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I was primarily excited about Exiles because it proposed to present Hopkins, who led mostly a hidden life as it was, in the full light of one writer's imagination -- one whose acumen for bringing historical figures to life has already been vouchsafed in his other works of historical fiction. As one who has spent a good deal of time reading poetry (Joseph Brodsky, at one point in his life, wryly observed that he read only poetry because he could read more poems in the time he had left on this earth than he could novels. More literary bang for one's buck, I guess. Well, I won't go that far!), I am fascinated by the motivations of composition and the machination of the muse.

 

As I see it, fiction provides a perfect picture window into these elements of the poetic arts. Jane Alison's The Love-Artist comes to mind -- Alison's novel is a fictional account of Ovid's exile by order of Augustus Caesar, one of the greatest unsolved literary mysteries. Even among those poets who have left an intricate record of their experiences, motivations, etc., they do not always add up to the sum of their self-revealing parts. A. S. Byatt's fictional retelling of the Brownings, Possession,comes to mind.

 

But before going any further, since Mr. Lickona alluded to it, I might as well let you all in on my first impressions. I sent these offhandedly to him, as a postscript even (I hope it wasn't cheating to discuss it beforehand):

 

I enjoyed the novel, but as I was reading it, a little voice in the back of my mind kept saying, it's not really a novel. Have you read anything by Erik Larson (Isaac's Storm; The Devil in the White City; etc.)? It really reminds me of the kind of things he does -- history with lyric speculation between Clio's silences.

 

I think Hansen should have brought Bridges more into the work as a foil for Father Hopkins, and not just as a correspondent. Some baddy from Otto's Empire should have been on the ship, as well. We need some Iliad in here for the sisters -- a Hector for their Achilles -- and some Odyssey for Father Hopkins -- an account of his wanderings to someone through storyline (and who better than a friend who thinks your poems are terrible, goes on to become the poet laureate of England, and, despite himself, almost singlehandedly drags your poetry into the light 30 years after you've died -- and ten or so years before he dies himself?). At any rate, in either case, something human to bring out the excellences. The characters go too silently, in many ways, into the night.

 

 

So much for first impressions. Now, to explain some of these impressions in more detail. Both to show which of them remain with me, and why, for that reason, the work fails as a novel; but also to show which of them have led me to conclude that someone of Hansen's caliber could not possibly have -- excuse the pun -- missed the boat on such a fundamental level.

 

I tend to agree with Bishop Flores, that if Exiles doesn't work on the level of a novel, it works on some other level. That like Dostoevsky or Walker Percy, Hansen is using the novel for his own purposes. While it retains the bare bones of the novel form, Exiles is perhaps closer to a work of nonfiction about a specific historical moment -- or moments. In fact, it appears to be a work of correspondence -- not only the letters or news bits between characters, but the living narrative moments between characters.

 

One of Hansen's better-wrought scenes appears twice in the novel -- I think for the purpose of intoning these correspondences. The first time the scene appears, Sister Henrica is looking out the train at the passing landscape:

 

There were fields of shorn barley or wheat, now blond and fallowed with winter, Jersey cattle sedately chewing silage in their pens, their hides ruffed like hackles in the cold, sodden, pillowy gray quilts of cloud hanging so close they seemed just out of reach of her hand (37, emphasis added).

 

The second time we see this scene, part of it duplicated verbatim, Father Hopkins is looking out another vehicle hurtling him toward his own fate as "he glumly watched England slide past his window: snow in the fields and sodden, pillowy gray quilts of cloud hanging so close they seemed just out of reach of his hand . . ." (175, emphasis added).

 

There are other correspondences, as well -- Sister Henrica and Father Hopkins both wrote poetry, and both were literary before they were religious, etc. In the hands of Joseph Conrad, Sister and Father would become two sides of the same psychological coin, as in The Secret Sharer; in Dickens, it would have been A Tale of Two Poets; in Dostoevsky, they would have been philosophical kin; and so on.

 

At any rate, what came to mind when I saw these correspondences was the sense of "exile" being at the heart of it all. We're all exiles, after all, and sojourners in this world. Some of us will be reminded of that exile by boat wreck, some by literary rejection. But the correspondences also reminded me of a work which, 25-odd years before Flannery O'Connor came on the scene, was already playing with the idea of violence and the sacred: Thorton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Like in Exiles, Wilder's novel takes disparate lives and ties them together in an intimate moment of violence. The correspondences are more apparent, and not nearly as subtle as in Hansen's case, but they seem to anticipate many of the same themes -- the great crying "Why?" of existence can only be answered, ultimately, by our own fiat. The novelist, meanwhile, can show us how that fiat can play out in surprising and revealing ways. I'm just not convinced (by Hansen) that Exiles succeeds.

 

 

Also, I can't say I agree with Ms. Welborn's estimate: I don't think his bone-dry storytelling method is due to reverence (which isn't to say that's not there!). I did like Hitler's Niece for all the same reasons I found Exiles lacking: It gave you Hitler not in facts and dates and testaments, but in what Herr Hitler would do -- "lightly touching [Geli's] hand when he wanted the butter or salt," etc. In other words, Hansen "did" Hitler well -- showed his reader the private man as consistent with the public man. To be certain, there are similar moments in Exiles, such as the Christmas Eve skating party at St. Beuno's:

 

Hopkins became so fascinated by a kind of Sanskrit in the ice itself that he fell to his knees and crouched over green ice that was like a book of slow freezing, his face inches away in his reading of jots and burst and traceries that he considered exquisitely beautiful.

 

"Are you alright there, Hop?" Gavin called.

 

Hopkins faintly waved a hand but stayed hunched in his enthralled scrutiny. And he smiled as he heard Rickaby shout, "Oh, it's just another of his salaams to nature."

 

This scene was wonderful -- and gave a bristling sort of satisfaction, showing the poet of pied beauty once again rapt by dappled things.

 

But in describing the style of Exiles, Ms. Welborn hit upon the right word: reportorial. In fact, I didn't think to connect the dots until she used this word, but perhaps there is poetic method to the prosaic madness after all. As the novel weighs anchor (OK, that one I meant), the narrative frames in Exiles begin to stack up like Russian dolls -- letters and back-stories and newspaper accounts and what have you. I would propose that there is perhaps an ultimate correspondence between the initial frame in which the story of the wreck was told to Hopkins -- the London Times newspaper account -- and Hansen's recreation of that same sensation for the reader in his account of both the wreck and its effect on the poet. After all, since Hopkins re-found his muse in the London Times,perhaps Hansen wants the reader's experience to approach that of Hopkins's by prizing the fiction from between the lines of the journalist's account. I offer this as a hypothesis, not a solution.

 

And as far as traditional fiction goes, I think Mr. Lickona hit upon the key principle around which this work turns, or fails to turn: the implicit "show, don't tell" demand that the reader makes of the novelist. But what does that mean?

 

I like how the late John Gardner explains the principle in his Art of Fiction: The novelist must present fiction as if it were a dream. When the novelist fails to maintain the continuum of dream-as-real, such as we experience in our own dreamtime, then the narrative is interrupted, the illusion destroyed, and we as the reader become irritated, if not downright disgusted, with the work. That disruption can happen in many ways, but suffice it to say, it mostly comes down to some sort of self-consciousness on the part of the writer, which infects the reader's own sense of the fictional reality. On a very basic level, this means the writer (not the narrator) makes his presence known in the work -- intrudes unnaturally either through some factual error or aesthetic misjudgment. It is the literary equivalent of the first-chair violin blowing a kazoo at a climactic moment in a symphony.

 

In Exiles, if we take these interruptions at face value, a good part of the string section is blowing kazoos; the interruptions are aesthetic misjudgments -- that is, if we assume the purpose was to write a novel according to the "show vs. tell" dichotomy. The interruptions happen so often -- the un-cited quotations are the worst, I think -- that the reader's imagination just about gives up trying to look at the work as a traditional act of fiction.

 

 

It would be more vulgar, and not playing Hansen fair, to compare what goes on in Exiles to those television shows that seek to solve the crime with real actors recreating actual cases of the various hypothetical accounts. "No, Kennedy was killed this way . . ." "Here's how we think Jimmy Hoffa died . . ." "This is what really happened to Jim Morrsion," etc. A better and more just approach to figuring out what Hansen's up to would be to first compare what he's done here with his other works.

 

Hansen works best in the historical context -- his most successful novels (in no particular order) are Hitler's Niece, The Assassination of Jesse James…,and Mariette in Ecstasy. (While this last is the least historical of the three, the story still plays out against the historical facts of turn-of-the-century religious life.) There is certainly something provocative about the footnotes of history that can make for a great story, and -- as these three novels testify -- Hansen excels at subordinating the history to the drama. For example, the genius of Hitler's Niece is the way Hansen makes Hitler a believable human being: not any less evil (and in a certain way, for that, more so) than the connotation-laden historical figure with the Charlie Chaplain mustache. In Hansen's hands, he is not a cipher; we hear his heart beat behind his words, the sweat form on his brow after each ellipsis. Hansen almost even tricks us into sympathizing with the dolt. The same is true, though to varying degrees, of Robert Ford and Dr. Baptiste.

 

But, except for certain significant exceptions, not so in Exiles. The characters do not come alive in the way we're used to seeing in Hansen's other brilliant elaborations of fascinating historical footnotes. By way of exceptions, the beginning of Exiles is a case in point. In one sentence, he manages to limn the sacred and profane in one fell swoop of a sentence: "Lying in bed in his nightshirt and black woolen stockings, Hopkins recited his Morning Offering, then stood to use the chamber pot." Like a weak radio signal, this sort of writing fades in and out throughout Exiles. I wanted more and didn't get it.

 

So the question remains -- and I look forward to getting to the bottom of it -- why? Was Hansen not in tune with his art, or are we just not attuned to Hansen's art?