Sharp and, by turns, melancholy and wry, Agatha narrates her own belated coming-of-age tale about, as she says, learning "how to distinguish an idea of yourself from the real thing."Īgatha tells her story in retrospect, beginning in 2005 in her convent outside of Buffalo, N.Y. I picked up Agatha of Little Neon for its unusual subject and I got pulled in by Agatha's voice. The implication is that there must be something "off" about a woman who would choose such a life of self-abnegation.Ĭlaire Luchette's debut novel, Agatha of Little Neon, offers a counter-narrative about a young 21st-century nun who's neither a holy fool nor a musical miracle worker nor a monster. Nuns, of course, have greatly diminished in number since the '60s and, in recent decades, when they do make an occasional appearance on screen they're often grim, even baroque characters like Meryl Streep's Sister Aloysius in Doubtor Jessica Lange's Sister Jude in American Horror Story. The Flying Nun starring a buoyant Sally Field was on TV, "Singing Nun" Jeanine Deckers appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show and her life was made into a movie there was The Trouble with Angels and the "Mother Superior" of all nun movies, The Sound of Music.
For a brief time, nuns, in particular, were everywhere. I was a Catholic schoolgirl during a strange moment in the 1960s when Catholicism infiltrated American popular culture.
0 kommentar(er)
