Showcasing Catholic writers with ties to Milwaukee, Part Two:
Infinite Regress by Joshua Hren (Angelico Press, 2022)
In last month’s post, we left the heroine of Liam Callanan’s When in Rome at the bottom of a hole on the grounds of the fictional Convento di Santi Gertrudis. Oddly enough, Infinite Regress also involves two characters being hauled up out of a deep hole on the grounds of a monastery. But they have come for a different purpose, and by a much different route.
Infinite Regress is definitely set in Milwaukee–but it is a Milwaukee transformed by the imagination, with street names I’ve never heard of and schools whose familiar names have been transposed. For a local like me, this only enhances the book’s heady, dreamlike quality. Take, for example, St. Benedict the Moor Parish, where the Capuchins have run a meal program for decades. Hren reimagines the place as an abandoned inner-city monastery in desperate need of repair, with a sonorous bell that features magnificently in the book’s ending. I can visit the real St. Ben’s on State Street any day; but I wish I could hear that monastic old bell ringing out from its tower–or taste the fish fry at “Deplorables,” a fictional establishment formerly known as “The Black Madonna” in honor of Our Lady of Czestochowa, whose icon is proudly displayed there. Such embellishments beautifully amplify the symbolic significance of the book’s urban setting.
The story’s patriarch, Garrett Yourrick, has been a drunk since the death of his beloved wife Catherine. Of his three children–Blake, a one-time cemetery attendant crushed beneath the weight of his unpaid student loans; Max, a psychiatrist; and young Dymphna, the only daughter—only Dymphna has internalized her mother’s Catholic faith. A former Jesuit priest and influential professor, Theo Hape, wants to solve Blake’s student loan problem with a heinous offer of money for sex which he justifies by asserting that nothing is real and, therefore, traditional morality is irrelevant. Hape preys on Blake’s vulnerability; in another dreamlike exaggeration, Blake is liable for arrest because his student debt has already doubled in a most usurious fashion. The entire system is fancifully compared to the Circumlocution Office, that pinnacle of bureaucratic obfuscation found in Little Dorritt, Charles Dickens’s tale of debtor’s prison.
Infinite Regress has several narrators, but perhaps the clearest voice belongs to young Dymphna, who at her father’s direction goes to the mailbox to send $59 rolled up in an empty single-shot bottle to her brother Blake, whom her father believes is still in the fracking fields of North Dakota. “She let it drop…but the mailbox jaw creaked like a well-traveled ship, [and] as the message sank to the belly of the blue boat, made of steel for the rough seas it would ride, she was overcome with certainty that this was the wrong message….” What she does not know is that Blake is already back in Milwaukee, where the money will never reach him—and where he will avoid meeting his father by sneaking in and out of the family’s basement.
Infinite Regress is full of sharp metaphor: in Garrett’s memory, his wife Catherine walks the Camino de Santiago in a “last attempted ‘cure’ for the crippling Lyme disease that occupied and emptied her mind one mosaic tile at a time.” Later, to keep Blake from bolting, Hape “[brings] a harmless dish out from the mind’s kitchen and [sets] it on the table of conversation.” The novel’s enigmatic set pieces flow seamlessly from one to the next; my favorite section belongs to Father Marto, who is restoring the monastery and who receives Catherine Yourrick’s troubling last confession. Father Marto’s purity is such an antidote to Hape, who reads his own version of Dostoyevsky’s “Grand Inquisitor” passage to Blake as a sort of apologia.
Hren’s style demands careful attention, but the payoff is rich. This novel of fathers and sons proceeds like the circles spreading from raindrops on a lake—or like a modern-day way of the cross, in which Blake and his young sister Dymphna each carry a stepladder through town on their way to a symbolic and wonderfully earthy conclusion.
Now, for some poetry:
The Spring that Feeds the Torrent: Poems by St. John of the Cross Translated by Rhina P. Espaillat (Wiseblood Books, 2023)
When I picked up this book, I knew little about St. John of the Cross other than that he was a sixteenth-century contemporary of Teresa of Avila. If pressed, I might have been able to add that he joined in her effort to reform the Carmelite order.
But as Timothy Murphy explains in his introduction, St. John of the Cross is also a poet of the highest order: “no other great poet of the personal relation to Christ—not Gerard Manley Hopkins, not George Herbert—takes us so far into the bower of Christ and his poet bride.” And, yes, he’s talking about love poetry after the fashion of the Song of Songs. As translator Rhina P. Espaillat notes, poets who are also mystics “often have a relationship to the deity that is more passionate than ordinary prayer, more intimate in its language, and often, during a first reading, almost shocking in the highly visual imagery with which they address God….”
Espaillat’s translation is accompanied on the facing pages by the original Spanish, which to my mind makes it a perfect fit for a high school classroom. This excerpt from “A Spiritual Canticle of the Soul and the Bridegroom Christ” will give you a taste of the lovely and natural voice in the English translation: “Whenever you beheld me, /your eyes imprinted all their graces there, / mastered and quelled me…. / Look on me now: your eyes /have scattered through me / the beauty of the gaze with which you drew me.”
I used to read poetry in college and graduate school but have lost the habit since. And so, as I add poetry to my spiritual reading, I’m especially grateful for such a beautiful and very accessible edition.
And finally, three cheers for the return of ELJ’s Afternoon Shorts!
Naked and Famous by Elizabeth Broadbent (ELJ Editions)
ELJ’s Afternoon Shorts is a series of novelettes that can be read in one sitting. In Naked and Famous, Elizabeth Broadbent takes us on a rollicking ride through the swamp country of North Congaree, South Carolina courtesy of three teenagers, Harlan, Brook, and T.S.–but don’t you dare call her Tiffany Sue. T.S. is tired of living in the shadow of her pageant queen sister Melanie, so she takes a page from her favorite tabloid and convinces Harlan to dress up as Lizardman, a towering, bellowing figure in concrete shoes who terrorizes the teenagers getting up to no good in the back seats of their cars at the Lot. In the hope of a tabloid interview of her own, T.S. asks Brook to pose as her boyfriend, which he’s only too happy to do.
It will take several appearances for the legend of Lizardman to take hold, so T.S. schedules one at her own home, with her sister as witness. “It was startlingly dark–T.S. lived right on the edge of the swamp. The rotten-sweet smell of standing water rose all around us.” Soon, Lizardman has T.S. in his clutches, and Brook, in the role of protector, throws a garden gnome at the beast: “throwing it felt righteous, holy and proper, as if I were lobbing a primary-colored hand grenade at the enemy.” When the press takes notice, “T.S.’s fifteen minutes [have] arrived.” But success goes to her head, and a cryptozoologist comes sniffing around; and as the summer proceeds, the tensions among the three teenagers come to a boiling point. Naked and Famous is a beautifully constructed treat–and the ending, while inevitable in retrospect, is never telegraphed. Buckle up and enjoy.
Joan Elizabeth Bauer 