Overview
Alice Fairweather, a lapsed Catholic who lives in upstate New York with her two sons and philandering husband (whom she loves to distraction), has just lost her dream job as a radio talk show hostess. When one of the family dogs suddenly becomes gravely ill, Alice opts out of a family spelunking vacation to nurse the pooch. Unexpectedly, her husband’s charismatic Nicaraguan Harvard roommate, Abelardo—coffee planter, failed seminarian, and scion of an old Nicaraguan family—comes to visit as part of his quest to have his aunt canonized as the first Nicaraguan saint. Through a variety of somewhat bizarre and miraculous events, Abelardo must return home to his village before his canonization work is complete. But Alice, with time on her hands and a void to fill, adopts Abelardo’s mission and becomes obsessed with helping him find the path to sanctify his ancestor. Not only does she befriend Hubert, the eccentric man in charge of New York’s hagiography club, she becomes somewhat of an expert on the various women who have achieved the distinction of sainthood, and soon finds herself on a plane destined for Nicaragua.
Abelardo’s quest to canonize his aunt, together with Alice’s quest to save her marriage, makes for a miraculous story of love, loss, and faith.
Synopsis
Alice Fairweather, a lapsed Catholic who lives in upstate New York with her two sons and philandering husband (whom she loves to distraction), has just lost her dream job as a radio talk show hostess. When one of the family dogs suddenly becomes gravely ill, Alice opts out of a family spelunking vacation to nurse the pooch. Unexpectedly, her husband’s charismatic Nicaraguan Harvard roommate, Abelardo—coffee planter, failed seminarian, and scion of an old Nicaraguan family—comes to visit as part of his quest to have his aunt canonized as the first Nicaraguan saint. Through a variety of somewhat bizarre and miraculous events, Abelardo must return home to his village before his canonization work is complete. But Alice, with time on her hands and a void to fill, adopts Abelardo’s mission and becomes obsessed with helping him find the path to sanctify his ancestor. Not only does she befriend Hubert, the eccentric man in charge of New York’s hagiography club, she becomes somewhat of an expert on the various women who have achieved the distinction of sainthood, and soon finds herself on a plane destined for Nicaragua.
Abelardo’s quest to canonize his aunt, together with Alice’s quest to save her marriage, makes for a miraculous story of love, loss, and faith.
The New York Times - Tom LeClair
Absent a Miracle has no literary pretentions; it's pure, unadulterated adulterous entertainment…Alice, who admits to a "tendency toward melodrama," can be an overly chatty narrator, but Lehner is a talented humorist—and a softy sentimentalist.
Editorials
The New York Times Book Review
"Pure, unadulterated adulterous entertainment."Tom LeClair
Absent a Miracle has no literary pretentions; it's pure, unadulterated adulterous entertainment…Alice, who admits to a "tendency toward melodrama," can be an overly chatty narrator, but Lehner is a talented humorist—and a softy sentimentalist.—The New York Times
Publishers Weekly
Alice Fairweather, a Californian transplanted to the New York City suburbs with her Harvard-educated, Maine-born husband and their two precocious sons, undergoes a major transformation in Lehner's unpleasantly overstuffed latest. An unexpected visit from her husband's college roommate, Abelardo Llobet Carvajal, who is seeking to canonize his great aunt, sets Alice on a journey to Nicaragua. Although the author has imbued her characters with charming eccentricities-husband Waldo is an inventor with a fondness for limericks; one son, Henry, tends to speak in thesaurus-ese ("hypogeal" and "egregious"); the other son, Ezra, lives "fully in his sleep"; and Alice has an interest in dreams that parlays into a part-time radio hosting job where she interprets callers' dreams-there is a bewildering lack of depth and connection between the characters, who come across mainly as anthropomorphized collections of quirks. Add in an unwieldy plot that includes marital infidelity, dream interpretation, the exigencies of upper-crust life in Maine, the obstacles to canonization, Nicaraguan politics, coffee-bean farming, suicide, Catholic guilt, snow blindness and canine blood donation, and you've got something of an unholy mess that never quite pulls itself together. (Aug.)
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