A Foundation for a Life of Storytelling

“A stay against confusion” is how Robert Frost described the essential function of poetry, but novelist Ron Hansen borrows the same phrase and applies it to religion. In a collection of confessional essays that adopts Frost’s phrase as its title, Hansen allows us to see for ourselves how a passion for God and a passion for the writing life--so often at odds with each other in contemporary literature--enrich his work as a novelist.

“Churchgoing and religion were in good part the origin of my vocation as a writer,” explains Hansen in the opening chapter of “A Stay Against Confusion,” “for, along with Catholicism’s feast for the senses, its ethical concerns, its insistence on seeing God in all things, and the high status it gave to scripture, drama, and art, there was a connotation in Catholicism’s liturgies that storytelling mattered.”

Hansen is best known as a storyteller; his novels include “Atticus,” “Mariette in Ecstasy,” “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” and, most recently, a startling work of imagination about the love life of the 20th century’s greatest villain, titled “Hitler’s Niece.” Now he steps out from behind the scrim of fiction and speaks plainly and movingly about how his faith in God, his reading of the Gospels and his embrace of the Roman Catholic Church have inspired and illuminated his life’s work.

Hansen, of course, stands in an old and honorable tradition, one that can be traced without interruption from the prophetic writings of the Bible to the confessions of St. Augustine to the more recent work of Flannery O’Connor, Alice McDermott, Walker Percy and Reynolds Price. But he reminds us that confessions of faith are regarded in our postmodernist world as not merely unfashionable but odd and eccentric. And so he identifies himself with “writers and artists of faith who may feel exiled or silenced,” as he puts it, “who may feel they can say the unsayable only through cunning.”

Thus, for example, Hansen acknowledges that his first published book, “Desperadoes,” presents itself as a historical novel about a gang of frontier outlaws--”a boys-will-be-boys adventure full of high jinks and humor and bloodshed”--but he insists that his tale of the Old West is imprinted with a spiritual subtext. “ ‘Crime does not pay,’ ” he writes, “is a biblical theme.” Still, by the time he wrote “Mariette in Ecstasy,” a novel about an early 20th century nun who bears the stigmata, Hansen felt at liberty to write openly about religious settings and matters of faith.

“Everything for me,” he attests, “was the feeling that Christianity is difficult, but Christianity is worth it.”

Now and then, Hansen allows himself a moment of reverie, as when he recalls his beloved step-grandfather in a brief sketch titled “A Nineteenth Century Man,” or when he honors John Gardner in a tribute that characterizes the famous novelist and gifted teacher of writing as “The Wizard.” More often, however, Hansen is drawn to unambiguously religious themes and personalities. He offers what amounts to a short biography of St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, for example, and the chapter titled “Hearing the Cry of the Poor” is a powerful and moving elegy to six Jesuit priests who were murdered in El Salvador in 1989.

Wherever his eye falls, in fact, Hansen sees a spiritual dimension. He insists that the life of Jesus is retold in some surprising places--not only “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Cool Hand Luke,” which I can readily see, but also in Tom Wolfe’s “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” which I can’t. He hears echoes of Cain and Abel in the Gospel account of Jesus and Judas, the imaginary encounters of Mozart and Salieri in “Amadeus,” and the life story of Jesse James, the subject of one of Hansen’s own novels. Hansen finds himself forced to concede that readers and writers are not true believers by nature. “We fiction readers are questioners,” he writes. “We find ourselves wondering if the facts are right, if a scene truly occurred, what will happen next in the story, and where we are being taken.” But he insists that the work of a writer can be, and ought to be, infused with spiritual meaning: “The job of fiction writers,” goes Hansen’s credo, “is to give their readers the feeling that life has great significance, that something is going here that matters.”

What makes “A Stay Against Confusion” so refreshing and so enlightening is his willingness to reveal exactly what is at work in his heart and his mind when he reads and writes. In that sense, the fact that Hansen is so stirred by his own cherished faith is almost incidental. Another writer might have an entirely different set of concerns, but only rarely does any writer explain himself so clearly and so courageously.

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Jonathan Kirsch, a contributing writer to the Book Review, is the author of “Moses: A Life” and, most recently, “King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel.”