The Sardonic and the Sentimental

...Bishop Dullinger, retired and intolerably bored, goes to investigate a housewife's "miraculous" vision of the Blessed Virgin, whose message is "Keep Minnesota Green...

...and this sloganeering mockery enables him to renew his vocation by "livery-horsing'' for indisposed rural pastors...

...Unlike Powers, who is reticent to a fault, Woiwode gives self-indulgent voice to all the torrents of memory...

...the bingo game going on under the Cross for the seamless garment of the Son of Man: everywhere the sign of the contradiction, and always...

...But while some individual scenes are executed with a resonant beauty of human feeling and a genuine sense of place, the novel as a whole relies too primitively on the maudlin force of nostalgia...

...They never grow tiresome and I never run out of things to think about...

...If the new church does not look like Mont-Saint-Michel, a model the Bishop was forced to abandon as "crazy," at least the big-city architects have given "a distinct Romanesque flavor" to their contemporary design...

...In the sequel, "Farewell," Powers evokes the gendy triumphant, sardonic mood of "Lions, Harts, Leaping Does...

...Yet one cannot help wishing that Powers were open to the risks of imperfection, that he did not keep his shrewd and funny scrutinies so tightly contained...

...Rather than unfolding this family saga in a conventional linear narrative, Woiwode presents a series of frozen episodes and tableaux told in different voices, scrambling with harsh abruptness distant moments of time (Woiwode calls them still pictures from a family album) in a collage of childhood and maturity, joy and tragedy, life and death...

...But Bill is unhappy because he has been deprived of the chance to improve conditions in a slum parish, and Joe is horrified when his curate's seminary classmates turn up in Brahms T-shirts, awash with counterculture prattle...

...In the period since Powers' last book, however, the world, including the Catholic Church, has undergone some violently unsettling changes, but only a few of the stories in his new collection, Look How the Fish Live (Knopf, 190 pp., S6.95), confront them...

...How much more, we feel, he could do with the hip young sophisticated priests of the '60s and their puzzled elders...

...If only he would engage his brilliant talent and intelligence in a reckless, even outrageous spirit, daring perhaps to move outside his predictable boundaries...

...But Powers, with quietly intelligent comic force, has succeeded in making the commonplace life of the Midwestern provincial Roman Catholic clergy uniquely his own imaginative territory...

...In "Keystone" the aging Bishop Dullinger of Ostergothenburg, Minnesota, fulfills his dream of constructing a cathedral for the diocese-and finds himself embroiled less in the glory of God than in exhaustingly complicated business negotiations with real-estate agents, architects and builders...

...Every piece is to contribute its crucial weight: photographs minutely described, job applications, pages from a young girl's diary, visions of a book that adumbrate the book we are reading...

...These breezy sophisticates have no use for an old-fashioned parish lacking "guitars, tom-toms, sensitivity sessions, speaking in tongues...

...As a result, the significance of the unforgotten is to easily lost in the dishevelling flood of detail, and he is forced to take refuge In the fraudulent certainties of sentimentality...

...For his readers, on the other hand, they do grow tiresome, because what is missing from Beyond the Bedroom Wall is a unifying, discriminating intelligence that might lend this family album some reflective meaning...

...These days even the priests' housekeepers-those sullen, pious, incompetent guardians of the prelatical stomach-are starting to act strangely and insist on being called Ms...

...The story is marvelously funny and touching, alive with Powers' characteristic sense of the spiritual surprise lurking everywhere within an America of crass coimpetiveness and materialist opportunism...

...As one character remarks, seeming to speak for Woiwode: "Those days are best...

...Instead, Powers has padded Look How the Fish Live with bits of triviaa misfired joke about moon exploration, some feeble cautionary tales of adultery and hypocrisy-better consigned to oblivion...

...There is always a lingering poignance of unexplored possibility in everything he has written...

...His masterly story of the 1940s, "Lions, Harts, Leaping Does," told of the dying Franciscan, Father Didymus, who, believing himself at last to be "close to sublimity," continued to be assaulted by mundane distractions...

...After years without assistance, he is granted a youthful curate, Bill, and he looks to share good talk and priestly service with the new generation...

...It is, basically, a conventional American epic of restless mobility and disappointed expectations, with the generations shifting from a secure rural environment imbued with faith and industry to the more unstable, relentless pursuit of change and displacement for their own sake...

...And though the prelate, in his pastoral letters, often refers to "the keystone of authority," the arches of the new building must do without that real and symbolic support: Keystones, the architects declare, are obsolete...

...Arrogant, Teilhard-spouting young curates were inevitably subverted by bumbling old codgers who understood the solacing imponderables of Catholic dogma far better than they...

...A bewildered traditionalist like Joe, for example, the tippling pastor in "Priestly Fellowship," is left feeling unmoored in a choppy ecumenical sea...

...Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 619 pp., $12.50), an enormously overlong tribute to the tender web of family relationships and the powerful endurance of the past in the present, is sometimes moving, more often exhausting...

...It's a sound structure, the contractor assures the Bishop, a cathedral that will be "good for 50, 75-maybe 100 years...

...I keep going over them and over them again and again just like they were the only part of my life I really lived...

...Joe argues that the priesthood is fine work but not a crusade, and they laugh at him...

...A Job-like figure, Martin takes his growing family from a comfortable but professionally cramped life in the North to Illinois, where the promise of a better job falls through, his wife dies, and his small children must often be scattered to live with relatives...

...They were to be expected, he knew, as indelible in the order of things...

...These loving arms, the necessities of misfortune, are Martin's solace as well-fr Woiwode is above all affirming the closeness, warmth and generosity of the Neumiller clan, the cherished insolubility of the bloodlines that bind people together as brother and sister and grandparents and cousins...

...If only, too, he would indulge his many admiring readers with more than one small collection of previously published stories in 13 years...

...As always he projects that coarse world with a self-confident plainness that at its best acquires a witty elegance...

...Martin Neumiller and his intuitive, elusive wife Alpha are the educated ohildren of North Dakota farmers...

...The choppy dissociation of names and places and people, of scattered, deceptively isolated incidents, are meant as clues to the unspoken coherence making up one family's reality...

...Yet time and again in Powers' earlier tales, the spirit of divine, love asserted its imperative, mysterious tenacity in the rectories of the heartland...

...In two earlier collections-Prince of Darkness and The Presence of Grace-and in the satiric novel Morte d'Urban, he focused compassionately upon the incongruity of all-too-human clerics, stewards of the Church bound to the divine mysteries of grace and salvation, participating in the vulgar realities of Chicago, fund-raising, martinis, expensive cigars and cars, and the pleasures of golf...

...The two longest and most successful stories, "Keystone" and "Farewell,' dealing with the disparities between the secular and the sacred that pervaded Powers' earlier volumes, are more representative of this book...

...Writers & Writing THE SARDONIC AND THE SENTIMENTAL BY PEARL K. BELL It has been 13 years since we have had the gift of a book by J. F. Powers, the most perceptive and witty storyteller of American Catholicism in this century...

...There have, of course, been other important American writers who were Catholic-Hemingway least noticeably, and Flannery O'Connor, whose profound Irish devoutness was bent into a very private shape by the Bible-belt South where she lived...

...When would he cease to be surprised by it...