Contrition: a book review
by Carol Zapata-Whelan
Editor's Note: a version of this review has also appeared in Catholic Moms and US Catholic Magazine.
When Los Angeles reporter Dorrie McKenna, working in "tabloid hell," chases a two-headed goat story that leads her to her long lost twin in Big Sur, we are pulled into a fast paced, arresting debut novel by Maura Weiler: Contrition (Simon & Schuster).
Contrition is a spin on the classic tale of opposites separated at birth: we meet the twenty-something daughters of a famous abstract artist, now deceased, who gave away one of his newborn twins--marked by a birth injury--shortly after his poet wife's death in the delivery room. Dorie, raised by loving adoptive parents, is a smoking, drinking, Twinkie-sneaking falsifier of news for The Comet. Candace--Sister Catherine--reared by her tormented father, is a cloistered nun whose vows of silence yield ethereal art she both creates and destroys for God.
Living in a shabby apartment in Venice, CA, with "wallpapered over" feelings for an ex-beau in the movie industry, Dorie is poised for change. She travels to the sobering beauty of Big Sur, where a cloistered convent of barefoot nuns protects her twin.
Dorie's efforts to process family secrets, her craving for connection--and identity--via Catherine, prompt her to enter the convent under false pretenses in order to write her sister's story. The result is a dramatic reversal of fortune for both sisters.
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Along with humorous caricatures--an amoral tabloid editor, a glitzy no-nonsense art agent, a Hollywood star--Weiler gives us a fascinating and reverent view of religious life. She draws a tender portrait of eminently human women whose life of self-abnegation and prayer is not above a feisty game of ping pong. And as Dorie the ex-Catholic moves away from an old fear of nuns, she finds herself estimating ages by eyeglass fashions, musing over faces renewed in prayer and unmarked by time.
Through Dorie's efforts--both noble and ignoble--to profile her twin, to reach back for a new identity, Weiler's novel leaves us with philosophical questions about family, vocations, faith, guilt, art--and what it is that we do, exactly, in the name of God.
Weiler gives us a page turning story distinguished by elegant writing, humor, and grace. The novel's unexpected stunner of a conclusion makes clear the significance of her one word title. In Contrition, narrator Dorie's writing, like Sister Catherine's art, might be seen in TS Eliot's words as a "raid on the inarticulate," here, a desperate effort to explain our inexplicable guilt--for the sin of being human.
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Carol Zapata-Whelan, PhD, teaches Spanish literature and Humanities at California State, Fresno and is the author of Finding Magic Mountain: Life with Five Glorious Kids and a Rogue Gene Called FOP. She is currently writing a YA novel about Diego de Veláquez's iconic painting, Las Meninas."