"Thirst: A Novel"

Former Paradise resident John Wilson, now living in the Chicago area, was a junior at Paradise High School when I was a sophomore. Later he became a consummate editor and book reviewer, so when he wrote in the journal First Things that a spare new novel by A.G. (Grace) Mojtabai is "one of the most memorable works of fiction I've read in the last decade" it was a recommendation I couldn't refuse.

Brooklyn-born in 1937, Mojtabai majored in philosophy and mathematics, taught at Harvard and the University of Tulsa, and lived for a time in Iran and Pakistan. She worked at a hospice in Amarillo, Texas. 

Her new book fittingly arrives in this column a day before Ash Wednesday, observed by Christians in the West as the beginning of Lent, a time of penitence and prayer leading up to Easter.

"Thirst: A Novel" ($16 in paperback from Slant; also for Amazon Kindle) charts the final days of Father Theo, a lifelong priest serving a rural diocese in Texas. The nearby convent houses just seven sisters, all save Sister Perpetua ("the youngest of the group, somewhere in her fifties") "grown old in service here." 

Theo is old as well. "He does not want to outlive himself," the narrator tells us. "His mind is made up.... Listen: the rattle of bare stalks, a shuffle of wings. It's time. He enters his house. He will not leave it again."

Lena, Theo's first cousin, is called in to help when the priest refuses to eat. Though Lena was steeped in Catholicism as she and Theo grew up in Texas, she later abandoned her faith. Yet, flying in from Chicago, now a widow, she senses a connection with Theo despite her frustration with his not eating, or drinking, and her discovery that he's given away most everything in his little cottage, including his precious books.

When Theo can no longer speak, "reaching for her hand, his fingers close on hers and hold on with an iron grasp." She later remembers his question to her growing up: "Is there a meaning to us?"

Mojtabai explores faith and doubt, commingled, in these two lives--mere ashes--yet thirsting for something more.