Connolly's Life

...Nancy, for her part, has acquired a middle-aged chic, having evolved into an ecumenical groupie who wears her sunglasses perched on top of her head and is concerned about the Third World...

...Then, too, his fiction is true to its form: it pleases and instructs without insisting...

...Clark himself had been a Vatican correspondent for a liberal American Catholic magazine and a close friend of Connolly's (they had been to seminary together...

...whimsical and bittersweet because it leaves you blinking ruefully at the conclusion...

...In fact, it is appropriate for Jim Clark to appear somewhat as a cliche...

...Nor does Mclnerny play favorites when he delineates the features of a spent culture...

...As in Mclnerny's previous novels (notably his 1973 best-seller The Priest), Connolly's Life has for its backdrop the turmoil of post-Vatican II Catholicism, and Jim Clark, self-made loser, has lost his Catholic faith...

...The novel opens with Clark learning from a newspaper in Rome that Michael Connolly, the title character, has been killed in a plane crash back in the States...

...he has lost his self-respect to his erratic passion for a succulent 20-year-old airhead named Maria...

...Although Clark- evidently an old-fashioned sourdough Catholic liberal of the Sheed-and-Ward variety-has long ago lost his faith, the loss is just one more reason for his resentment of Connolly's easy hermeneutics: "I wanted to be as clear as possible about the content of the faith I had repudiated...

...And this may partly explain why the critics who don't like Mclnerny's fiction dislike it so vehemently...

...The message, hard as it may be to pin down amid the tangled plots and whimsical dialogue, is blunt and discomfiting: that our world, always complex and often incalculable, nonetheless is fundamentally intelligible-and that the dreadful and hilarious creature man is responsible for the intelligibility...

...Their marriage long ago annulled, Clark is still a bit wistful about Nancy but remains stung by memories of being cuckolded...

...He has also lost his wife, Nancy, to the charms of his best friend Michael Connolly...

...unobtrusive and serious because, like a modest enthymeme, it implies the major premise...

...A hugely successful writer of boys' adventure stories ("good wholesome stories, too"), he is nonetheless a self-styled, indeed self-made, loser...

...picked up the Angelic Doctor's penchant for dogged clarity and, with that, a quiet unconcern for the amassing of debater's points...

...Let us cast the message in a syllogism: Major Premise: Humans owe it to the fundamental intelligibility of the world not to act like jackasses...

...Mclnerny's fiction is entertaining and funny because it centers on the minor premise...

...Over the past 16 years of his steady literary production, critics have been divided between a minority who find Mc-Inerny's fiction boring and not one damn bit funny and a majority who find his fiction informative, charming, and often hilarious...

...In Connolly's Life, therefore, you'll encounter modern Catholics with little sense of history for whom the word "relevant" somehow defines an absolute, as well as the type whose "idea of benefiting humanity is to hire planes to dump holy cards on the Congo...

...and he almost loses his life to the fury of Maria's psychopathic boyfriend, Austin...

...That's the kind of irony and gray humor you'll keep running into in Connolly's Life...

...Clark flies back to the States to attend the Washington funeral, a splash celebrity affair offered up by Mclnerny complete with cameo appearances by such real-life glitterati of the American Catholic intelligentsia as Daniel Berrigan, Garry Wills, Avery Dulles, Michael Novak, and Malachi Martin...

...A few days later, after attending Connolly's burial, Clark is astonished and then angered when, dreamy-eyed, Nancy tells him that she has seen Connolly alive, in her Washington apartment...

...And Jim Clark, by the way and without spoiling the novel for you, is ultimately denied his revenge...

...CONNOLLY'S LIFE Ralph Mclnerny/Atheneum/ $13.95 John R. Dunlap Ralph M. Mclnerny, professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame since 1955, has been a minor Catholic novelist since 1967, when he published Jolly Rogerson, a Lucky Jim-like foray into the tacky realm of academia...

...Clark is thus the common vertex in a double love triangle which, given the cultural milieu of the novel, is just preposterous enough to be plausible: there is little of love in either triangle and much of a highly cultivated self-delusion in both...

...The main character is the first-person narrator Jim Clark, a middle-aged American writer living abroad in Italy in a self-imposed exile from his native Wisconsin, writing in the first person now, feeling futile, and shacked up in his Roman apartment with a neurotic American girl half his age . . . and if your teeth are starting to itch, relax: I've just exhausted the cliches...

...That loss seems to account, sadly and bewilderingly, for some measure of their fine-tuned asininity...

...The message is a bit hard to pin down, exactly...

...Back in Rome, Clark accepts a commission to write Connolly's biography...

...That the logic is impeccable is only incidental...

...Needless to say, his is a fiction with a message...

...In other words, they are both losers, packed with guilt about their personal failures and living off the residual capital of a basic decency acquired in their strict Catholic upbringings- but, let it be said, profoundly without blame for one shared loss: years before, they lost their two-year-old son Gregory to a childhood disease...

...Connolly would let me go on reciting the Creed and not meaning a word of it...

...Mclnerny calls himself "an uncomfortable conservative," and he's clearly no more comfortable with weather-bitten reactionaries than with idiot liberals...

...The late Father Michael Connolly, we are given to know, was a "dissident" Catholic theologian, a prominent chinwagger among the avant-garde Catholic intelligentsia, a darling of religion editors for the secular media-and, back during the excitement of Vatican II, the seducer of Nancy in a spell of Roman fever...

...His scholarly work is not only readable (a wonder in itself) but downright graceful...

...Thomas Aquinas and a top-flight scholar, Mclnerny seems to have John R. Dunlap is Lecturer in Latin and English and the Walter J. Kropp Reader in Greek and Classical Civilization at the University of Santa Clara...

...We learn all this in a tight blend of flashback and narrative progression...

...Clark and his former wife Nancy slip away from the august gathering to have dinner, but they can't avoid fencing with each other...

...most of Connolly 's Life is poignant and spellbinding...

...Minor Premise: Yet humans often act like jackasses...

...above all, it is faithful to the complexity of human experience...

...but that's all years past now as Clark, settled in Rome and hung up on his bitterness, reads of Connolly's death...

...Conclusion: Therefore, humans are in arrears to the fundamental intelligibility of the world...

...He plans to examine what Connolly has been and done "in the clear light of the Christianity he had tried to obscure...

...The dustcover of Connolly's Life describes the novel as a "theological thriller," but you don't have to be Catholic to take it as a clever mystery, a shrewd psychological enthraller, a moving and sympathetic portrait of Catholicism in crisis-and, by extension, of Western culture in a tailspin...

...Since then he has written 14 more novels, including seven thus far in his popular Father Dowling mystery series...

...to its dissolution...

...For as an authority on St...

...What with his half-wit wench Maria pouting for his attention it's difficult for Clark to get any writing done, but things start getting very complicated (and somewhat chilling) after Maria tells Clark that she too has seen Father Connolly alive, in Clark's Roman apartment...

...In his latest novel, Connolly's Life, the message is served up with a laconic refinement bordering on the precious...

...he needs the money and, after all, here is his chance to take some post-mortem revenge on the "sonofa-bitch...

...That's your culture too, whether or not you're Catholic, and Ralph Mclnerny, minor Catholic novelist and major Catholic scholar, is a wry, clear-sighted, genial witness to its dissolution...

...But this Thomist writes novels, and the novels are not merely cerebral...

...That sounds like the sort of message you'd get from a self-conscious Thomist...