“Neon” Catholicism Lights the Way
Agatha of Little Neon, a luminous and cheeky debut novel by Claire Luchette, is split into three parts: Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience. A novel structured around the vows taken by Catholic religious orders instantly captured my interest.
“Structure is my greatest fear as a writer, and early on, the book was really shapeless and formless,” Claire Luchette told me in a phone interview.
Luchette (who uses they/them pronouns) grew up, as they put it “really Catholic. Extremely Catholic. There’s no better adverb.” While casting about for the structure for Agatha’s story, Luchette said it was “this real ‘aha’ moment when I thought about the vows.”
Agatha of Little Neon is wry, tender, and fresh. But the underlying drama in Agatha runs according to the same script that has prevailed in Western society since the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century: the drama of leaving religion behind for a life guided by reason and personal feeling. Luchette’s novel falls into familiar grudges against institutional religion and it adheres closely to classical liberal orthodoxy: authentic personhood can only be discovered by casting off the shackles of religion.
Initially, I faulted Luchette’s novel for being what it was rather than what I was looking for. I wanted an exploration of how structures of faith give what writing teachers promise structure ultimately provides: creative freedom.
But Agatha of Little Neon is an accurate portrait of many Catholics’ experience of the American Church. Agatha holds a sparse and delicate mirror up to reality. And in that rather blemished reflection, a lovely novel takes shape.
Luchette told me that they began to write about a woman religious in graduate school. And, “the more I wrote, the more taken I was with what it would actually mean to spend your days with other like-minded women and develop together your own patterns and rules and ways of living,” they said.
Luchette’s imagination was captivated by nuns as they were living alone for the first time.
“It was really the loneliness that fueled my thoughts about religious life. I missed living with my friends — waking up and knowing that someone you loved was like down the hall.”
Agatha of Little Neon opens on its protagonist, a young habited religious sister, Agatha, living in a convent in its twilight in Buffalo, New York. The community’s daycare ministry is drying up. The diocese is bankrupt. They are on the rocks. A simple explanation suffices: “The men in charge have been reckless,” Agatha says.
Due to the bankruptcy, the sisters are reassigned. They leave behind their beloved Mother Superior Roberta and take residence in a failing halfway house in rural Rhode Island named Little Neon, due to its Mountain Dew-colored siding.
The story takes place in crepuscular shadows of many endings — the ending of the sisters’ convent in Buffalo, the ending of Little Neon, and the slow death of their beloved former superior.
But it’s also a story of dawn — Agatha’s dawn. Over the course of the novel, Agatha stumbles into the light of self-awareness as she reveals herself slowly to the reader.
The book’s three parts map out Agatha’s struggle with her vows: the community’s crisis in the face of diocesan bankruptcy (poverty); Agatha’s grappling with her sexuality and a surprising intimacy with a colleague (chastity), and to remain loyal to the Church, which demands — she believes — a denial of herself, or to vie for a more authentic existence (obedience).
Agatha’s story grapples with the hypocrisy of the Church, the flaccidity of its hierarchy, and its refusal to affirm the goodness of people, and its blind denial of the mercy of God that fuels the whole operation.
“From the beginning, my goal in writing this book was exploring power dynamics,” said Luchette. “The first scene that I wrote was the scene in which the women fix the car but have to unfix it so the priest can do it himself.” In that scene, Agatha and her sisters repair a car’s engine belt with pantyhose, a maniacally creative solution they then undo so that the priest can fix the engine himself. “Many times, the greatest mercy you can grant a man is the chance to believe himself the hero. This was obedience, we thought,” says Agatha.
Luchette’s writing is touched with the odd and common grace of life and deftly captures religious life’s oddities. Poverty — creating meals, like walnut tacos, out of whatever is available. Chastity — the delightful intimacy of living life in a community with others. Obedience — taking on an assignment to become a high school geometry teacher, a post that changes Agatha’s life.
Church politics are in the background of the sisters’ lives, not the center stage. A new pope’s election occurs on the same day as the nuns’ periods — the red stains on their sheets preoccupy them more than the white smoke from the Vatican. But the shadow of the clergy abuse crisis hangs over the action of the story.
“I’ve met some really wonderful priests throughout my life,” Luchette said, “I in no way wanted them to be easy villains in this book. But I did want it to be clear that their inherent power makes it difficult for them to remember their humanity.”
In the end, the defining features of the Church in Luchette’s portrait are its rigidity, its emphasis on “No” for the sake of “No,” and its denial of the human in favor of the repressed.
The breaking point for Agatha is a suicide victim whose funeral is presided over by the bishop rebuking the dead sinner for his transgression. It’s the final straw for Agatha. She cannot be contained or denied. “I had no idea the church could break your heart,” Agatha says.
Luchette said they’d received an angry email from a priest in response to the novel, who claimed Luchette knew nothing about religious life or the church. “And he hopes that I never write a novel again,” Luchette said with a laugh.
Luchette’s book is not an op-ed or polemic for ecclesiastical reform. It’s a story. But one that contains an age-old critique that Catholics could pay more attention to.
The narrative of liberalism — that human freedom and enlightenment come at the expense of religion — has persisted for over 300 years unedited, because the Church has not yet made up its mind to prove that narrative wrong. We counter that one can be a free, enlightened human and live within the structure of religion. This may be true in the recesses of our hearts, but what good is a solely private witness?
“I want to make God cool again,” says a priest in Agatha of Little Neon, desperate to attract young folks to church events. Agatha responds to herself: “I didn’t think God had any interest in being cool.” The thought doesn’t travel much beyond that, but how right she is.
American Catholicism is full of marketing campaigns for acceptance by the broader culture, to woo young professionals and white suburban families to fill the pews. American Catholicism has bent over backward to make itself acceptable and desirable in a culture of consumer capitalism gone amok, in which the product with the best branding and savviest marketing wins the most customers.
If the way Catholics market their own faith were true, Catholicism won’t change your life one wit. Trust us, Christians are still fun-loving, money-making, cool people, we protest. You’ll be a winner in the eyes of the world. As though we’re politicians stumping for acceptance.
But Agatha is right: God doesn’t have any interest in being cool. God is for the losers.
The way forward for American Catholics may lie in the bones of Luchette’s book: in the evangelical counsels, the skeleton of authentic faith the book fleshes out. Particularly that first one, poverty.
Luchette said one of their favorite scenes is one in which Agatha follows a Little Neon resident, Tim Gary, up to the top of a water tower. Tim Gary is the first person Agatha meets in Little Neon. He teaches Agatha how to roller skate. He’s lost half his jaw to cancer and he can only eat meals that are a hairsbreadth from mush. But he weeps with gratitude. “I just feel blessed is all,” Tim says after one bland dinner.
Agatha sits with Tim on the top of the water tower. She just sits, because that’s where Christ is — sitting in solidarity with a loser in the game of life. Sitting with Tim is a moment of transformation for Agatha that changes the course of her life. And perhaps, the Catholic Church’s course forward begins where Agatha’s does — sitting with the losers.
