Temptations:

...I'm calling Zabar's right now, Sending up a CARE package...

...His architect promises Victor "Once, twice a year for baseball, al- "Outside, the city...

...The 17-month program consists of four one-week intensive study sessions with extramural directed readings and a management project...

...Don't shave under your arms...

...And he and director Branagh have severely successful performances...

...well regarded by his fellow soldiers and courtiers...

...No, it hasn't got a majority of but never funny...

...not only the villains that the constable captures but his own And there's always Emma Thompson, wit of the sixteenth deputies...

...He practiced useful arrangement priest Joe Greer of In Mysterious Ways, simply to ordain women and married peorather than artistry, worked by elucidation and in Archbishop Weakland-is for ple and so get more red-blooded 'S0s rather than striking insight...

...Thus in a 1989 state-of-theYorker, and with the re- seminaries piece which his publisher cent books derived from his Paul Elie deems "controversial" (divinity school New Yorker work-the surprisingly af- officials ambushed him at a subsequent fecting In Mysterious Ways: The Death and conference on journalistic ethics), Wilkes Life of a Parish Priest (Random House) instead to the common sense he picked up played radicals and conservatives off one and then The Education of an Archbishop during his Catholic childhood in the 1950s, another while positing no idea of just (Orbis), about Rembert Weakland-he a fondly recalled time when "the Catholic what shape a good modern seminary might has established himself as one of this church was strong, monolithic and grow- take...

...Their delicious romance has its high point when Joseph catechetically tests Margery on common cultural truths: sake of commerce...

...Lucky types back into the rectories...

...Mort has in mind a screenplay for Jeremy Irons...

...But it does have what few Shakespeare damaged the movie by allowing Dogberry to maul and gouge films, what few movies of any sort, possess: zest...

...And for all this he is "still one of that dying breed, the 'practicing Catholic'-not a good one, mind you, but practicing at it...

...Em's history, striven to create...

...Above all, he Wilkes the highest of the virtues...

...But his diction wavers and, both in speech Keaton, Branagh finally wriggles free and delivers a human and deportment, he brings America too insistently into this ut- being...

...truly menacing when he chalpsychotic receiving his thoughts from some alien's spaceship lenges Claudio...

...Send me an outline, okay...

...Think understatement...

...Cheesecake too...

...Instead, lamentably, Wilkes obeys ances are those of survival, of growth from of ingestion and growth...

...Or one might say, more derstanding, and common sense, falls "Gay...

...Joseph has in mind a thoughtful time culminating in a thoughtful book...

...Buy them the cheapest cat food and never use ARCADIA replace the open-air Soap Market...

...In those books, of no higher calling than the priesthood...

...If we hanker for the what is vital grows and will return...

...like the tallest buildings, make their marks reviles the monastery for its embrace of The story's focus is on the end times by blocking out the sun...

...They'd love it: the new, no-pain religion...

...Don Pedro can cer- the play's first half...

...He has been there before, on assignment, and has kept up a correspondence with the spiritual director, Father Columban...

...Reading, praying, and tending a private garden worthy of Smith & Hawken, Joseph gets a real taste of the contemplative life, which Wilkes renders eloquently and authentically...

...In the most fundamental the monastery down...

...The spiritual director, in the sort of pas de deux that is a strong point of the book, tells him that the only way to get close to the monks is to adopt the attitude of a postulant...

...So he sets up Joseph in a cottagelike "hermitage" on the monastery grounds, grants him the use of a four-wheel-drive pickup truck, and urges him to read the strict and straight spiritual giant Aelred of Rivaulx_ To the chagrin of his agent, Mort, a crude stereotype of a New York Jew, soon Joseph is living in a halfway house between his spiritual life and his literary one...

...But, unlike conditional hate...

...in a recent Times op-ed quickie about country's most active journalists cover- ing, and her best young men could think priestly pedophiles, he proposed that the ing religious affairs...

...The fire of first love is in his eyes and he convincingly shows Like Keaton's Dogberry, Kenneth Branagh's Benedick is a how such unconditional adoration can turn into equally un- performance wriggling in the grip of a concept...

...Such threat to life Vatican II reforms...

...Maybe that's exactly what you came here to find...

...when Joseph despairs of making spiritual progress, Columban accuses him of wanting to be "the Rod McKuen of the Trappists...

...seeing Benedick's potential, the compassion and true wit that Keanu Reeves is quite bad as Don John...

...in the heavens...

...This excess backfires because it keeps us from detached rather than lordly...

...The novel has to do with the monastic life, which Wilkes has explored in a television documentary about Thomas Merton...

...Cats...

...Margery too is a cradie Catholic of the '50s generation, lapsed religiously but not spiritually-after a stint as the broker for a group of batik-making nuns, she runs a health-food store called Nature's Bountiful Harvest-and she shares his parochial set of references...

...The study sessions conducted in Nassau, Bahamas are held each May and November...

...And he trots about on an imaginary horse...

...Branagh's Benedick is a fellow who has diminished himterly European work of art...

...There is the conflict between the abbot and the agent, between prayers and profits, as Joseph's intentions, increasingly purified as chapters named for months mark the passage of time, move away from writing and toward the notion of entering New Citeaux as a postulant...

...baron...

...his quest for spiritual wholeness while (London Fields) is apocalyptic in theme and At the same time, Crace asks us to be treading a path that demands relatively lit- "postmodern" in form, Crace is generally burghers and to revel in the city, mostly tle in the way of sacrifice...

...Students will be accommodated in an international hotel in Nassau...

...In a series of colloquies Father Columban, abetted by unyielding quotes from Aelred, challenges Joseph from every side: when the writer declares his desire to enter into the monastic life entirely, the priest tells him to get on with his article...

...Unlike Ackroyd the smell of its bowels...

...Courtesy of herself...

...Waiting pital, a rejected novice turned militant fires and fevers of the world, we turn our also, darkly, in this novel is a shadow...

...Eat seventeen hot That same birthday, however, also sees dogs, drink as many beers as you Jim Crace is of the same gener- the unexpected and bitter split with Rook, can....Yell and scream for whoev- ation of British novelists as Victor's chief of staff...

...The anmon sense in which he has worked so prof- offers us a very earthy city, whose assur- tagonist is the country and the conflict one itably...

...Joseph, born of Eastern European Catholic immigrants, 'an overachiever in school, is now, in middie life, "a somewhat accomplished nonfiction writer...

...Box N3732 Nassau, The Bahamas Or dial toll-free: 1-800-847-8921 Commonweal 18 June 1993: 25 an engaging, readable style...

...This is a carefully crafted book, one city mouth meets country morsel is the sense-the rule that tells him he must that seems as symmetrical and patterned as Soap Market where produce is sold...

...More interesting still is the conflict between Joseph's commitment to sample the ascetical life and his love affair with Margery Fowler, who emerges a third of the way through the novel...

...After all, no sneering note throughout and never shows us the villain's pleas- matter how captious he may be toward Beatrice, Benedick is ure in his own malice...

...David Koresh reminds us that such an in- feeding the country to the city, yet he lives Crace's imaginative energy-at least as cident is not unbelievable...

...self by denying his feeling toward Beatrice...

...God, you'd sell millions...

...This same garden was once a Victor's mother, Em, and her struggles to the nuanced fictional world that he has restaurant but now abandoned because the survive with infant Vic...

...Listen to the warm...

...After the Michael Keaton apparently decided that Dogberry's trou- mutual declaration of love, Branagh is splendid: ardent with bles with the English language are rooted in fundamental prob- his lover, sagacious in aiding the slandered family, and (how lems with the human race, so he plays the constable as a comic rare this is with most Benedicks...

...Or romance even...

...The action of the er's losing...

...RICHARD ALLEVA BOOKS Get thee to a monastery Paul Wilkes writes about re- TEMPTATIONS lowing him to muddle through vexing isligious matters for the Paul Wilkes sues without giving undue offense to his Atlantic and the New Random House, $20, 256 pp...

...Martin Amis and Peter Ack- novel is to a large extent the tracing of Alive, believable, appealing, Margery royd...

...You're just right for your generation out there working out on their exercise machines, with their headphones on...

...More interesting is the conflict between Joseph's yearnings for a distinct experience of God and his habit of standing back and taking notes...

...Think lots and lots of money...

...ways at the park...

...Even so, in this in a "misanthropic building," occupying far as characterization is concerned-is novel it is flagrantly inappropriate, a be- a greenhouse roof garden, plagued by not in the present but in the past with trayal of Wilkes's own sensibility and of aphids...

...In often bewildering mic and alive is it to incantation: "This is planners would make artificial the city's fashion, this plot enfolds a sinister Brother the sorcery of cities...

...When he is tricked Denzel Washington, on the other hand, is well-spoken as Don into admitting to himself his love, he becomes whole...

...El been asked to indulge...

...To hang his reflections on a crime-ridden a globe artichoke...

...countryside within...

...The organic Wilkes had developed their romance more, whose English Music seeks to tie London metaphor won't be suppressed: "our city" for it lies precisely in the realm of com- to the eternal English Imagination, Crace is alive and the hero of the novel...

...the place at which an altogether different rule of common decay...

...A brief prologue introduces the narrator and protagonist...

...Edward T. Wheeler before...

...In Temptations, however, Wilkes is on his own, and the uses to which he puts his writerly gifts and his commonsensical outlook show how equivocal-and, indeed, temptingsuch things can be...

...Application deadline is August 30th...

...told in flashback, is Georgian and the that he chose to come down on the wrong The occasion of his eightieth birthday has urban world Crace constructs is brilliantside of the divide between prayers and Victor ruminating on a project, a high-rise ly alive, almost Dickensian in its groprofits, gerrymandering his book for the structure to be called Arcadia which will tesques, its sharpers, and in the symbolic 26: 18 June 1993 Commonweal...

...We do not chase down relationship with the country...

...He holds onto one will be released once he becomes a worthy lover...

...Wilkes's main business, it seems, is exploring the ways the church-world conflict is made manifest for a contemporary person, and he does so on a number of levels...

...Victor's position is anomalous: he way, this novel places at its center the strugThe biblical conflagration set off by has grown great through produce, through gle between life and death...

...Good Pedro and cuts a fine figure...

...For a prospectus and application form write: TEMPLETON THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY P.O...

...Nova and scallion cream cheese, bagels," Mort tells him by phone...

...Now Joseph tells Columban that he wants to get close to the inner lives of the monks, and eventually to write a book about them...

...Admission requirements are a bachelor's degree and five years in the ministry or equivalent...

...eschewed appeals to this or that under- for him, because the appeal to common All that said, Wilkes is a skillful writstanding of the Christian life, appealing sense is also his main journalistic tool, al- er, able to relate complicated subjects in 24: 18 June 1993 Commonweal YOUR MBA FROM TEMPLETON THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY The Templeton MBA program, a 17-month program led by an internationally-recognized faculty, is designed for ministry professionals including clerical, religious and laity, and offers courses in: • Theology of Management • Business Ethics • Principles of Management • Corporate Culture • Marketing • Strategic Management • Finance for Not-for-Profits • Total Quality Management The multinational composition of the class promises students access to diverse ideas and an exciting learning experience...

...Listen to the heartbeat of God,"' he jests...

...It culminates in a of Victor, the vegetable king, and his at- provokes a recollection of "Et in Arcadia scene in which Kiernan, crazed and wear- tempt to leave some sort of lasting mon- Ego," words which Crace never lets Death ing the preconciliar cassock, all but bums ument to his life as a wholesale produce speak outright...

...Yet this is a callow performance, approach, but I found the actor's execution of it too blatant in more like a warm-up than a finished work...

...Victor 'Mitzi doesn't feel good today' as Jim Crace wishes to transform, to idealize his roots, an excuse when you don't want to Atheneum, $20, 311 pp...

...Dogberry century (courtesy of Shakespeare), sensual apparition of ninecan be convincingly portrayed as quietly mad but not as open- teenth-century Italy (courtesy of this production), and heroine ly, dangerously crazy, for then why would the sane citizens of the 1990s...

...The abortionist, and the private detective backs on herds and hedgerows and seek out epigraph warns us that the greatest men, Octavius Kiernan, a onetime Latinist who crowds...

...Trying to establish Benedick's foolishness, tainly be played by a young actor but the seniority of rank and Branagh screeches, caws like a crow, does unfunny bits with pride of command must be communicated...

...for it was in the Soap Market that Victor go out yourself...

...Keaton is often fascinating in his weirdness A great Shakespeare film...

...Think facial expression...

...Washington seems collapsing chairs...

...solution to this problem, and to most of Wilkes's virtues were largely negative Such common sense-as seen in the parish the problems of the church in the U.S., is ones...

...In despair after a week in which he has slept with four different women in New York, he sets off to get his spiritual bearings-at "a Zen center, a Mennonite farm, and a charismatic evangelical house of prayer," and finally at Our Lady of New Citeaux, a Trappist monastery in Vermont...

...got his start as a hawker so many years "Professional sports, watching of...

...Joseph is also, he tells us-never quite convincingly-a hedonist, promiscuous, superficial, fond of expensive gourmet goods, the brands of which are deftly dropped throughout the novel...

...One wishes that affirmative and traditional...

...and like them he is a Rook's schemes to be the bird of ill omen is the greatest temptation Joseph meets in chronicler of the city...

...The auguries he performs conthe novel: a person who honors and shares blances end quickly after that: where Amis vey the futility of the Arcadian scheme...

...many readers...

...The major Polycarp, a postulant who commits sui- country roads for fame or wealth or liber- action moves through metaphor to myth: cide, another who ends up in a mental hos- ty...

...His genre is "the lived experience kind of book," and his main asset is "the uncanny ability to enter the mind and soul of his subject...

...One might say, simply, building's sway sickened the patrons...

...Resem- for Arcadia...

...charitably and more instructively, that short of the uncommon asceticism of an "Don't think so, but then I've never Paul Wilkes, gifted with eloquence, un- artist...

...Forgive the five o'clock shadow, but I didn't think I'd be inspected MODERN GARDENING today...

...Good in their place...

...The prose runs contin- city and country must be added a third, movie-of-the-week plot if they are to play ually to unmarked blank verse, so rhyth- the urban developer, whose architects and for a mass audience...