed quickie about priestly pedophiles, he proposed that the solution to this problem, and to most of the problems of the church in the U.S., is simply to ordain women and married people and so get more red-blooded '50s types back into the rectories.

All that said, Wilkes is a skillful writer, able to relate complicated subjects in an engaging, readable style. In Temptations, however, Wilkes is on his own, and the uses to which he puts his writerly gifts and his commonsensical outlook show how equivocal--and, indeed, tempting--such things can be.

The novel has to do with the monastic life, which Wilkes has explored in a television documentary about Thomas Merton. A brief prologue introduces the narrator and protagonist. Joseph, born of Eastern European Catholic immigrants, an overachiever in school, is now, in middle life, "a somewhat accomplished non-fiction writer." His genre is "the lived experience kind of book," and his main asset is "the uncanny ability to enter the mind and soul of his subject." Joseph is also, he tells us--never quite convincingly--a hedonist, promiscuous, superficial, fond of expensive gourmet goods, the brands of which are deftly dropped throughout the novel. And for all this he is "still one of that dying breed, the 'practicing Catholic'--not a good one, mind you, but practicing at it." In despair after a week in which he has slept with four different women in New York, he sets off to get his spiritual beatings--at "a Zen center, a Mennonite farm, and a charismatic evangelical house of prayer," and finally at Our Lady of New Citeaux, a Trappist monastery in Vermont.

He has been there before, on assignment, and has kept up a correspondence with the spiritual director, Father Columban. Now Joseph tells Columban that he wants to get close to the inner lives of the monks, and eventually to write a book about them. The spiritual director, in the sort of pas de deux that is a strong point of the book, tells him that the only way to get close to the monks is to adopt the attitude of a postulant. So he sets up Joseph in a cottagelike "hermitage" on the monastery grounds, grants him the use of a four-wheel-drive pickup truck, and urges him to read the strict and straight spiritual giant Aelred of Rivaulx. To the chagrin of his agent, Mort, a crude stereotype of a New York Jew, soon Joseph is living in a halfway house between his spiritual life and his literary one. Joseph has in mind a thoughtful time culminating in a thoughtful book. Mort has in mind a screenplay for Jeremy Irons. "I'm calling Zabar's fight now. Sending up a CARE package. Nova and scallion cream cheese, bagels," Mort tells him by phone. "Send me an outline, okay? Cheesecake too. Think facial expression. Think understatement. Think lots and lots of money."

Wilkes's main business, it seems, is exploring the ways the church-world conflict is made manifest for a contemporary person, and he does so on a number of levels. There is the conflict between the abbot and the agent, between prayers and profits, as Joseph's intentions, increasingly purified as chapters named for months mark the passage of time, move away from writing and toward the notion of entering New Citeaux as a postulant. Reading, praying, and tending a private garden worthy of Smith & Hawken, Joseph gets a real taste of the contemplative life, which Wilkes renders eloquently and authentically.

More interesting is the conflict between Joseph's yearnings for a distinct experience of God and his habit of standing back and taking notes. In a series of colloquies Father Columban, abetted by unyielding quotes from Aelred, challenges Joseph from every side: when the writer declares his desire to enter into the monastic life entirely, the priest tells him to get on with his article; when Joseph despairs of making spiritual progress, Columban accuses him of wanting to be "the Rod McKuen of the Trappists. 'Listen to the warm. Listen to the heartbeat of God,'" he jests. "God, you'd sell millions! They'd love it: the new, no-pain religion. You're just fight for your generation out there working out on their exercise machines, with their headphones on. Maybe that's exactly what you came here to find." More interesting still is the conflict between Joseph's commitment to sample the ascetical life and his love affair with Margery Fowler, who emerges a third of the way through the novel. Margery too is a cradle Catholic of the '50s generation, lapsed religiously but not spiritually--after a stint as the broker for a group of batik-making nuns, she runs a health-food store called Nature's Bountiful Harvest--and she shares his parochial set of references. Their delicious romance has its high point when Joseph catechetically tests Margery on common cultural truths:

"Gay?"

"Don't think so, but then I've never been asked to indulge."

"Don't shave under your arms?" ...

"Forgive the five o'clock shadow, but I didn't think I'd be inspected today...."

"Cats?"

"Good in their place. Buy them the cheapest cat food and never use 'Mitzi doesn't feel good today' as an excuse when you don't want to go out yourself."

"Professional sports, watching of?"

"Once, twice a year for baseball, always at the park. Eat seventeen hot dogs, drink as many beers as you can .... Yell and scream for whoever's losing."

Alive, believable, appealing, Margery is the greatest temptation Joseph meets in the novel: a person who honors and shares his quest for spiritual wholeness while treading a path that demands relatively little in the way of sacrifice. One wishes that Wilkes had developed their romance more, for it lies precisely in the realm of common sense in which he has worked so profitably. Instead, lamentably, Wilkes obeys an altogether different rule of common sense--the rule that tells him he must hang his reflections on a crime-ridden movie-of-the-week plot if they are to play for a mass audience. In often bewildering fashion, this plot enfolds a sinister Brother Polycarp, a postulant who commits suicide, another who ends up in a mental hospital, a rejected novice turned militant abortionist, and the private detective Octavius Kiernan, a onetime Latinist who reviles the monastery for its embrace of Vatican II reforms. It culminates in a scene in which Kiernan, crazed and wearing the preconciliar cassock, all but burns the monastery down.

The biblical conflagration set off by David Koresh reminds us that such an incident is not unbelievable. Even so, in this novel it is flagrantly inappropriate, a betrayal of Wilkes's own sensibility and of the nuanced fictional world that he has striven to create. One might say, simply, that he chose to come down on the wrong side of the divide between prayers and profits, gerrymandering his book for the sake of commerce. Or one might say, more charitably and more instructively, that Paul Wilkes, gifted with eloquence, understanding, and common sense, fails short of the uncommon asceticism of an artist.

PAUL ELIE is a frequent Commonweal contributor. His most recent review appeared in the November 6, 1992 issue.