This Week in Fiction: John L’Heureux on Faith and Not Fitting In

John L’Heureux’s story “Three Short Moments in a Long Life” appears in this week’s issue.Photograph by Dagmar Logie

Your story in this week’s issue, “Three Short Moments in a Long Life,” looks, as the title indicates, at three different times in the life of the narrator: one in childhood, one in middle age, and one in old age. What is it that binds these three moments together for you?

A friend asked me what my story is about and, uncomfortable with this question, I answered her truly, “It’s a love story, with a few laughs on the road to the Great NeverNever.” That turns out to be a fairly accurate summation, and not too misleading. Which is to say that I find it difficult to talk about my own work. Nonetheless, I’ll try to be more precise, more detailed, in answering your excellent questions.

What binds these three sections together is—for me—mystery itself. The first looks at a child’s awareness of the mystifying otherness of people who inhabit a world different from his own. He is a smart little kid, rigorous in his thinking, judgmental, unforgiving. Beverly LaPlante does not fit in—her crying tells him this—and then her mysterious change of personality violates his sense of what is “right,” of what can be explained. Mystery unsettles him. He only dimly perceives that he himself is a mystery. He deals with his uncertainties by referring them to the certainties of Sunday catechism: Jesus rose from the dead. That’s a mystery and perfectly acceptable. Period.

In the first section, the narrator discovers the mystery of character; in the second, he discovers that the essential ambiguity of character has eluded him. He is obsessed with Jesus but fails to recognize him when he comes knocking at his door. In despair, he discovers that—as a writer—he has traded away mystery for the ruinous comfort of ideas.

In the third section, the narrator is an old man who has survived a suicide attempt only to discover that he is suffering from Parkinson’s disease. But something mysterious has happened to him, and his suicide has become a sort of reverse baptism into a new, free life. He now delights in the absurdities of human nature and, no longer obsessed by Jesus, he rejoices in a transfiguring love for his wife that proves healing, fulfilling, and enduring enough to reach beyond the grave. The mystery is how this love is able to transform his religious obsessions into something more human and, at the same time, more exalting.

I’m interested in the chapter headings you chose for the story: “The Spy,” “The Writer,” and “The Substance of Things Hoped For.” The second one is straightforward enough. But the other two require some puzzling out. Is the narrator spying on Beverly and her transformation? Spying on himself? And, in the third section—in which the narrator struggles with his physical decline and tries to imagine the best way to make his exit from life—is he also experiencing something he might have hoped for?

Yes, the narrator of the first section, suspecting that he does not fit in, spies on other kids for clues as to how they manage to be a part of the group, to fit in. At the same time he spies on himself, strangely satisfied with not belonging but eager to appear as though he does. I think that most writers feel “different,” even as children. Hemingway wrote to Scott Fitzgerald, “We are all bitched from the start,” and, though this may overstate the case, it captures a general truth.

In the second section, the narrator feels that his writing is a failure because no one cares about it; it does not fit in. Moreover, his career as a spy has not equipped him to recognize Jesus as anything more than an obsession.

The third section gives the narrator a new joyful life, despite the Parkinson’s. He has discovered in the suicide ward that he finally does fit in and, perversely, he sees that belonging does not matter. The tragedy of life has turned comic. St. Paul defines faith as the substance of things hoped for, and the narrator has found that substance not in the divine but in the human. His obsession with Jesus has been transformed by a love that he is convinced will survive death.

While we were working on the story, you wrote to me, in an e-mail, “The story begins in mystery for the narrator, continues with several kinds of self-immolation, and concludes as it does in a kind of willing suspension. . . . What's at stake—for me—in this story is a question of vision.” Can you explain what you meant by that? What vision or form of vision would you like to leave the reader with?

I think of vision as the writer’s interpretation of reality or the interpretation he imposes upon it. In my story, the issue we discussed was whether to end the story with the aged couple waiting in each other’s arms or to continue with the dying scene. For me, the dying scene, with its protracted “holding and still holding,” is absolutely essential to the story since it casts their lives together into something beyond death. For me, this is where love moves past the boundary of realism into something rare and wonderful. What that something is I confess I don’t know, but it seems to me—in this story, at least—to be the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.

The narrator of the story refers to himself as “that most useless of creatures: a writer obsessed with Jesus.” Jesus and the narrator’s obsession with Jesus are central to the story. (He even makes a kind of cameo, in the form of a homeless veteran.) What’s at the heart of that obsession? Does it stem from the narrator’s residual guilt over the death of Beverly LaPlante? Or is it something else?

I’m afraid the obsession with Jesus is a given in this story. It can be justified, I suppose, by the narrator’s early exposure to the comforting certainties of Sunday school and by his own need to know precisely what is right and wrong, and certainly by his guilt at having prayed Beverly to death, but in fact the story does not investigate how he comes by this obsession. Flannery O’Connor quotes her uncle as he tries to explain the extraordinary actions of her characters: “It just goes to show how some people will do.”

You yourself were a Jesuit priest for seventeen years, and some of your writing has grappled with the subject of God, saintliness, and belief. How has your relationship to faith informed your work? Hindered it?

My relationship to faith is not easy to explain or, indeed, to understand. I think of myself as a Catholic agnostic. I was raised Catholic and, as you say, I was a Jesuit for seventeen years, and in that way I am a Catholic. But I am utterly unable to tell you what I believe, and in that way I am an agnostic. But I have hope, and hope—for me, at least—bridges the gap between the two.

I think that faith—or, better, hope—certainly shows its influence in some of my books. I find even horrible people to be redeemable once I begin writing about them. The father who sets his son on fire in “The Shrine at Altamira,” for instance, stands no chance of human redemption but he gets something very like it through the self-immolation of his son. I think in this way—by extending divine mercy to the apparently unredeemable—my life as a Catholic agnostic shapes my fiction. I don’t think my work has been hindered by it.