Some writers capture national headlines; others capture local hearts.
This observation was brought delightfully home to me a few months ago,
when I dropped a small pile of books on the checkout desk at my
neighborhood public library. The librarian working the computer screen,
a small, quiet woman of monastic disposition, usually goes about her
chores without uttering a word. This time, however, she accepted my
stack, glanced at the top book, and burst into a smile broad enough to
launch a moon rocket. "Jon Hassler!" she yelped. The smiled widened as
she saw that, in fact, my entire selection that day consisted of Hassler
novels. "Isn't he just great!" she said. "I wish there were more like
him. A writer that makes you glad to be alive."

Who, you might wonder, is this man who gladdens the hearts of young
librarians, middle-aged professors, and, I am told, droves of retirees?
The author of seven novels, beginning in 1977 with Staggerford
(the imaginary Minnesota town where most of his stories unfold), Hassler
is a writer-in-residence and English teacher at St. John's University,
Minnesota. In a recent interview, he confesses that the writing takes
precedence: "My teaching is always in the late afternoon or evening. The
students get me when my mind is shot!" a decision that even his students
must applaud considering the literary fruit that results, lately in his
newest novel, Dear James.

Dear James brings back characters from Hassler's earlier
ventures, most notably Miss Agatha McGee, the elementary school
principal who loomed so large in Staggerford and A Green
Journey (1985). Agatha, now seventy, radiates that quality that
used to be called "spine": moral rectitude, dogged courage, and a trap-
door mind fused into a backbone strong enough to shoulder the problems
of half of Staggerford. She has her faults, too; having "always striven
to be predictable," she finds herself adrift after the closing of her
beloved St. Isidore's Elementary, an event symptomatic, in her worried
eyes, of the shutting down of Christendom. Around Agatha's moral axis
revolve, frequently in erratic orbit, the members of Staggerford's
closely knit Catholic community: French Lopat, the Vietnam vet who
scratches out a living as a fake Indian for the tourist trade; Lillian,
Agatha's best friend, who gets her news from supermarket tabloids;
Imogene, Lillian's daughter, a liar and backstabber; Sister Judith, a
New Age nun who imagines the Creation as God laying a giant egg.

In this constellation of superbly drawn comic characters, the brightest
star is the one farthest away: Father James O'Hannon, an Irish parish
priest in Ballybegs, Ireland, with whom Agatha has carried on a
correspondence blossoming into platonic love for years. Thus the
salutation of the title; its irony lies in James' failure, for the first
several years of their relationship, to inform Agatha of his clerical
status. After she discovered the truth during their only face-to-face
encounter (a debacle recounted in A Green Journey) the
correspondence entered a new phase. As Dear James opens, Agatha
continues to write long, revelatory letters to James, and then instantly
tears them up. Meanwhile, James' undammed stream of letters to her
stagnates in her desk.

Despite their estrangement, Agatha thinks constantly of James, and he of
her. Their relationship is platonic in more than the conventional sense;
these two traditionalists share a respect for ideas and a belief in
Ideas, even in the Logos. Similarly, their correspondence is more than
epistolary; their lives run along parallel tracks, in religion,
intellect, and morals. The joy of the book lies in watching these lines
converge into a happy ending despite the obstacles of age, location, and
vocation. Before this dignified conclusion, however, Agatha and James
must not only reconcile with one another, but atone for the past by
surrendering a grudge: he against the British who killed his father
sixty years ago; she against Imogene, the acid-tongued gossip who makes
public her correspondence with James. In local communities, Hassler
suggests, ancient truths abide: words retain their power to save or ruin
lives, good and evil can yet be distinguished, people remain accountable
for their acts, and sin, penance, and absolution are still valid coin of
the realm.

Remarkably this is where Hassler parts company with almost all other
American novelists religion is the means whereby these small-town
transformations take place. In Dear James, the catalyst is not
only the teachings of the Church but its sacred places as well. Agatha
and James heal their breach in the Vatican (she is there on a New Year's
tour of Italy), a small town that is a universal city. They deepen their
accord in Assisi, another small town whose essence Hassler captures as
well as any writer before him. Most strikingly of all, James renews his
priestly mission during a papal audience at the Vatican. The critical
moment comes when John Paul II, working his way down the center aisle,
halts in front of James (who is standing on a chair for a better view),
gazes into his eyes for "a full five seconds," and then gestures him
forward.

James lowered himself carefully to the floor, and the crowd made room
for him at the barrier. John Paul stepped forward, took James' face in
his hands, turned it to the left and spoke briefly into his ear. Then he
bent forward and touched his forehead to James' forehead, his hands
still cupping James' face like a precious vessel. Then he moved on.

To find out what the Pope whispered, read the book. Suffice it here to
repeat Agatha's assessment that "we've just witnessed a miracle," not in
the sense of an impossible happening, but in the sense of a revelation
of the eternal sacred moral order in the temporal fallen human order.

These Staggerfordian trials and redemptions add up to more than a series
of Sunday School lessons. One feels a great moral force surging through
this novel, a sense that lives do indeed matter, that God oversees the
comedy and that fiction is the right means to get this message across.
As James puts it, "Stories can move people, Agatha. I learned that in
the pulpit. You can preach till the cows come home and not awaken a
single soul, but the right story, well told, goes straight to the
heart." It brings to mind a passage from John Gardner's On Moral
Fiction, an important, vilified, and now forgotten book of the
1970s. "The traditional view," Gardner writes, "is that art is moral: it
seeks to improve life, not to debase it. It seeks to hold off, at least
for a while, the twilight of the gods and us."

Gardner's definition of traditional art describes perfectly Hassler's
novels: creations as admirable for their benevolence as for their
architecture. Here is an author who embraces every character his
imagination conjures up, whether heroine, fool, heretic, or shrew. He is
fulfilling Chekhov's dictum that "it is the writer's business not to
accuse and not to prosecute, but to champion the guilty, once they are
condemned and suffer punishment." Agatha, James, and nearly all of
Hassler's figures suffer chastisement or worse for their failures, and
nearly all are championed in this splendid work, testimony to God's
tender mercies.