Trials and Blessings of Life Outside the Convent : BODY AND SOUL, <i> by Marcelle Bernstein,</i> St. Martin’s Press, $18.95, 351 pages

This novel follows a loose and popular structure of tales for modern women. The form--seen in works as popular and secular as those of Kate Coscarelli and Sidney Sheldon--takes as its starting point a woman of pluck and character, but from a sheltered and essentially safe past. The plot then thrusts her, all unsuspecting, into the outside world.

The sheltered woman, who has heretofore thought of herself, if she has thought of herself at all, as ordinary, deficient, perhaps, finds that in the helter-skelter of modern life, she is able to thrive and bloom, and that everything she has been doing in the first part of her life has prepared her beautifully for the second.

These novels are meant to be read by melancholy wives or divorced women; to hearten them, to prepare them for an uncertain future. The main change in Marcelle Bernstein’s “Body and Soul” from this serious and edifying formula, is that Anna, our heroine, is not married to a beer-swilling trucker or a conniving professional man. Anna, “Sister Gabriel,” is a bride of Christ. Anna has been an “enclosed” nun since age 17.

She’s 31 now. She hasn’t been out of the convent since the day she came in. She never speaks to her “sisters” except when absolutely necessary. For the past several years she’s been in a state of “accidie,” or spiritual emptiness. She’s been praying constantly to the Lord, but He has not been answering.

Thus, when Anna’s brother commits suicide, leaving two kids, a pregnant wife and a failing textile mill behind, the reader knows that Anna, though she thinks she’ll be outside convent walls for only a week, will probably be out longer.

Part of the obvious interest and fun in this novel is that Anna re-enters the world as an alien being. She hasn’t had a bubble bath in 13 years. She’s never seen a dishwasher. (She can, however, drive her brother’s Jaguar, since she’s been driving a tractor at the convent for 13 years.)

Anna also encounters strangely revisionist theories about why she went into the convent in the first place. She always believed it was to pray for the afflicted in the world; to be a vessel, a conduit to the Lord, and back again. But her sister-in-law, pregnant and resentful, feels that Anna took up a spiritual life to get away from the responsibilities of the daily grind, particularly from the demands of the family mill.

Anna must concede that perhaps some of that is true--or was true. Now, she is confronted with all the responsibilities of a “man of the house.” In effect, Anna now has a wife, two kids with another on the way, and that failing mill to put back on its feet.

But her cloistered life has given her drastically strict work habits. Within those convent walls, she and her sisters--when not fasting and praying--have been raising sheep, shearing and dyeing wool and spinning that wool into yarn to make expensive hand-knit sweaters. Also, while not a mathematical genius, Anna has the strength of character to face up to the bills her improvident brother has left.

If these are Anna’s strengths, her weaknesses are the way she deals with her fellow human beings. She talks in religious platitudes, she can’t bring herself to kiss children, she can’t look adults in the face and, for most of the novel, she swoops around in a full habit that dates from the Middle Ages. (Her head isn’t shaved, but she keeps her hair cropped with nail scissors. She hasn’t looked in a mirror for 13 years.)

The mill has been undermined by her dead brother’s execrable taste--he preferred flashy colors and synthetic yarns--and by the nasty, underhanded ways of Stan Beattie, a womanizing assistant manager, who has been trying to sabotage the mill by rerouting orders to other factories in the hope that those establishments might hire him when the family mill goes under.

(This seems rather a forlorn hope and fictionally contrived, since Stan could just as easily work for Anna, the deserving sister-in-law, the kids, and keep his job, but every novel needs a villain, and in the absence of boozing truckers or conniving professional men, poor Stan Beattie draws the short straw.)

Will Anna return to the convent? Don’t bet on it. Although this book is heavy on concrete details of the spiritual, enclosed life, the joy and ecstasy of that life is totally absent. (It’s not clear that Anna ever believed in God at all.) But there are plenty of tasks on the outside, plenty of ways to do good. (And a lot of cute guys, once you give that chastity vow a toss.)

There’s a lot of wishful thinking in this novel, a lot of fairly preposterous scenes, but it’s got the enchantment of a certain kind of story: You stay up until 3 in the morning reading it. And you make plans, for when the checks begin to bounce; for when that husband strays, or dies.

Next: Constance Casey reviews “Childhood” by Melvin Konner (Little, Brown).