Following the titular character, Moon Gaffney offers an intimate look at Irish-Catholic life in New York in the 1940s. Moon, a young lawyer with a bright future at Tammany Hall, finds himself constantly at odds with the world around him. The women in his life, his friends, and the expectations of his father lead him to question what social relationships are necessary for his Catholic practices. And his religious convictions and the pragmatism of his chosen vocation struggle incessantly at the back of his mind. When a politically charged case comes before him—defending black dock workers associated with a Communist group who have suffered a beating—Moon must choose to whom he will swear his fealty, the City of Man or the City of God. Moon’s journey is further echoed in other characters of the novel as they each seek to live in harmony with the teachings of the Church and needs of the world around them.
Set in rural Maryland in the 1930s, Dearly Beloved is the story of two Jesuit priests who want to heal the racially charged wounds of their parish. Father Kane and Father Cornish make effort upon effort to bridge the gap between their black and white parishioners, inviting a young Georgetown student named John Cosgrave to work with them. Through establishing cooperatives to bolster the struggling local fishing community and offering spiritual guidance to the morally impoverished region, these three men find themselves at odds with their community and with their own sins. As the story races towards a violent conclusion, the Catholic Church, through her faithful ministers, attempts to steer its members towards a peaceful reconciliation that may never come. Dearly Beloved asks hard questions about what it means to live together as the Body of Christ in a fallen, broken world constantly plagued by racial tension, economic poverty, and moral compromise.
Spencer Bain is a modern man of science, a university anthropologist doing fieldwork in a small New Mexican town. Used to long separations from his wife, a UCLA professor equally dedicated to her career, he is mostly untroubled by his infidelities, and hers; that is, until now.
In order to study the religious practices of the Penitentes, a brotherhood of local men who engage in severe, medieval penances, Bain feigns a conversion to Catholicism and participates in their Lenten observances, including their dramatic public procession on Good Friday.
Nothing in Bain’s skeptical academic training has prepared him for the profound remorse that he begins to experience. Though no sentimentalist with respect to the poor and ignorant who surround him, he cannot help but contrast the simple yet solid lives of the men and women he studies with his own fruitless relationships and those of the jaded, over-sexed sophisticates — the self-proclaimed artists and intellectuals — he considers his peers.
Artistically descriptive of the rugged Southwest and the people who dwell there, the novel also movingly portrays the inner landscape of a man coming to grips with his need for redemption. Author Harry Sylvester masterfully illustrates both the objective reality and the subjective experience of guilt and grace.
