North of Hope
By Jon Hassler

688 Pages • $13.95

North of Hope
By Jon Hassler

About the Author  •  Links about the Author

In a key moment in North of Hope, the richest and most ambitious of Jon Hassler’s twelve novels, Father Frank Healy stands at the pulpit at Sunday Mass and can think of nothing to say. His mind is blank. He’s paralyzed by a void within him. His is not a God-sent speechlessness, like Zechariah’s in the New Testament, but rather a symptom of a profound soul-sickness. Frank calls it “my big leak.” His spirit is draining away, drip by drip. His worried bishop packs him off to his childhood parish in the small town of Linden Falls, in northern Minnesota, for rest and, hopefully, renewal.

This crisis comes upon Frank a good fifteen years into his priesthood. The first part of North of Hope narrates crucial events in Frank’s life a quarter century earlier in Linden Falls, when he was in high school. He was a pious boy, apparently heading smoothly toward a priestly vocation, when a beautiful, vivacious girl named Libby Girard moved to town. Frank was infatuated; he was struck by the conviction that she was “the one.” But Frank and Libby never connected in a lasting way. They moved in very different directions: Frank to the seminary, Libby to a reckless marriage.

Back in Linden Falls twenty-five years later, a wounded Frank finds Libby again. She is living on a nearby Native American reservation with her third husband, a corrupt physician named Tom. Libby’s life is in chaos. She reaches out to Frank. “Is she the one?” he wonders.

In the hands of a lesser novelist, this dangerous material could be the setup for a tale of healing through sex. Instead, Jon Hassler makes it into a subtle story of midlife regeneration. It’s wintertime in northern Minnesota, and in this frigid setting, a cold and menacing reality descends on Frank, Libby, and the other people in their lives. They are forced to deal with corruption, crime, addiction, mental illness, and other ugliness. As they do, warmth creeps in.

North of Hope relates a serious story, but the world of the novel is full of vivid characters, some of them odd, many likable, all recognizable. There’s Toad Majerus, a dwarf bartender who makes his own difficult choice toward the story’s end; Caesar Pipe, the trustee at Frank’s mission at the reservation, who hates any kind of confrontation; and Monsignor Adrian Lawrence, Frank’s kindly old pastor, whose nickname is “Loving-Kindness,” for the phrase that recurs in all his sermons. One of Monsignor Lawrence’s pious habits is praying for the souls of deceased celebrities. One morning, Frank interrupts him at prayer:

“Good morning, Adrian.”
           
“Ah, Frank my boy, look here. Did you know that Bing Crosby, Ethel Waters, and Guy Lombardo all got away from us in the same year?”
           
Frank took the magazine and scanned the pictures. “And Groucho Marx.”
           
Adrian chuckled.
           
“And Gary Gilmore,” Frank added.
           
Adrian frowned. “Yes, executed. Let’s hope our Lord is healing him with his loving-kindness.”

Ultimately, North of Hope is a drama of the consequences of choices. Frank and Libby both suffer from the consequences of past choices. The crises they face present them with new choices, one of which is to flounder in regret and self-loathing or reach for hope. They both begin the story in a bleak spiritual place somewhere “north of hope.” They end in another, warmer place, strengthened by hard choices and enriched by genuine love.

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About the Author

Jon Hassler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1933. His father, a grocer, moved the family north to the small town of Staples, in the center of the state, when Jon was a baby. In his teens, the family moved once more, to Plainview, southeast of Minneapolis.

Hassler graduated from Saint John’s University, a Catholic school associated with the Benedictine order, in Collegeville, Minnesota, in 1955, with a BA in English. During his years teaching English in high schools, Hassler also attended graduate school at the University of North Dakota, receiving a master’s in English in 1960.

In 1965, Hassler moved to teaching at the college level, first at Bemidji State College, then at Brainerd Community College, and finally at Saint John’s, where he taught and served as writer in residence from 1980 until he retired from the university in 1997.

It was during his time at Brainerd that Hassler first began writing. As he recounts it in My Staggerford Journal, “I, upon waking one morning in September 1970, . . . [heard] a voice in my head saying, half your life is over, Hassler, you’d better get started. Obediently, therefore, after teaching my 8:00 a.m. class that day . . . I went to the campus library with a pen and notebook and began to write ‘A Story Worth Hearing.’” Hassler published several short stories before his first novel, Staggerford, was published in 1977.

Jon Hassler has written many novels in the years since then, including The Love Hunter (1981), A Green Journey (1985), Grand Opening (1987), Dear James (1993), The Dean’s List (1997), and The New Woman (2005). His memoir of real and fictional people who have influenced him, Good People . . . From an Author’s Life, was published by Loyola Press in 2001. Several of his novels have been adapted for stage and television. The Jon Hassler Theater in Plainview, Minnesota, is a highly regarded regional theater that has produced adaptations of many of Hassler’s works.

Hassler splits his time between Minnesota and Florida. He is married to Gretchen Kresl Hassler and has three children.

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Links for Jon Hassler

Jon Hassler’s Web site

“The Wit, Wisdom and Wonder of Writer Jon Hassler,”
by Anne M. Cormier

“Hope on Ice: The Felicitous Fiction of Jon Hassler,”
by Charlotte Hays

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