North of Hope by Jon Hassler

First published: 1990

Edition(s) used:North of Hope, with an introduction by Amy Welborn. Chicago: Loyola Press, 2006

Genre(s): Novel

Subgenre(s): Catholic fiction

Core issue(s): Hope; love; prayer; priesthood

Principal characters

• Father Frank Healy, the protagonist, a priest
• Father Adrian Lawrence, Frank’s mentor
• Eunice Pfeiffer, a retired rectory housekeeper
• Father Zell, a nineteenth century missionary
• Libby Girard Pearsall, a nurse
• Tom Pearsall, a physician
• Verna Jessen, Libby’s daughter
• Judge Bigelow, a bar owner
• Roger Upward, Verna’s dead Ojibway lover

Overview

An expansive four-part novel, North of Hope chronicles Father Frank Healy’s efforts to revive his languishing vocation as a Catholic priest. As he admits in therapy, “I’ve sprung a very big leak, and my spirit is draining away.”

Part 1 recounts Frank’s adolescence in the northern Minnesota town of Linden Falls, including his dying mother’s seminal wish that her son join the priesthood. This message is relayed through Eunice Pfeiffer, who kept a deathbed vigil while Frank served as altar boy at Christmas Mass. Adrian Lawrence, the parish priest, befriends Frank and quietly supports his desire to serve God. Frank’s choice is also manipulated by Eunice’s pious mothering. Unable to gain the affections of the widower, she devotes herself to making a priest of the widower’s son. Another influence on Frank’s decision is his hero, Father Zell, a nineteenth century missionary who served the Ojibway Indians and died from exposure while carrying Communion wafers across frozen Lake Sovereign.

In 1949 during his senior year, Frank’s first and only crush is on Libby Girard. A newcomer to Linden Falls, she catches Frank’s eye at the cinema. A voice in Frank’s head intuits that “she’s the one,” and Libby finds in the gentle teenager a refuge from her volatile home life. Though the confidants share walks to school, Frank watches from the sidelines as Libby wins her share of admirers. When she entreats Frank to take her to his house for a few hours’ respite, he panics and abandons her. Libby aims to marry early and cannot fathom Frank’s contemplation of the priesthood. Frank experiences his first dance and kiss with Libby, pleasures followed by heartbreak as, in quick succession, she gets pregnant, withdraws from school, marries the father of her child, moves to a farm, and gives birth. Frank heads to Aquinas Seminary to begin theological studies. To mortify his soul and to erase memories of Libby, he denies himself sufficient sustenance and warmth. When a recently divorced Libby gate-crashes the male enclave, Frank is both embarrassed and tempted by her disclosure of love. Ultimately he rejects her proposal for a life together.

Part 2 continues Father Frank Healy’s story decades later, during the winter of 1977-1978. The college where Frank served as headmaster has closed because of declining enrollments, and his displacement creates a midlife crisis of faith. He returns to his hometown parish to assist his aging mentor, Father Lawrence. Nicknamed “Loving Kindness” by younger priests who mock his sermons, the elderly Adrian welcomes Frank to St. Ann’s. Frank also travels to the Basswood Indian Reservation to say weekly Mass at Our Lady’s, another facility threatened with closure. To his astonishment, Libby lives across from the mission in a building that houses both a clinic and accommodations for its doctor. It is not by choice that Libby and her third husband, Tom Pearsall, are in residence. Tom must complete community service for a drug sentence in Minneapolis, and Libby, a nurse, has accompanied him. She hopes this barren outback will keep her husband within the law and allow her daughter, Verna, a chance to heal from her sexual and drug addictions. Neither hope seems promising. Verna acquires replacement lovers and Tom, flouting his Hippocratic Oath, supplies illegal drugs for Judge Bigelow to peddle from his bar, the Homestead. The suspicious death of Verna’s Ojibway lover, Roger Upward, complicates matters when federal investigators enter the scene. As Frank comforts this distraught family, his feelings for Libby, never entirely extinguished, are renewed.

Part 3 focuses on human suffering, both the physical ailments of age and addiction and the emotional trauma of abuse and grief. After his mentor suffers a heart attack and is hospitalized, Frank replaces Adrian as pastor of St. Ann’s. A suicidal Verna is consigned to a mental health facility, the aptly named Hope. Frank escorts Libby on her visits to the ward and learns that her second husband sexually abused Verna. Amid these crises, Libby and Frank replenish their friendship and begin a ritual of midnight telephone calls. The priest admits his love for Libby but remains true to his vow of chastity, despite temptation and opportunity. Frank’s realization that pastoral work is another form of his beloved teaching allows him finally to settle in at St. Ann’s.

Part 4 of the novel, like the human lives it depicts, is not tidy but offers resolution. Verna bares her soul to Frank: She has engaged in sexual relations with her stepfather, Tom. The incest Libby knew occurred in her second marriage is revealed to have carried over into her third. It is news Libby struggles to process, and she leaves Tom. Despair and loneliness, added to her awareness of Frank’s renewed commitment to the priesthood, drive Libby to attempt suicide. Frank, apparently divinely guided, senses her desperation and intervenes. Hoping to avoid prosecution for statutory rape, Tom endeavors to fake his death but is double-crossed by Judge Bigelow. In an ironic reversal of Father Zell’s noble sacrifice, the doctor drives through the icy surface of Lake Sovereign and drowns. Eunice Pfeiffer’s conscience compels her confession to Frank that she took liberties with his mother’s final words. She explains it was merely Mrs. Healy’s hope, and not her edict, that he become a priest. Frank, however, has made peace with his vocation and his God. In the process of ministering to others, he has been healed through communion with them.

Christian Themes

Jon Hassler writes with insight about the Church in contemporary America, where much in its culture starves, rather than feeds, the spiritual hunger of clergy and laity. North of Hope’s depiction of a priest in crisis compares favorably to Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory and J. F. Powers’s Morte d’Urban. In addition to challenges facing priests in a secular society, the novel explores hope amid despair, prayer in daily life, and the healing properties of love.

As indicated by its title, the novel’s dominant theme is hope, a rare commodity, as Hassler’s characters find themselves north of hope both geographically and emotionally. Variously they desire restored faith in God and humanity, renewed health, recovery from addiction, dignity in old age, economic opportunity, and true love. However, hope seems alien to this isolated region. As Libby laments, “It’s like hope doesn’t reach this far north.” Even a fragile faith offers solace to the desperate, as Frank and his parishioners learn. When Libby and Verna take steps to mend their shattered family, it is their mutual hope for a better relationship that allows them to acknowledge each other’s pain and look past their own.

Whether spoken intentionally or uttered unaware, prayer is practiced by both the doubtful and the faithful in North of Hope. There are formal prayers, such as Father Lawrence’s liturgical recitation during his terrifying heart attack and his ever-expanding prayer list for the deceased. Frank’s conversational prayers range from his request that God keep Libby at a safe distance to his commentary on loneliness: “Dear God, the barriers between us. The walls.” Libby, an agnostic, envies Frank’s faith, but her thoughts as she plans her suicide become a form of prayer. Though Frank has imagined God to be a loner like himself, only the intercession of an involved God can adequately explain how her words reach Frank, miles away.

Ultimately, North of Hope is a love story. If prayer dismantles the walls humans have erected between themselves and their God, love bridges the distances that separate people. Though Frank and Libby do not consummate their love, each comes to recognize the value of their intellectual and emotional connection and the intimacy that close friendship engenders. The loving-kindness preached by Father Lawrence proves to be the balm, after all, for lonely individuals and wounded families afflicted by the diseases of modern life.

Sources for Further Study

Block, Ed. “A Conversation with Jon Hassler.” Image: A Journal of the Arts and Religion 19 (Spring, 1998): 41-58. In this interview, Hassler reviews his career as a writer and examines the many connections between his faith and his fiction.

Brown, W. Dale. “Jon Hassler: Happy Man.” In Of Fiction and Faith: Twelve American Writers Talk About Their Vision and Work. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1997. Traces characters’ values and behaviors to the author’s Catholicism.

Hassler, Jon. “Conversation with Jon Hassler: North of Hope.” Interview by Joseph Plut. Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature 55, no. 2 (Winter, 2003): 145-164. Hassler shares the origins of certain characters, settings, and events in North of Hope, including biographical links.

Low, Anthony. “Jon Hassler: Catholic Realist.” Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature 47, no. 1 (Fall, 1994): 59-70. Examines Hassler’s oeuvre in the light of its religiosity and realism.

Narveson, Robert D. “Catholic-Lutheran Interaction in Keillor’s Lake Wobegon Days and Hassler’s Grand Opening.” In Exploring the Midwestern Imagination, edited by Marcia Noe. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1993. Compares Hassler’s interdenominational presentation of Christian life in rural Minnesota with that of Garrison Keillor.