Each year at Easter, the Catholic Church eagerly welcomes an influx of new catechumens-turned-mystagogues, many of them younger and just starting out in faith and in life. But by Pentecost we may seem to have forgotten about that moment when we opened wide the doors. We’re back to muddling through, and we seem to expect our converts to get on with it just as we do. What happens to them then? Trevor Cribben Merrill’s new novel The Comforts of Exile tells one possible version of the story through Colin Phelps, a young American in Paris who must come to terms with his tendency to deviate transcendence even as he learns to practice a faith that is ever ancient, ever new.
Although it’s a sequel, this volume stands alone. It’s helpful if readers know what happened to Colin over the course of the prior installment, the campus novel Minor Indignities, but not game-ending if we don’t. Most who finish The Comforts of Exile will have their curiosity piqued and humor primed enough to want to go back and laugh at Colin’s unfailing ability to imagine his way into a better situation only to land himself in a worse one.
That ability is on full display in Comforts. Here, a freshly graduated and recently baptized-and-confirmed Colin oscillates between Paris’s Left Bank and Manhattan’s gentrifying streets, represented respectively by his two love interests: alluring, chaste Laure and repentant, conflicted Julia, both Catholics yet each holding a different attitude toward the Church’s more difficult teachings. Suspense arises, as it did in the first book, both from the fraught charge of eros and from the comic question to what degree Colin’s propensity for self-sabotage will get in the way of his not inconsiderable talents.
Many of Colin’s decisions embody a dynamic that anyone who’s undergone any degree of conversion will recognize well: We think that our main problem is in our heads, that if we only put ourselves through enough intellectual change, then our higher thoughts will finally fuel the moral change we want to see in ourselves. Really, though, it’s the other way around. Moral change almost always does precede, and often moral change must precede the intellectual. Wish as we may to change our thoughts, we may not be able to do so until we make the act of will to give up the actions that are getting in the way of our ability to see higher things.
A sidebar here, for the philosophers: This may seem to be going against St. Thomas’s saying that every act of will is preceded by an act of intellect, but it isn’t really. For in order to make the act of the will to change your moral behavior, you do first have to have made the act of the intellect that says, “Changing my moral behavior would be better than not changing it.” That is a separate issue from, say, understanding the truth about how matter and form work in the sacraments. But in practice, someone might not have the freedom of mind to fully understand how matter and form work in the sacraments until he has first successfully said to himself, and followed through on the insight, “You know, it might be a waste of my time and talents to post so many rage-screeds on X” (or “spend so much time doomscrolling,” if shitposting isn’t not your vice), “and I should also probably cut out the day drinking that makes me want to post rage-screeds” (or “the excess caffeine that drives the anxiety that drives the doomscrolling,” if alcohol isn’t your vice). We could multiply examples. The precise fault that gets in the way and the precise truth to be grasped will change according to situation: But the point still holds that, very often, we think we need to think more when really what we need is to do better. Or, as a priest-friend of mine bluntly puts it, “Sin makes you stupid.”
Back to Colin, who reaches this illumination while reading “The Angelic Imagination” and who, to his credit, knows he is too smart to be as stupid as he sometimes is: His relative modesty and self-awareness keep him just this side of humble, even as he stumbles in and out of the rest of the six deadlies, with lust and envy often gaining the upper hand. What there is of Colin’s pride, and there isn’t much, is mostly vanity: the least harmful, because most obvious, kind. (Ordinary pride of arrogance, Augustine’s libido dominandi, easily masks itself as excellence and force of character, while the wretched but all too common pride of timidity masquerades as humility while really being nothing of the sort.)
In fact, Colin is a paradigmatic vaniteux, the sort of character described in René Girard’s Deceit, Desire, and the Novel who “does not want to be anyone’s disciple. He convinces himself that he is thoroughly original”—when, of course, no such thing is the case. This very desire for originality makes the bringing-about of such a character’s religious conversion and social comeuppance—the revelation to himself of his own same-as-everyone-elseness—a particularly rich problem for the comic novelist. Merrill’s complications and conclusions don’t disappoint; Colin, if he is to meet the story’s many demands upon him, will be absolutely required to think less and practice virtue more in a way that could easily provide the impetus for yet a third volume.
Wish as we may to change our thoughts, we may not be able to do so until we make the act of will to give up the actions that are getting in the way of our ability to see higher things.
Not to spoil the surprise, but Colin undergoes here a classic “novelistic conversion,” which, for Girard, takes place when a central character becomes aware of and disgusted with his vanities. At a higher state of development, the enemy to be fought might not be overt self-aggrandizements, so much as the subtler hesitations, self-preservations, and self-deceptions that not only keep Colin mired in a bad case of staircase wit but, far worse, block him from a fulfilled life in the truth.
Where Minor Indignities featured the first sort of conversion, Comforts features the second, making Colin a deeper, more substantive, and more interesting character than the rank freshman his earlier readers knew. His French epiphanies are of the pointed but natural type that come to all of us through experience, yet his extreme youth makes it reasonable to believe that he still needs to learn them. This slow process of learning and maturation, perhaps taken for granted or read as implicit by earlier generations, is once again of narrative interest to us in a culture that has all but completely forgotten how to make adults out of adolescents. Colin is in the painful process of psychological molting, shedding the shell of the adolescent to emerge as an actual grown man, and though at times we cringe with and for him, we also cheer him on. Particularly delicious are the novel’s last two lines (don’t jump ahead to them, though; they only make sense in light of the whole), unfolding in their precise choice and sequence of words how the revelation of same-as-everyone-elseness might be cause, not for despair, but for hope.
What makes the tone of the comedy work is Merrill’s thorough understanding of, and compassionate gaze upon, his “bewitched, bothered, and bewildered” protagonist. While not presented as a moral model by any means, Colin is perceived, rather than judged, by the narration. Any judgment delivered is Colin’s own self-judgment and is shown by the turnings of the plot to be entirely justified. In his youthful confusions and earnest if clumsy corrections, Colin stands as an easily comprehensible and perhaps an encouraging figure for those who have recently entered the Church yet still find that their years of (mal)formation in a sick mainstream culture sometimes prove too strong for their good intentions. These new mystagogues don’t need overblown stories of all-but-impossible models to imitate nearly so much they need wise, gentle, humble confessors, such as Colin finds in Père Bayard, who combine serious remonstrance with an abundance of chances to correct course. The young, particularly, don’t need to sit and meditate on their faults—a meditation that life itself will, fortunately and unfortunately, force—nearly so much as they need to fly to the fountain of mercy. Colin’s constant, sincere recourse to the sacraments is his saving grace. It can be ours, too, if we hold fast to it.