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Comedians
By John L'Heureux
New York, Viking Penguin, 1990. 209 pp. $17.95.

For John L'Heureux, life is chaos and God is a comedian. In L'Heureux's Comedians, it is the juxtaposition of these two exaggerations (rather than any traditional understanding of providence or plot) that is the material of history and story. Every one of the four main parts of this collection-the two short stories, the nine mini-tales entitled "Brief Lives" and especially the novella ("The Terrible Mirror," which may well be the most convincing piece in the book)-is a comedy "with no tidy resolutions and nothing to make it all cohere except, sometimes, a thin, thin line" of something vague and unnameable that L'Heureux understands, and wants the reader to appreciate, as grace. Under the conditions of such irony, God acts in the dark in a world too brightly rigged with clarifying light. God's irony, experienced amid the "randomness and waste of life" as "absolute," is perceivable only to those who make no claims to have "gotten it all together." Somehow, eventually not despite the waste and randomness but precisely because of themL'Heureux's often blinded, frustrated, or overwrought characters come in the end to "see."

The most obvious example is Corinne, the main character of the title story, "The Comedian." A thirty-eight year old stand-up comedian with a second husband, no thought of a child, a nominal, standard Catholic faith, and an interest in getting a lot of laughs finds herself pregnant by accident. Struggling with the decision to have an abortion, she discovers that the fetus sings, but only to her. At the same time, her vision begins to fail and she is told by her boss that her comedy lacks feeling. Throughout the course of deciding about the abortion, the fetus continues to sing, with an amazing and ironic repertoire. Corinne learns that the baby is deformed. She decides to go through with the abortion and the fetus stops singing. At the last minute, as Corinne is about to undergo the abortion-which L'Heureux describes as a descent into darkness in the midst of blinding lights-Corinne struggles off the table, the room fills with singing, she tears aside the unbearable brightness and sees.

Few of the stories in Comedians "make sense." One may label this surrealism or consider it a flaw, depending on the point of view. A more trustworthy response might be to take these tales as a manifesto of L'Heureux's Flannery O'Connor-like faith. But it is less Flannery O'Connor's writing that the stories resemble than it is her hard-line theology. Where O'Connor's story lines are bizarre but convincing, L'Heureux's occasionally leave us wondering, at least in the case of "The Comedian," if they are not a bit contrived. Because O'Connor was

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enthralled with the concreteness of her characters as much as with the reality of grace, the exaggerations she offers are believable; the characters are sometimes comically, sometimes terrifyingly, true to the strangeness of life. Unlike O'Connor, L'Heureux seems mesmerized more by the idea of grace than by the quirks of his characters; for this reason they occasionally slip away from him in service to an abstraction. Yet one may not criticize L'Heureux because he is not a new Flannery O'Connor. Rather than viewing the former Jesuit, currently Lane Professor of Humanities at Stanford University, as one more "Catholic author," a latter-day apostle of grace, one must appreciate him in his own right as an engaging-and worthy-disciple of chaos. L'Heureux is interested in mapping chaos in the lives of all his characters, and he does so with particular effectiveness in the novella "A Terrible Mirror." The main character, Hunter, is an academic and artist who, in the words of his wife Rachel, has spent all of his life-and all of his art-being obsessed by God, specifically, God's unfairness. In the recurring metaphor of a powerful sculpture of Abraham sacrificing Isaac-the masterwork of Hunter's life that be is unable to complete-he sees God as destroyer. In Hunter's experience, God is cruel and inhuman yet continues to exercise a strong fascination over Hunter's psyche, particularly through the action of Rachel. Shocked one afternoon by the realization that she has somehow "become" Hunter, and prepared by a long training in dealing with "terminal exhaustion" in her married life, Rachel leaves Hunter (whose name seems no accident) to follow a quest of her own. After an empty search through sex, she goes to the guest house of an Anglican convent where she combines living the convent rule and meditating on the Christian mysteries with writing romance novels, dieting and eating chocolates, and bleaching her hair.

Debilitated by his wife's leaving and blinded by an accident, Hunter settles into a tormented existence in which little is accomplished and nothing makes sense. When Rachel learns of his blindness and later returns, Hunter accuses her of wanting to be a saint. She replies that she is not pursuing holiness but holiness is pursuing her. When Rachel finally leaves Hunter for good (his vision having returned), it is because she "can't stop any of it." She can't stop doing what she doesn't want to do; in Hunter's eyes she is "driven by God" to live in a convent guest house and not with Hunter whom she loves. Hunter suffers terribly from this, and he only comes to see the truth of Rachel's quest in the fifteen minutes of unobscured seeing that occur before his death: "His mind was muddled … and then-the artist's luck-he saw what Rachel meant. It was all meaningless chaos except for that thin thin line."

The notion that in the chaos of life God's action is a "thin thin line" inseparable from pain and doubt is an irony on which L'Heureux likes to comment throughout the stories. Theological observations appear like exegetical glosses, sometimes interlaced in the narrative itself and

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sometimes placed in the mouths of characters. In the mini-tale "Themselves," for example, the narrator recounts the story of his death in retrospect, interpreting the event in light of two flambouyant " goddesses of chaos." Harriet and Margaret, both in their seventies and both preoccupied in spite of their apparent atheism and their long being "tired of Jesus and God," with questions of faith and of God. In the course of a dinner party immediately after which the narrator has a stroke and dies, Harriet sums up the irony of faith by remarking, "Oh, I see … grace is exactly like nothing … except it hurts." And in another tale, this time focused on an ugly encounter triggered by the petty event of competition over a parking space, the main character is forced to face the depths of selfishness amid the superficial everydayness of a tiny act of kindness.

The final story of Comedians, "Maria Luz Buenvida," is a variation on the theme. Here, Maria Luz tells her story from end to beginning, beginning to end, all the while giving voice to the binding thread that spells its own coherence. In her violent, premature, and senseless death, she believes she will be effective unto good. Yet the coherence comes not from the events that have made up her life but from the faith that enables her death. Although she is one of the disappeared of an unnamed Latin American country, and although she has been violated, mutilated, and ultimately silenced, she proclaims: "I will not be a picture in the archbishop's palace, not another faceless one…. I will sprout wings of bronze and I will course through the night; at dawn I will hover above them, the murdered, the defiled, the dying; I will draw them to me; and I will draw the evil, the sick and the depraved…. I will take them into myself and they will be transformed, made whole, all one."

What is it about the randomness and chaos of life that fascinates L'Heureux so much? It is the apparent senselessness of life to the living, the form that we ourselves can not give to our lives and that even art can not give, the maddening inability to make the definitive statement, to speak the ordering word. Reserving that word to God alone, L'Heureux maps a cross-section of typically "Catholic" experiences of the comedy of God-"faith isn't something you choose, it's something you're given, except that in a way you have to want to choose it"-with the disconcerting coordinates of chaos. In "A Terrible Mirror," during one of the many conversations in which Hunter tries to make sense of his wife's living in a convent and writing novels that are not works of art, Rachel makes a speech that could well proceed from the mouth of L'Heureux himself. A real novel, if I were to write one, would try to capture the randomness, the sprawl, the … well, the messiness of life. There would be no causal thread running through it-you know, because you did this, that happened. It would be chaos, and a wanton waste of everything good and valuable, and heartbreak that came from standing inside the only skin you will ever really know. There would be

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nothing to hold it together except the person it was about and … a single tiny thin thin thread of God's meddling in our lives.

Frances Stefano
Seton Hill College
Greensburg, Pennsylvania