North of Hope by Jon Hassler

"North of Hope" is the story of Father Frank Healy, set in post-World War II Minnesota and extending into the 1980’s. Healy’s mother died in his childhood, and the lad is more than tended to by the housekeeper of his parish church, Eunice Pfeiffer, who is making a play to win the newly widowed Mr. Healy. Pfeiffer, tending the boy’s mother at her moment of death, reported to all that the woman’s last wish was that her son Frank become a priest.

An introvert coping with maternal loss, Frank Healy progresses through high school—a very handsome, intelligent, and athletic figure but something of an enigma to his peers, and thus even more intriguing and desirable to his women classmates, none more than Libby Girard. It is Libby who brings the energy to this story, albeit in a pathological way. Desirous of Frank as both a lover and a protector from her abusive father, Libby makes her play for Frank in a way that forces him to fish and cut bait on his decision to enter the college seminary. When Libby makes her final desperate play for Frank—pursuing him to his new home, the college seminary, of all places—he keeps her at arm’s length and she begins her long dolorous adulthood through three highly dysfunctional marriages and a severely troubled bipolar daughter, Verna.

There is a long break in the narrative, and we pick up Frank [now Father Frank] and Libby in a most unlikely setting, as neighbors in the Basswood Native American Reservation. Several Amazon reviewers criticized this quarter-century gap as disruptive to the rhythm of the work. On one level I agree: we learn precious little about Frank except that he was ordained and immediately assigned to teach math at an exclusive Catholic academy, where he spent the first quarter century of his priesthood. When the academy closed, and after a brief stint at the Cathedral parish where he developed panic attacks while preaching, Frank receives the bishop’s reluctant permission to rediscover his priesthood in the poorest throes of his diocese.

On the other hand, this gap in the narrative sets the stage for Libby, now working as a nurse at the reservation health center with her third husband, a seedy physician, to unfold her life’s narrative to Frank in a series of episodic crises prompted by Libby’s [and Verna’s] lifetime of trauma, poor choices, and in Libby’s case, likely undiagnosed major depression. She makes repeated and more open appeals to Frank to leave the priesthood and pick up the relationship she remembered from high school days. To his credit, Frank, who is in the throes of depression and midlife identity crisis himself, is able to save Libby from her worst self as her life continues to unravel in a series of shocking revelations and criminal conspiracies.

To focus on the plot exclusively, though, does not do justice to the full work. The bulk of this novel pivots around grimy reservation life and dysfunctional rectory life, each with a culture all its own. The story is peppered with colorful “parish people” who alternately humor and infuriate us. Frank lives with an ineffectual pastor Father Adrian, a monsignor whose life as a pastor and chancellor of the diocese was marked by extraordinary mediocrity but a private, charming piety. Playing out the string, the old pastor has few friends in the diocese, but Frank finds him a comforting presence. As the novel reaches its climax, Father Adrian demonstrates an unexpected energy of tolerance and understanding that contributes to the plot resolution.

On the other hand, there is the rectory’s housekeeper, Mrs. Tatzig. If you have ever watched an episode of “Father Brown” from British TV, you have a decent representation of the power of rectory housekeepers, at least in recent history. In a J.F. Powers short story, “The Prince of Darkness,” [1947] an aging assistant pastor prays for a pastorate so that he might install his mother in the position before she is too old. In our story here, Mrs. Tatzig lives in the rectory and assumes the care of the old monsignor, particularly after his heart attack.

Mrs. T. does not take to Father Frank. His drinking and his preoccupation with Libby obviously do not sit well with her, but his main transgression against her is his penchant for playing cards close to the vest. She cannot read him. Libby’s crises finally disrupt rectory life, and certainly the housekeeper’s, but in this madness Frank comes to realize that his stoic and blunted interpersonal style may indeed be hurtful to Mrs. T., and he takes her into his confidence about the gravity of the crises around them. It is a subtle indication that Frank the priest is finally learning about himself, to the degree that there might be hope for his priestly vocation.

While the novel does not wrap up in a Pollyanna happy conclusion, most of its human trajectories appear more hopeful. Even the bishop reluctantly decides to keep the reservation church open with Father Frank at its helm and Father Adrian and Mrs. Tatzig in support. While not a classic, North of Hope is a good read that conveys how a Catholic church of fallible beings can still rise to the occasion in time of crisis.