From the Desk of the President: A Review of “North of Hope”

By President John Garvey

In the mid-twentieth century the United States enjoyed an explosion of Catholic literature. The list of writers included Flannery O’Conner, Walker Percy, J. F. Powers, Edwin O’Connor, Thomas Merton, and many others. They wrote very different stories, but all of them depicted in their fiction a world shaped by their Catholic faith.

Jon Hassler (1933–2008) was heir to this Catholic literary tradition. He wrote about Catholics—practicing and lapsed—living in the frozen upper Midwest in the decades after the Second Vatican Council. The Catholic authors of the midcentury lived at a time when Archbishop Fulton Sheen beat out Edward R. Murrow and Lucille Ball to win the Emmy for Most Outstanding Television Personality. Gene Kelly starred in a made-for-TV adaptation of Flannery O’Connor’s The Life You Save May Be Your Own. Hassler captures a Catholicism that seems to be waning. As one of the characters in Hassler’s North of Hope puts it, we live in a post-Christian age.

North of Hope is set in the small town of Linden Falls in northern Minnesota. It tells the story of Frank Healy. More specifically, it tells the story of Frank’s vocation. It would seem straightforward: In the novel’s opening scene, 16-year-old Frank sees Libby Girard for the first time, and he hears a voice, “She’s the one Frank.”

But there are competing voices. The (supposed) last words of Frank’s mother were, “I want Frank to be a priest.” And circumstances intervene. Frank disappoints Libby when she needs him, Libby deeply hurts Frank. By the end of high school Libby is married with a baby and Frank is headed to the seminary.

The novel picks up the story twenty-three years later. Frank is a priest experiencing what he calls “my very big leak,” the draining away of his spirit and certainty about his vocation. Libby is on marriage number three. Her baby is a now a mentally-ill 26-year-old woman, scarred by sexual abuse, and seemingly set on destroying herself and everyone around her.

God does not loom large in the frozen world North of Hope depicts. In fact he hardly comes up at all. North of Hope is populated by very broken people: drug addicts and drunks, adulterers, murderers, and cranky, old shut-ins. It is not clear how, or even whether, God is guiding these lives. It is not clear that Frank’s decision to become a priest was not a mistake resulting from many preceding mistakes. When Frank meets Libby’s daughter Verna for the first time in the psych ward of a hospital, he asks, “Did you, dear God, foresee this when you made the sun, the moon, and the stars and told your creatures to propagate? Did you know that some of the people you claim to love would be confined to this cramped room with a lock on the door, their moods and behavior out of control?”

The answer to Frank’s question is implicit in the story: Yes. And that is why God sent her Frank Healy. What North of Hope shows so well is that God is not absent even in the grimmest corners of reality. He works in human actions, even very imperfect actions to draw his creatures to himself.