MARIETTE IN ECSTASY by Ron Hansen...

MARIETTE IN ECSTASY by Ron Hansen (HarperPerennial: $10). Hansen’s novel of religious obsession is told in sensual, glowing fragments that suggest the pattern formed by sunlight falling through a stained-glass window. When Mariette Baptiste, the delicately pretty daughter of a wealthy doctor, decides to become a nun in 1906, she disrupts the dreary peace of a small convent in Upstate New York. Her charm and extreme devotion make her the immediate favorite of some of the nuns and the bane of others. When she develops the stigmata, she precipitates a crisis of faith within the convent. Hansen declines to give easy answers, leaving questions about the links between sexual infatuation and religious rapture, faith and self-delusion, for the reader to resolve.