Monk Downstairs

Rebecca Martin is a single mother with an apartment to rent and a sense that she has used up her illusions. I had the romantic thing with my first husband, thank you very much, she tells a hapless suitor. I'm thirty-eight years old, and I've got a daughter learning to read and a job I don't quite like. I don't need the violin music. But when the new tenant in her in-law apartment turns out to be Michael Christopher, on the lam after twenty years in a monastery and smack dab in the middle of a dark night of the soul, Rebecca begins to suspect that she is not as thoroughly disillusioned as she had thought.

Her daughter, Mary Martha, is delighted with the new arrival, as is Rebecca's mother, Phoebe, a rollicking widow making a new life for herself among the spiritual eccentrics of the coastal town of Bolinas. Even Rebecca's best friend, Bonnie, once a confirmed cynic in matters of the heart, urges Rebecca on. But none of them, Rebecca feels, understands how complicated and dangerous love actually is.

As her unlikely friendship with the ex-monk grows toward something deeper, and Michael wrestles with his despair while adjusting to a second career flipping hamburgers at McDonald's, Rebecca struggles with her own temptation to hope. But it is not until she is brought up short by the realities of life and death that she begins to glimpse the real mystery of love, and the unfathomable depths of faith.

Beautifully written and playfully engaging, this novel. is about one man wrestling with his yearning for a life of contemplation and the need for a life of action in the world. But it's Rebecca's spirit, as well as her relationships with Mary Martha, Phoebe, her irresponsible surfer ex-husband Rory — and, of course, the monk downstairs — that makes this story shine.

Rebecca Martin is a single mother with an apartment to rent and a sense that she has used up her illusions. I had the romantic thing with my first husband, thank you very much, she tells a hapless suitor. I'm thirty-eight years old, and I've got a daughter learning to read and a job I don't quite like. I don't need the violin music. But when the new tenant in her in-law apartment turns out to be Michael Christopher, on the lam after twenty years in a monastery and smack dab in the middle of a dark night of the soul, Rebecca begins to suspect that she is not as thoroughly disillusioned as she had thought.

Her daughter, Mary Martha, is delighted with the new arrival, as is Rebecca's mother, Phoebe, a rollicking widow making a new life for herself among the spiritual eccentrics of the coastal town of Bolinas. Even Rebecca's best friend, Bonnie, once a confirmed cynic in matters of the heart, urges Rebecca on. But none of them, Rebecca feels, understands how complicated and dangerous love actually is.

As her unlikely friendship with the ex-monk grows toward something deeper, and Michael wrestles with his despair while adjusting to a second career flipping hamburgers at McDonald's, Rebecca struggles with her own temptation to hope. But it is not until she is brought up short by the realities of life and death that she begins to glimpse the real mystery of love, and the unfathomable depths of faith.

Beautifully written and playfully engaging, this novel. is about one man wrestling with his yearning for a life of contemplation and the need for a life of action in the world. But it's Rebecca's spirit, as well as her relationships with Mary Martha, Phoebe, her irresponsible surfer ex-husband Rory — and, of course, the monk downstairs — that makes this story shine.

Publishers Weekly

An independent, "unremarkable" single mother of one and an introverted ex-monk are the unlikely couple sharing the spotlight in this delightful, Anne Tyler-ish third novel from the author of 1998's well-received Blues for Hannah. Rebecca, a 38-year-old divorced San Francisco graphic artist, already has plenty on her plate a six-year-old daughter, Mary Martha, and a pot-smoking professional surfer ex-husband, Rory when she rents her downstairs apartment to Michael Christopher, a monk who has just abandoned monastery life after 20 years. She's sure she's not on the market for romance, but when Michael weeds her backyard, manages to befriend no-nonsense Mary Martha and joins Rebecca for intimate cigarette breaks ("little suicides") on the back steps, she finds herself wavering. Much trepidation predictably gives way to heated romance, though Michael wrestles with his crisis of faith via letters back and forth to the abbey brothers, and Rebecca, between bouts of bailing Rory out of jail, questions whether a romantic relationship with a man like Michael would be a true "fall from grace" for them both. Then Rebecca's mother has a stroke, and Rebecca and Michael are forced to make some rushed but pragmatic decisions. Fluent prose, seamless dialogue and a lovingly rendered Bay Area setting lift this novel above the pack. Farrington touches on many of the themes customary to the genre: forbidden fantasies, passionate first kisses, hovering family members and the tribulations of inconceivable relationships and all are mastered with ease and grace. The writer may have adopted a secondhand premise, but he delivers a charmingly written, gratifyingly hopeful tale. Agent, Linda Chester, Linda Chester and Associates. (May) Forecast: West Coast readers in particular will appreciate the quirky, spiritually inflected sweetness of Farrington's fiction. Farrington has been quietly building up a solid body of work, la Stephen McCauley, and The Monk Downstairs should bump his reputation and sales up a healthy notch. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Tim Farrington is the author of Lizzie's War, The Monk Downstairs,—a New York Times Notable Book—and The Monk Upstairs, as well as the critically acclaimed novels The California Book of the Dead and Blues for Hannah.