How does an author convey spirituality without getting didactic? Or craft transcendence that crosses religious borders?
In our current political climate, it is difficult to consider these questions. Within the chaos, it’s easy to doubt the role of reading. We live ordinary lives—or try to—but are bombarded 24/7 with gut-wrenching news from across the country and around the world. If ever we had the illusion of stability, we are hourly reminded that life is not so. Yet without a semblance of routine and normalcy, as well as a dose of art and joy, we can be overcome by terror and despair. In this light, books that elevate us to a higher plane seem indispensable.
Andrew Krivak has made a career of writing along this higher plane. He gets love, family, faith, and home on the page—all of it—the good, the fraught, the mysterious. He has a way of lifting his fictional characters, regular people with heartbreaking lives, into realms of love and forgiveness.
Krivak’s latest novel, Mule Boy, dresses familiar themes in his work in a fresh overcoat. The book has two narrators—the “I” of the present Ondro Prach, and the “he” of Ondro’s childhood. The combined effect, prospective and retrospective, reads as trauma, prayer, and expiation.
I first came across Andrew Krivak with his debut book, a memoir called A Long Retreat, published in 2008, and have followed him since then. This essay considers most of Krivak’s novels, but not his poetry and essays.
A Long Retreat describes a young man of depth and authenticity on a spiritual journey. His inward gaze is commensurate with his outward gaze. I was hooked by his language from page one:
The two or so December days during which my family waked and buried my father after his sudden death at the age of eighty moved in a kind of brume that shortened sight and left memory behind.
Krivak grew up Catholic in Dallas, Pennsylvania, coal country that he fictionalizes in novels as the town of Darden. The grandson of Slovak immigrants, Krivak’s heritage features prominently in his work.
Krivak’s father urged that his son postpone his plan to work around boats for a living and instead accept the offer of education, because education would be his father’s only legacy. Krivak’s descriptions belie that—Tom Krivak was adored by friends and family. His was a legacy of love. Having lost his own father (Krivak’s grandfather) to the coal mines at age three, Tom Krivak forged a supportive, larger-than-life role as husband and father to seven.
Krivak took his father’s advice and attended St. John’s College in New Mexico, where he was inculcated into the “Great Books” curriculum, a way of thinking focused on the classics. Over time, Krivak got two masters’ degrees, and a Ph.D. in literary modernism. From early days, attending mass was a priority. He felt the pull of the monastery even as he began graduate studies. As he completed his masters’ degree in poetry at Columbia, he applied and was accepted to join the Jesuit society at St. Andrew’s in Syracuse, New York.
A Long Retreat opens the monastery doors and invites readers into the novitiate’s life. We meet Krivak’s classmates—a diverse group of personalities—learn about their prayer and work routines and watch them struggle with their calling. Krivak’s life is mostly confined to the monastery, but he has contact with the secular world due to required Spanish lessons at a nearby school. Monastic life serves as metaphor:
A Catholic’s stance of faith—the belief that Christ has died, risen (the fullness of the empty tomb), and will come again—gets lived out in the inherently day-to-day nature of community….
Krivak is not alone in writing about this kind of religious occupation. Other writers bring us inside the convent and the monastery—Thomas Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain, Kathleen Norris’s Acedia & me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer’s Life, and Karen Armstrong’s The Spiral Staircase: My Climb out of Darkness, come to mind. Merton’s is a towering description of his conversion experience and what follows. Norris, a Protestant, finds healing for her depression in a silent retreat at a Benedictine monastery, while Armstrong deconstructs her flight from the convent in harrowing terms.
Krivak’s memoir paints a compassionate picture of his peers, elders, and mentors. He gives us his take on spiritual leadership, his relationship to prayer and faith, and his reading life. While he struggles to know himself, he is surrounded by guidance and understanding. He writes openly about his descent into pettiness, his annoyance at minor things, and fading interest in his studies. As he gets angrier—at what, he doesn’t know—his mentor Jeff calls him in for a meeting.
I don’t know what it is. On the surface you’ve got it together. And you’ve got a good way of drawing the fringe of a community into the center…. Now you don’t seem able to draw the fringe of yourself into your own center, as though you’re not entirely sure about what you want.
Jeff recommends therapy. The talking cure brings Krivak face to face with depression. It takes eight years, but ultimately, Krivak gives up the cloth, immerses himself in writing, and marries and raises a family. He remains a man of faith, but within a secular life.
Krivak’s debut novel, The Sojourn, was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the Dayton Peace Prize as well as the Chatauqua Prize. In The Sojourn, Krivak imagines a reverse immigration. After a startling and provocative beginning, protagonist Jozef Vinich leaves America and returns with his widowed father to Austria, only to be swept into the vortex of World War I. The war scenes are heart wrenching in their detail and devastation.
Krivak’s novel The Signal Flame continues Joseph Vinich’s family story back in America, in the fictional Darden, Pennsylvania, where subsequent generations grapple with the devastating impacts of war, desertion, and loss. Family connectedness is a hallmark, as are the quiet, tolerant, loving bonds that hold family together.
Krivak’s The Bear operates on a more metaphorical level. It has a stark premise: an unnamed girl and her father are the last humans on earth. In the shadow of a mountain, the father ensures his daughter’s survival by bringing her to water and teaching her to hunt and fish. His gentle, wise instructions about both her forebears and the cosmos feel like prayer.
The father tells his daughter the story of Thorn, a mythical hunter who transforms into a “giant puma of silver and brown,” puts his people on his back, and saves them from fire. Thorn next becomes an eagle the size of a mountaintop to fly them across the water, takes the form of a great bear, and again becomes a man, who disappears into the forest instead of dying.
The father anticipates his own death when he sets up this mythical guardian for his daughter—
The spirit of Thorn lives still on the shores of the lake and along the paths of the forest. He watches over everything here and, for that reason will never die.
And so, when the father dies, a bear appears and takes on the care of his daughter. With the lifesaving bond that is forged between animal and human, Krivak nods to prelapsarian times. The book reads more like a creation story than a story of demise. The Bear offers an affirmation of life and spirit, despite its dystopian premise.
Now comes Mule Boy, making stylistic inroads. Krivak begins each chapter with “And,” putting the reader in mid conversation. The book is written in one continuous sentence, à la Anna Burns’s The Milkman or Jon Fosse’s Septology. But unlike those hefty tomes, Mule Boy is a compact story of one man and one community’s tragedy and redemption.
The boy Ondro grows up in Pennsylvania coal country and takes a job as mule boy following the death of his father in the mines. Like so many boys before him, Ondro knows the risks and tragedies associated with going underground. Inexorably, however, he joins the community to provide for his family. Ondro’s job is to lead a mule in and out of the mine with loads of coal. At thirteen, he witnesses a horrific accident in which four miners are killed: John Chibala and Štefan Bozak, and their buddies Matty and Emil Milenic. Ondro is the sole survivor. Although John Chibala’s daughter Magda is the love of his life, Ondro flees. Prey to unbearable memories, he wrestles with addiction, refuses to serve in World War II, and ends up in prison as a conscientious objector, where he is schooled by an old Jewish man.
Ondro’s Jewish mentor protects him within the prison and provides him with lessons. He gives Ondro a Hebrew manuscript of Jonah, an Old Testament prophet who ignores God’s commandment to warn the people of Ninevah that they must repent or be destroyed. Jonah cannot escape duty, however. Ondro narrates that after a hellacious near-shipwreck, and three days in the belly of a great fish, Jonah
Is spit on the shores of Nineveh, and so he crosses the vast city and speaks of God’s anger, and the Ninevites repent and believe, as though they have come from darkness into a light, and they cover themselves with sackcloth and ashes, a feeling on the body I know, a feeling every miner with a coal stove knew…
Jewish scholarship holds differing interpretations of Jonah, but it is the combination of personal and community consequences, and the idea that forgiveness can be a matter of God’s compassion rather than justice, that make the story a keystone of the afternoon service on Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. Ondro, too, understands the story to be a reminder of God’s “mercy and magnanimity.”
Ultimately, Ondro settles in a remote area of New Hampshire. Three generations of Emil’s family make a pilgrimage to meet him as a much older man. Krivak understands that grief runs through time. Emil’s family members’ loss may not be immediate, but it has seeped through the generations, leaving a hole instead of a father, grandfather, and great grandfather.
With small bursts of information, Ondro recalls what happened during the final hours of the men who died in the mine. He recounts that the coal miners helped each other find peace in their final hours. He tells Emi’s family that these dying men ensured that Ondro got to safety. Ondro does not sugar coat the telling of their deaths. Their injuries were grievous; they died of blood loss, thirst, and hunger.
Ondro assures the descendants that Emil’s last words expressed love for their mother, grandmother, and great grandmother. The scenes between Ondro and Emil’s family read as part mourning ritual, part expiation for an accident Ondro could not have prevented, and part benediction.
What is Krivak doing? I believe it has to do with humanizing the world, with affording his characters dignity no matter their actions or station. By extension, he provides lessons on how to live. Ondro has served a prison sentence, but that does not make him any less a human being or deplete his ability to offer solace to the families of the men killed in the mining accident. Or, to paraphrase Bryan Stevenson, celebrated racial justice and anti-death penalty advocate, and author of Just Mercy, no one is only the worst thing they ever did.
In Krivak’s work, grieving families make their way by leaning on each other, retelling stories, and looking to myth and biblical stories to find lessons and solace. There may not be bright lines, but there are values. If there are no moral absolutes, characters’ learn from their mistakes, experience remorse and repentance, and overcome violence and trauma. They find redemption and peace, and we, the readers, are the better for it.
