All We Know of Heaven

All We Know of Heaven. By Remy Rougeau. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. 228 pp. $23.00 (cloth); $13.00 (paper).

Nuns, and now monks, appear to be enjoying a certain popularity these days as subjects of novels. First there appeared Mariette in Ecstasy by Ron Hansen (HarperCollins, 1992) and then Lying Awake by Mark Salzman (Knopf, 2000), both about nuns, which explore the possibility of mystical experiences in the modern world (see Anglican Theological Review 83.2 [Spring 2001], pp. 340-342). Those novels were written by laypersons; by contrast, All We Know of Heaven is, according to the dust jacket, by "a Benedictine monk living in the upper Midwest." Although Hansen and Salzman admirably, and surprisingly, capture much of the texture and feel of monastic life, their novels have a hothouse atmosphere; Rougeau's novel is more redolent of cheese making and barn mucking, the day-to-day activities of a praying-and working-agricultural monastery.

Paul Seneschal, a French Canadian, comes as a postulant to St. Norbert, a Trappist (Cistercian) Abbey near Winnipeg, in 1973. When the cab driver drops Paul off at the front gate he asks, "What is this? A cemetery?" (p. 3). The cabbie's question sets the tone for the novel: it asks "What can monasticism mean in the modern world?" and delightfully informs the reader that Rougeau has a sense of humor and will not take either his monks or himself too seriously. Paul discovers that the old monastic tonsure, the corona, was "a finger-wide band of hair around the head that looked like a furn; sweatband" (p. 32). Rougeau has a sharp eye that accompanies his sense of humor: one monk "installed himself in an old stuffed chair like a dog" (p. 41). One scene is worthy of Flaubert in Madame Bovary: as an old monk lies dying in the infirmary, Paul looks out the window and sees that Julius, one of the monastery's stud bulls (the other is named "Caesar"), which a year previously had attacked and killed a monk who was taunting it, is "in the last pasture, doing his business with a cow" (p. 44).

Paul, later to be named Brother Antoine, is, thank goodness, no young Thomas Merton, articulate and spiritually precocious, carrying in his spiritual knapsack the manuscript for The Seven Storey Mountain. Antoine stumbles and fumbles as much as he advances in the spiritual life. (Perhaps one of the novel's main themes is that spiritual advancement requires stumbling and fumbling.) Antoine is not as inward-looking (self-obsessed?) as the young Merton, and that's an advantage for a novel.

All We Know of Heaven really has no plot; each chapter recounts disparate events in the monastery's, and Antoine's, life. But plot may not be necessary in a novel about monks, whose "action" is mostly (but certainly not entirely) interior; holy routine, "whose project" for Antoine was to help him "discover his weight as a human being" (p. 156), takes the place of plot. The novel moves forward as Paul, as Brother Antoine, grows and matures spiritually.

Toward the end of the book, the monks must leave their beloved monastery because the city of Winnipeg has overgrown their property; the abbey and its barns will be leveled for a subdivision. With remarkable detachment, however, the monks move to a rural location and build a new abbey; in an amusing scene, they even take their dead with them. Perhaps this dislocation and renewal is a parable of the modern monk, who stands for silence and tradition in a world hell-bent on obliterating both. With humor and keen eyesight and insight, Remy Rougeau has given us a delightful novel about the realities and depths of the spiritual life.

TIM VIVIAN

Saint Paul's Episcopal Parish

Bakersfield, California

Copyright Anglican Theological Review, Inc. Fall 2002
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