Volume 47, Number 5 · March 23, 2000
Far from Rome
By Elizabeth Hardwick
J. F. Powers's Morte D'Urban creates an American scene of striking individuality: Roman Catholic priests in a woebegone village in Minnesota.[*] That is the general subject and setting, but the outstanding quality and vividness of the novel is in the composition, the mastery of detail, the wit of the teller, the placing of the characters, each in his fore-ordained spot in the Church hierarchy. The clash of innate disposition with the surrounding blanket of the special vocation gives rise to comic misadventures, disappointments, competitions within the lightly cloistered world each of the priests has entered with the solemnity of his choice of vocation.
Feature, 1678 words
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