31 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Outstanding novel of a priest in changing times, July 21, 1999
By A Customer
This remarkable novel describes the vocation and ministry of Father Joe Hackett. The author, J.F. Powers, carved out for himself a niche as the most perceptive literary observer of the lives, passions and quirks of the Roman Catholic clergy. Be warned: this is a far cry from the florid Romanticism of The Cardinal or the pschological mysticism of Susan Howatch. Powers is a realist, with a pen at once comic and acidic. After a few chapters to sketch his early life and randy adolescence, we encounter Hackett as a self-important seminarian, literally wearing an antique hairshirt and asking (aloud and in public, no less) how virtue can be made as appealing to the common man as sex. But as he is shaped and molded -- by his work as a priest, by the experience of his classmates, and especially by the encounter with a young curate full of Vatican II and Vietnam -- Hackett matures spiritually and otherwise. In the end, he is a few pounds heavier, a little bit wiser and, perhaps, a bit more virtuous.
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Powerful Masterpiece, May 30, 2005
This review is from: Wheat that Springeth Green (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)
The best of the series of books published by The New York Review of Books are all the works of J.F. Powers, who died in 1989. Powers' novels and stories are almost entirely concerned with Catholic clerical life in the midwest. I hadn't read his last novel, Wheat That Springeth Green, and I was happy to find that the new edition contained an introduction by the author's daughter, Katherine Powers. Wheat That Springeth Green is every bit as fine as Morte D'Urban, his first and only other novel written some 25 years earlier, and a National Book Award winner as well. In its treatment of character and plot the latter novel is theologically perhaps even more complex.
Joe's character is cast from the first pages: as a toddler he gets attention from his parents' friends merely for declaiming at a party "I go to church!" We also learn of his parents' antipathy towards the parish priest's intoning on the subject of the "Dollar-a-Sunday Club," an attitude that Joe will inherit, and which becomes a theme that will be played out in a number of surprising ways. We also sense something of his aloofness in these first chapters as well. He doesn't keep up with many friends, but he does seem to know the value in keeping up appearances: "Joe just smiled at Frances and everybody, so they couldn't tell how he really felt about being in the sack race..." Joe is a good athlete, even in grade school, and the race he really wants, but doesn't get, is the sprint.
Much of the story revolves around Joe's relation to money, so that even an early adventure (described in nearly pornographic detail) involving his first adult relations with women is later understood to be subsumed by his larger pecuniary obsessions. His sexual sins, or at least the memory of them, turn out to be something of a red herring: at the seminary he asks his instructor, "Father, how can we make sanctity as attractive as sex to the common man?" a question that (rightly) earns him nothing but mirth from his fellow seminarians. We are given hints that as Joe grows older he succeeds in overcoming his youthful scrupulosity. After a stint at Archdiocesan Charities he is assigned to the parish of St. Frances - a name shared by his childhood infatuation and a co-traveler in that youthful adventure. So as far as sex is concerned, there is in his maturity there a sense that all is right with Joe, if not the world. That this is the case is dramatically reinforced by the nearly hopeless entanglements of an ex-seminarian, some of which leads to misplaced retribution that Joe patiently, even faithfully endures. These episodes are magnificently structured, displaying in Joe's life a kind of fate that is worked out through choices made less in freedom than with a concern for propriety and in service to principles that are neither his own, nor of the church in which, as he says in other circumstances, he does so much hard time.
Other obstacles to holiness, as perhaps they always must, remain. Although his basic attitude is good, the reader realizes that the young Father Hackett has refused one halo in favor of another when he refuses to toady up to either the priest in his parish or to the archbishop in his archdiocese. Money matters are everywhere in evidence: the rectory built by Joe; bribes offered by parishoners; purses collected on behalf of retiring priests; inheritence; a collection drive that is farmed out to a private firm - in which Joe will take no part. All this points to beyond the contradiction in one man's character to a paradox that is funamental to our very being. How do we care for an abundance which is most fully ours when we least consider it our own?
Joe's misappropriation of his own nature, and indeed human nature, leads to a truly heinous transgression in one of the final chapters. That this transgression is committed and then resolved in secret, without comment from Joe or even the narrator, points toward a God who is as truly all merciful as he is unnoticed even by lesser beings working on his behalf. I would guess that the true thorn in Joe's side is also Powers', and while reading I several times wondered whether the crux of the story wasn't inspired by his frustration at watching baskets and plates passed through the pews, week in and week out, for a lifetime.
Very highly recommended.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Artful, beautiful, and simplicity, as if Shaker furniture were transformed into words, February 9, 2007
This review is from: Wheat that Springeth Green (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)
Anyone who has not read J.F. Powers is missing a major American voice in letters. This review will not be adequate to even speak of his skill.
Complete lives are sketched with the faintest of references, such as a family who the hero, Father Joe Hackett, brings from the city to remind his comfy parishioners of the trials of the poor (shades of the "holy poverty in the city" mantra so common from my youth). He tells their entire story with three unconnected lines sprinkled as a leitmotif throughout the narrative.
The hero's interior monologue is both revealing, and surprising. Throughout the novel faint points of challenges and grace (and simple, just-sufficient grace) carry the reader along with Father Joe's eventual conversion (rededication?). This is the story of a bumbling soul who eventually inhales the breath of the Divine.
Every person I've ever given a J.F. Powers book to has thanked me (Catholics and non-Catholics alike). Highly recommended, for this is monumentally great literature.
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