John L'Heureux's fiction is important both for its substance and its style. His undertaking is contrarian and ambitious: to map the presence of God in a world hostile to the sacred. His writing is committed, complicated, frequently witty, and sometimes unpleasant in its unflinching accounts of the violent and their behaviors. With prickly discernment, he excavates the mysterious in ordinary experience. L'Heureux has an instinct for locating and exposing the absurd in the choices men and women make or have thrust upon them; yet, he refrains from surrendering to easy resolutions and eschews sentimentality of any kind. He relies neither on superstition nor miracles but has staked out the tense frontier between the serious claims of faith and the partisan demands of belief. In an unpublished interview conducted on 25 April 2000 he said, "I heard a nice description offered by Graham Greene in his last days: 'I'm a Catholic...