Let me put my cards on the table right off the bat: I'll take Gerard Manley Hopkins anyway that I can get him. I am thus appropriately grateful for Ron Hansen's new novel Exiles, a deliberately simple, fact–based story of a shipwreck in 1875 which took the lives of five young nuns, exiled by Bismarck's laws against Catholic religious orders. Hopkins, then a Jesuit seminarian who had abandoned his literary career for God's service, learning of their drowning, broke his long silence to write the poem "The Wreck of the Deutschland."

Are you thinking what I'm thinking? That the Deutschland's deck is a potentially brilliant, albeit perilously tilting, planking on which the plight of these nuns whose histories Hansen must imagine, and the poem they inspire, and the priest and poet Hopkins, these three together, (the invented, the poetic, and the real–life faith, work, play, and sorrow of a man), may interplay and so inform some intimations of the soul of things. The nuns' plight is mythic, the poem is a flat–out treasure, and Gerard Manley Hopkins is—thanks be to God for not just dappled things—Gerard Manley Hopkins.

The possibilities are delicious. We want to know about a man who gives his heart, but more, his art, his drudgery, to God in daft devotion. We want to get inside and see just where his poems come from, inching closer to a God who gives these poems to a man. And every writer on the planet wants to understand Hopkins' surrender of his loved art for God, his giving up the writing of his poetry because he thought that that would please the Savior. Another man, George Muller, a Victorian savior of tens of thousands of orphans, wrote a novel as a young man. He loved writing. He really did. Then he threw his novel in the fire. He burned it up and he went out and changed the world. And we who harbor every scrap of paper we have touched a pen to—we want to know about people like that. Like Hopkins. And if shipwrecks, even ones that could have been avoided, and nuns, kindly dispositioned, German, tall, no matter, if they be in league with God–breathed poets, can be made to help us understand the thing, well, we will buy the illumination in hardcover, first edition.

Alas, and I do not think it overkill to add, alack. These three elements, the nuns, the poem, and the poet are put in print, the trio not just willing but entirely able to intertwine and, each one, tell us things about the other two. But, at best they do no more than co–exist. The reader is jolted back and forth among the three aspects, often jarringly. At one point I took the book and turned it upside down and shook it, hoping to shake free some machinations I had missed. I later tried convincing me the threads are there, but just too gossamer to see.

Hansen hints at Hopkins' inner struggles but seems unwilling to stay with them, to make that descent. I'm not sure why this is called a novel, or why, once having renewed his novelist's license, Hansen did not use it to hunt and fish and trap more freely. I'm an old–fashioned girl, and picky in the bargain. I want my novels to come complete with plot, and not just that, I want the plot to come from character—that's character, as opposed to shipwreck. It misses the boat (excuse me, but it does) to mistake the lone screw propeller embedded in the sandbar for the story. The job description of a novel demands it tell as much about the sandy shoals that capture and confound the rudders of our souls, as it does of shallow–water dunes and any nuns killed in the making of the story. Am I being glib? I am not. The writing of a novel is no timid thing. And am I being greedy? Yes. And I can conjure in a heartbeat a Hopkins who would say, Well all right then. Do, someone, throw this girl a bone.

Hansen would have it that the man who gave up poetry for God takes it up again in knee–jerk response to a story in the paper. Is inspiration so mechanical as that? Does this not misunderstand the process of the poet, miss the point of silence, of long days of no words rhymed, no rhythms marked out on the page, the poet, though, at work perhaps most truly then. In my book, a writer is a writer is a writer, and just because you're not covering a page with ink at any given moment (or in any given decade) doesn't mean that you're not on the job. Writing is a way of being in the world, and if that's not true of Hopkins, where shall lesser scribblers stand?

There is a great deal of nodding in this book. Hat tipped in the direction of sexual orientation, Catholic conversion, bipolar illness, God, devotion, a friend's artistic rivalry, family friction, even down to de rigueur glimpses of the hardened nipples of the comely nun emerging from her bath on a frosty morning. By p. 37, Hansen is strip–mining Hopkins' poetry: plotted and pierced, gear, tackle, trim. (This is not admiration's quoting phrase or line, but rather, word. In many ways this is a book of words, with poetry and meaning wanted.) Matters of taste, all this, perhaps, (I like books where I can forget I'm reading), and had the story gone a better way, I might hardly complain when a dozen, carefully crafted descriptors (yes, I counted) jostle one another in a crowded phrase. Proviso: If a person wants to use every word he's ever heard in one small book, he best tell a very fine tale indeed.)

I think due to the book's curious form, at few points are we able to forget the writer. There is a self–consciousness about the thing. The reader feels he's being told to open wide for yet another spoonful of facts, the writer saying, Now I will summarize the diaries for you. With quotes. Lots of quotes. Now I will draw you a picture of sweet nuns, (with standard issue sky–blue eyes, except for one with eyes the color of a blue Dresden ware). The nuns' most interesting aspect to my mind being height, one 5 foot 10, one 6 foot 2. A reader wants to be too caught up in the story to put the book down to go Google the "average height of German nuns in 1870." On my fifth mid–page Googling I feared Hansen's addiction to detail might well be contagious. Ditto: his use of adjectives, sufficient in profusion to sink the Deutschland on a balmy day.

The strongest writing is in Hansen's telling of the shipwreck itself. It is very well done. But at 212 pages (not counting the appendix, where Hopkins' poem is given, and the note on sources), the book is overlong. It takes the nuns an age to die (well I'm sorry, but it does.). We can be made to weep, and should, at any death, but the life lost matters to the telling. I'm happy to allow a writer as many pages as it takes to make me witness to a life's ending; all I ask is that when he's done, I care more, rather than less, about the loss. Formula won't answer. Not five times in a row.

One feels appropriately churlish quibbling with such a sweetly told tale. This book has more well–intentioned people than I've met in my whole life. The cheerful bunch of monks, whose only sin as far as I can tell is a certain inordinate fondness for punning, are about as lowdown as things get. Here there is smooth, sentimental sweetness, and were the world no more than that, we might be satisfied. The problem is that when we take the measure of the man, we want a fuller story. Hopkins suffers. He really does. We want more than passing reference to his depression, self–denial, disappointment, family schism, especially from a writer who can cause us to develop full–blown chilblains and to shiver at the nuns' wet icy habits clinging to their rasping chests too frozen for death rattles to be heard above the slapping waves. (I am fully capable of being as annoying as the next person.)

I leave the merits of the book, and I'm sure there are many, to another reader who will, and should, herald them. I think that praise comes best from fans and lovers, like minds, kindred spirits. There is faith that must be kept within every camp.

Gerard Manley Hopkins gave to his God, his life, his art, his best shot. And just because the man, the priest, the poet, asked so very little for himself, does not mean that's what he should get. And we, in benediction, would have the One who fathers–forth whose beauty is past change, agree.

Linda McCullough Moore, essayist and fiction–writer, author of The Distance Between, lives and writes in Northampton, Massachusetts.

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