Story Of Faith, Humanity Perfect For Season

“Mr. Ives’ Christmas” By Oscar Hijuelos (HarperCollins, 248 pages, $23)

The character of Edward Ives is something of a rarity in contemporary fiction: a hardworking, churchgoing family man of great decency, honor and compassion.

Novelist Oscar Hijuelos is something of a rarity, as well. A writer of quiet dignity, he probes tenderly but determinedly at the human heart, exploring its workings in powerfully understated - almost austere - prose that takes your breath away.

“Mr. Ives’ Christmas” is, in a word, stunning.

It is a story of faith, miracles that sweep unexpectedly into ordinary lives, and how we mortals can salvage hope and redemption from grief and unspeakable loss.

It proves yet again that Hijuelos - winner of the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love,” and of much acclaim for “The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien” - is one of the finest fiction writers in America today.

As the story opens, Ives is a retired advertising illustrator in his 70s. Once, we are told, he believed himself to possess a “small, if imperfect, spiritual gift.” But that was long ago - before one fateful moment when Ives’ world seemed shattered forever.

In that moment, a few days before Christmas 1967, his son, Robert, was gunned down by a teenage hoodlum as he left church choir practice. At 17, Robert planned to enter a Catholic seminary in just six months; he was everything a man could want a son to be. And for the next 30 years, “with their thousands of days and hundreds of thousands of hours,” Ives has lived with the image of his lifeless son sprawled in blood on a New York sidewalk - and with the gaping hole that has been left in his own soul.

Over the years, coming to doubt God’s very existence, Ives has “turned to stone.”

His relationship with his vivacious wife, Annie, has grown ever more distant. Though he loves his remaining child, Caroline, he is unable to reach out to her as fully as he wants. Even with his two adoring grandchildren, Ives finds himself barely going through the motions.

So the years roll by. “Then the holidays would come and the past would hit Ives like a chill wind,” Hijuelos writes. ” … Each day he awaited a slick of light to enter the darkness. And when life went on as usual, without any revelation, he’d await his own death and the new life or - as he often suspected - the new oblivion to begin.”

The holiday season is especially haunting for Ives. It was then, as a small child, that he was placed in a foundling home; also then, several years later, that he was adopted by a good-hearted widower.

Now the season of Christ’s birth has become - to the once-devout Ives - the season of his son’s death. And Ives finds himself pondering a chilling question:

“He would think of all the depictions of Christ on the Cross, his tortured eyes looking upward, heaven and just beyond, and wonder, to his horror, just what Christ might have been seeing. What if he had looked up and seen the whirling center of a chaotic universe swallowing him up?”

And there lies the central question of this novel. What if there’s nothing there? What if it all amounts to meaninglessness? And how - in the face of that possibility, in the midst of pain and great suffering - do we manage to go on?

As Hijuelos leads us back through the story of Ives’ life, we come to feel great affection for this endearing man who struggles so mightily to live courageously, to hold on to his faith.

We learn about his childhood fascination with art, his career as a Madison Avenue illustrator, his courtship of the fiery Annie, his abiding friendship with the Cuban-born Luis Ramirez and his wife, Carmen.

That friendship provides one of the novel’s most affecting threads.

So, too, does Ives’ correspondence, over the years, with his son’s convicted killer. It is that link - even more than the startling mystical experience Ives undergoes - that finally enables this kindly but haunted man to find peace.

In “Mr. Ives’ Christmas,” Hijuelos has crafted an exquisite testament to the power of faith and the human capacity for renewal.

From its opening pages to its breathtaking benediction, the novel takes on timeless themes with freshness and vigor. If there’s one book you read this holiday season, this should be it.