Inspired Wrecks

n his 1991 best-seller, Mariette in Ecstasy, novelist Ron Hansen enthralled readers with his portrait of a mysterious young postulant whose claims of divine possession trembled between passionate faith and madness. In Exiles (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Hansen returns to the spiritual realm, casting back to 1875 and an infamous shipwreck that took the lives of five exiled nuns en route to America—and compelled Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins to break the vow of creative celibacy he'd taken when he abandoned literary life for the priesthood, and to write his monumental poem, "The Wreck of the Deutschland." Hansen's ability to sinuously inhabit the soul of Hopkins as he suffers to find his voice, and attempts to reconcile the world's suffering with the will of God, is nothing short of a miracle. — E.S.

E.S.