Showcasing Catholic writers with ties to Milwaukee, Part One:
When in Rome by Liam Callanan
Liam Callanan is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Liam Callanan’s fourth novel, When in Rome (Dutton, 2023), takes place at a crossroads. For years, Claire and her best friend Monica have helped religious orders sell or repurpose their distressed real estate. When it’s time to attend their 30th college reunion, Claire reflects on her life’s two big near misses: one, she almost joined a convent; and two, she forswore a romantic relationship with Marcus, who might actually be the love of her life. At fifty-two, Claire has successfully raised a daughter on her own. But it’s time now to figure out “what’s next”—which just happens to be the question on everyone’s nametag. Claire’s list of “top ten lies I told at reunion” includes you haven’t changed; I love my job; and I no longer bargain with God. In this spirit, I’d like to list ten things I loved about When in Rome:
It’s funny.
It’s about running—not just actual running, which it is also about, but running away from the things we want most in life.
It’s pro-life, in that a young woman decides to continue an unexpected pregnancy alone—and then names her daughter after Dorothy Day.
It’s a virtual (and delicious) tour of Rome, complete with coffee shops, fountains, night markets, and crumbling old convents.
It takes vowed religious life seriously—but not too seriously.
It is unapologetically about middle-aged people.
It’s about Yale, in a good way.
It’s about being Catholic, in a good way.
It’s romantic.
It’s highly readable.
And the pope makes a cameo.
Oh, wait. Is that eleven?
Anyway, when no one’s key questions are answered at the reunion, Claire travels to Rome to offer her professional real estate services to the crumbling Convento di Santi Gertrudis, where a forced sale is imminent due to the convent’s dwindling numbers. Can the order be saved if Claire decides to join? Can she at least find an appropriate buyer who won’t cheat the sisters? And what about Marcus, who has remained a big part of her life? The sisters give Clare a key that Mother Saint Luke, now deceased, once kept “in case of emergency” –but no one has ever found the corresponding lock. Claire dreams of joining the order and wearing the key “on a chain, under her blouse, against her chest … to remind her that she could always get out of what she’d gotten into. Somehow.”
Meanwhile, Claire falls in love with Rome: “Trastevere teemed with trees, vines, flowers. London plane trees, umbrella pines, blue plumbago, wisteria, bougainvillea. She’d once thought of Rome’s spectrum ranging from bleached-bone white to sooty gray, the color of the Colosseum, the Forum, the façade of Saint Peter’s, the Capitoline Hill. But … [the] Trevi Fountain was faintly purple at certain times of day, tourmaline at others. … All the vegetables shone as if dressed for the opera.”
Claire longs to stay at the convent forever, but she can’t quite bring herself to confess her dream of a vocation to the sisters—and besides, her family and friends have other plans. Before the novel’s end, Monica finds Claire “at the bottom of a hole behind a convent, clutching a key.” With its mix of travel, discernment, humor and romance, When in Rome is a perfect summer read.
Joan Elizabeth Bauer 