Terrible Grace in Kirstin Valdez Quade’s The Five Wounds

The Five Wounds
Kristin Valdez Quade
W.W. Norton, 2021; 432 pp., $26.95 

Nail holes in each hand and foot, a lance piercing the side: these are the five wounds of Christ’s crucifixion, though the medieval Church counted a total of 5,466 wounds from the entire passion. The five wounds permeate Catholic devotions, art, and culture: the five decades of the rosary; a Feast of the Five Wounds popular in the medieval Church and continuing in Portuguese speaking countries; the Cross of Jerusalem; Caravaggio’s painting of St Thomas inspecting the puncture in Christ’s side. 

This fleshy, incarnational side of Christianity can scandalize the modern believer accustomed to sanitized forms of modern devotion and “shiny plastic plaster” crucifixes. It comes as some surprise, then, to see a novel from a major American publisher entitled The Five Wounds, and even more surprising when the book engages Christian themes with a literal crucifixion scene, rather than with allegory, analogy, or other more comfortable literary devices. 

Kirstin Valdez Quade’s The Five Wounds is her debut novel, based on a short story of the same title originally published in 2009 in The New Yorker and later collected in her anthology, Night at the Fiestas, in 2015. The original story focuses on Amadeo, a troubled New Mexican man seeking redemption by playing Jesus in his community’s passion procession. Each year in this confraternity, or hermandad, one of the hermanos is chosen to carry the large wooden cross while being scourged, then is raised on the cross and may—if he dares—ask to be nailed to the cross with real nails. At the end of the story, Amadeo’s crucifixion is not the “total redemption in one gesture” that he anticipated, but rather a moment of searing insight into how he has failed his daughter Angel, a pregnant high-school dropout. 

The crucifixion scene is repeated with slight modifications in Semana Santa, the novel’s first part. The other two parts are Ordinary Time and Lent, structuring the novel around the liturgical year. Ordinary Time, the longest part, traces the backstory of Amadeo’s family and follows it in the months after the crucifixion as it navigates Angel’s pregnancy and delivery along with the revelation that Yolanda (Amadeo’s mother) has rapidly spreading brain cancer. Angel attends a program for teen mothers but drops out after tensions with her teacher, who she had hoped would be the godmother to her son Connor, and a complicated relationship with another student. She struggles to relate to Ryan, her geeky high-school classmate and the father of her child: Ryan wants to be in Connor’s life, though Angel is afraid he and his more privileged family will try to take the baby from her.

The reader of The Five Wounds is reminded of another character from a Catholic novel troubled with alcohol addiction and feelings of despair: Graham Greene’s Whiskey Priest from The Power and the Glory. Quade cites this famous Greene character as a key influence on The Five Wounds, along with Flannery O’Connor:

O’Connor is on my mind a lot in life, and definitely when I was writing some of those stories. When I was writing “The Five Wounds,” the works I was thinking about most were O’Connor’s “Parker’s Back” and “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and Graham Greene’s novel The Power and the Glory. Parker and Greene’s whiskey priest in particular were on my mind as I was constructing the character of Amadeo, trying to get to a deeper and more humane understanding of who he is.

Greene found inspiration in the authentic piety of persecuted Catholics in Mexico, their faith expressed in popular devotion tinged with vestiges of pre-colonial religions. Quade adds a layer of nuance to this insight by showing that even a deeply enculturated religious practice that does not bear the fruit of love is “a noisy gong or a clanging symbol,” as St. Paul warned the Corinthians. Amadeo first saw the procession as a chance to prove his worth to Angel, but through the course of the novel he comes to see it as a distraction instead. Yet this is no neat morality tale where lessons are learned and the happy family moves on. Brokenness remains that Amadeo hopes to repair, but it will take more than the hot resin from his windshield repair kits to heal the wounds he inflicted on his family.

While Amadeo is clearly the protagonist of the short story version of “The Five Wounds,” Angel’s role in the novel is at least as central as her father’s. In a beautiful moment at the end, she calls Connor’s attention to Isaiah, the hermano playing Jesus the year after Amadeo, as he is raised on the cross. 

See those people, baby? See that man up there? He died for our sins. Yours, too. Like your diaper this morning. That was the stinkiest sin I’ve ever seen.

Here is Christianity in the flesh, unashamed by the body and its basest functions, which even Christ took on in the incarnation. 

Is this a “Catholic novel”? When critics ask this question, the answer often turns on some kind of purity test. Is the author really Catholic, they ask, and does the novel display the “Catholic imagination”? This exercise can devolve into unhealthy gatekeeping that artificially divides the body of Catholic writers instead of holding them in conversation and creative tension. Such litmus tests lead some critics to ignore or marginalize writers like Toni Morrison or Louise Erdrich, who, in addition to bringing diverse voices into the Catholic fold, are simply excellent novelists. 

The “Catholic novel” debate not only narrows the breadth of our vision, but also makes it short-sighted: Catholic writers are not always recognized as such by their contemporaries. Early critics of Wise Blood thought Flannery O’Connor was a nihilist, and the literary authorities at the Vatican objected to Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, with the notable exception of one Giovanni Battista Montini, who later became Pope Paul VI. The danger of the “Catholic novel” question is that it presumes the answer is both grave and immediately clear; but if the former is true, the latter is likely not, as what matters of great literary or moral import can be answered quickly? Far better, then, to take a wide view at first and be open to correction in the future. This more inclusive view of the Catholic novel opens the genre up to growth and development over time, rather than treating it as a static form with sharp boundaries.

Questions of faith are integral to Quade’s writing. While she is clearly concerned with social issues—her acknowledgements reveal the extent of her research into the community support groups in New Mexico that play a role in the book—this emphasis does not undermine the themes of grace and redemption but rather brings them down to earth. If the path to redemption bypasses loving service to family and community, it may not be redemption at all but instead a facsimile that merely flatters the conscience. The hard path Amadeo takes to learn this lesson is at the heart of the novel. Besides illustrating these spiritual themes in a grounded narrative, the author speaks comfortably of Catholicism as a “central part” of her identity, providing even more reason to take The Five Wounds seriously as Catholic literature.

It is only with a deft touch that a writer can use an image so obvious and central to the Catholic imagination as the Crucifixion to frame a novel without lapsing into cliché. Yet Quade has done just that. Her modern spin on a passion play shows faith persevering in a broken community just as Greene portrayed it surviving under fierce persecution. Rather than “total redemption in one gesture,” the novel shows something truer to life: the working out of grace that is unasked for, undeserved—and, yes, even terrible.