Tragedy and sin power The Crooked Heart of Mercy
Billie Livingston’s highly anticipated new novel mixes Catholicism like a cocktail
Sins are the great plot thickeners that coax confession, atonement
When my pious grandfather passed away in the fall, the hours-long open- casket visitation that is Roman Catholic custom concluded with a guided rosary. Spoken with the guidance of a beaded strand of iconography, the prayer sequence isn’t necessarily a daily part of lay Catholic life, but every pope makes a pleading fuss about how people ought to do it more; if the pope were a dentist, then saying the rosary is kind of like the Catholic version of flossing.
Meditative contemplation is considered a touchstone of monastic ritual, and Catholics take in the mysticism that resides in fabricated stillness. This is why it’s so common that the rosary be prayed en masse in periods of mourning. The repetition of childhood prayers until the words smear together in unison, becoming chant-like and remote, effectively neutralizes the body. Hail Mary; Our Father; Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. In 20 minutes of recitation, the membrane between the corporeal and spiritual realms is momentarily weakened, if not altogether breached. For a grieving believer, this is a comfort, an intimation of grace.
“But what do you do with death?” asks Maggie, the protagonist in Billie Livingston’s The Crooked Heart of Mercy, when ridden with loss and a crisis of dormant faith. “Where do you go when you need someone to lift you out of the mire, forgive you and rock you to sleep?”
Livingston’s novel concerns itself with this particular flavour of reconciliation: between realms seen and unseen, and between the devout and the non-believer. The novel calls for reconciliation in the Catholic sacramental sense, too. Here, the human missteps — or, to use the technical term, sins — are the great plot thickeners that coax confession, atonement, and something resembling self-forgiveness in its deeply flawed protagonists.
Ben and Maggie are a workingclass couple in their early 30s, a limousine driver and a house cleaner who make a “sure, why not?” go at a life together once Maggie becomes pregnant. What could possibly go wrong?
Livingston does not take a subtle tack in testing her protagonists’ faith, nor their resolve in forging forward. Catastrophe winds itself around every relation- ship in the novel. It befalls Maggie and Ben’s toddler son, who tumbles out of their apartment window while they are celebrating their anniversary with cocktails of bargain wine and tranquillizers. It haunts their pasts and looms over their futures because such are the self- perpetuating natures of trauma and misfortune.
When we meet the pair, Ben is narrating from a dissociative third- person state in a mental institution with a bandaged hole in his head whose origin he can’t remember; Maggie, gobsmacked with grief is entering her first postaccident odd job running errands for an octogenarian widow with a soft spot for the occult. Then there’s Francis, Maggie’s brother, a Catholic priest whose devotion to the cloth never quite overcomes his appetites for sex and drink, most especially indulged together.
The bruising ties that bind Crooked Heart’s troubled cast of characters are as TV- moviefamiliar as their respective moral afflictions, but their methods of grasping toward salvation are more straightforwardly ecclesiastical than you’re liable to come by in your average work of secular fiction. The past manifests not in ghosts but spirits — it’s probably not a coincidence that Francis, the narrative’s spiritual ballast, is also as much by vocation.
“Now, staring at the doting eyes in icon after icon, it occurs to me that the man who sleeps here craves salvation the way some crave food or sex,” Maggie observes of her troubled brother, chasing the Spirit for deliverance. Her boss, a patron of the United Church of Spiritualism (read: spooks), pursues a version of the same.
Grace is as much a condition as it is a cultivated state, but the theological underpinnings of Livingston’s self- love parable might be lost on the uninitiated. In a recent essay for Hazlitt, the writer Alana Massey explains it succinctly: “Grace manifests as both God’s disposition and God’s action; it is an atmosphere of salvation for humanity to dwell in, but can quickly be made manifest and intervene in human affairs.”
Livingston’s novel is skilfully plotted, and with great compassion for its motley cast of well-intentioned ne’er-do-wells. Ultimately, it is a wryly indulgent tenderness that rescues The Crooked Heart of Mercy from its own tendency toward heavy-handed sentiment. Empathy is its world’s manifestation of grace — required also, just maybe, of a reader confronted with less-than-perfect renderings.