Morte d'Urban
by J. F. Powers
Summary
Father Urban Roche is the star of the Clementines, an obscure and struggling Catholic order he single handedly keeps visible: a magnificent preacher, a natural fundraiser, a man who understands golf, dinner and rich men, and knows exactly how much good a worldly touch can do the Church. The order's leadership, mediocre and threatened in equal measure, knows it too, and ships him to the Minnesota woods, to a white elephant retreat house called St Clement's Hill, where the great man is set to painting walls under a superior whose idea of apostolic work is thrift.
Powers plays it as comedy, the funniest serious novel American Catholicism has produced, and lets the satire cut both ways: the Hill's pieties are ridiculous, but so, in slow degrees, is Urban's certainty that his operator's gifts are graces. Urban being Urban, he transforms the place anyway, charming a millionaire patron, Billy Cosgrove, reviving a moribund parish, and getting a golf course built on the property to bring in a better class of retreatant, and the novel keeps asking its quiet question: at what point does the salesman consume the priest?
The answer arrives as farce with teeth: a bishop's golf ball to the head, a fishing trip on which Billy shows what patrons are, a night with a rich man's daughter that strands him, literally, on an island of his own choices. Elevation follows, and it costs him everything the book has taught the reader to watch.
Best for readers who want institutional comedy with an actual soul at stake, written sentence for sentence as well as anything of its decade.
Historical Context & Significance
Morte d'Urban won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1963, a first novel by a writer the short story world already treated as a master: J. F. Powers had spent nearly two decades publishing exact, dry stories of Midwestern priests, a subject he owned completely. Thomas Merton called it "a valid and penetrating study of the psychology of a priest in what is essentially a spiritual conflict."
Powers wrote slowly and published little, one more novel, Wheat That Springeth Green, appearing twenty six years later, and his standing became a connoisseur's cause: admired by Waugh in his lifetime, kept in print by the New York Review Books revival of 2000, and pressed on readers ever since as the great neglected American comic writer.
The title's Arthurian echo is the joke and the judgement at once: a knight of the Church, unhorsed by a golf ball, and the death in question being the worldly self's, slowly, from success.