This is a gentle, slow-moving story of a bon vivant Catholic priest in mid-50s (?) midwest America, and the foibles and flaws of his colleagues in the backwaters of the Order of St Clementine as they try to manage their affairs. The humour is rather dry and indirect, to the point of obscurity at times, and the story drags in places. Some characters seem important for awhile, then disappear without another word. It's uneven and the ending is somehow out of character with the rest and weakly anti-climactic. ( )

It took me a while to get into Powers' short stories, but after I finished the first volume of them I couldn't put them down. So I was primed for this, and it didn't disappoint. In fact, the larger canvas seems to suit him more in some ways. Granted, it suffers a little bit from the same kind of disjointed narrative track that Cheever Wapshot Chronicle suffers from, but to nowhere near the same degree. But that's this novel's only flaw (unless you count 'being about a priest' as a flaw, which I don't, but some might): it's beautifully written, quietly hilarious in an Evelyn Waugh kind of way, and extraordinarily subtle in its depiction of the unbridgeable gap between the best and worst aspects of modern human beings. Powers has an incredible ability to vary the distance between the narrative voice and main character (sometimes they're practically identical, sometimes much fun is had at Urban's expense), and to elicit both ironic scorn & joyful admiration for all of the characters, all in perfectly clear prose. My only complaint (occasional disjointed narrative aside) is that he only wrote two novels. ( )

I greatly appreciated this book. ( )

This is a fabulous piece of writing on an era that is long gone,good or bad. Certainly, there is a more coherent sense of place and community here than today. Powers placed the life of a somewhat vain and ambitious man in the context of the Catholic hierarchy, with the same striving for power and success that laymen face.If you like Walker Percy or Peter Taylor, I think you will like this. ( )

Cradle Catholics will enjoy ( )