The Luck of Andrew Greeley

By Mayo Mohs

THY BROTHER'S WIFE by Andrew M. Greeley; Warner; 350 pages; $14.95

"Automatic Andy's at it again. Not content with writing one novel that gives trash a bad name, Catholicism's most juvenile writer (with never an unpublished thought) is back with his second potboiler. Everyone knows that a second novel is by definition worse than a first novel. Since The Cardinal Sins was a cheap, tawdry, trashy, sleazy book, you can imagine how bad Andrew Greeley's new novel, Thy Brother's Wife, is. A putrid, puerile, prurient, pulpy potboiler."

That diatribe is not from one of Andrew Greeley's critics. It is from Greeley himself, mimicking and mocking his detractors. He has plenty to choose from. Some of the Greeley haters may be simply envious: the author owns a sunny, three-bedroom house in Tucson, where he spends a semester each year teaching sociology at the University of Arizona. He keeps a two-bedroom condominium on the 47th floor of the chic John Hancock Center in Chicago, where he conducts widely respected studies at the National Opinion Research Center. And he has a beach cottage on Lake Michigan, where he water-skis, sails and--as he does everywhere--writes.

The sheer volume of his production may unsettle less prolific workers: he has produced some 90 books (eight since the beginning of 1981), mostly on sociology (Ethnicity in the U.S.), theology (The Mary Myth), education (Catholic High Schools and Minority Students) and history (The Irish Americans). In his spare time he writes a thrice-weekly column for more than 100 newspapers, and uncounted articles for magazines and scholarly journals. But nothing has brought him more recognition, notoriety and money than two novels, last year's The Cardinal Sins (2.6 million copies in print) and this year's Thy Brother's Wife. The first is in its 21st week on the paperback bestseller list, the second in its twelfth on the hardback charts.

The trouble with all this worldly success is that its recipient, Father Andrew M. (for Moran) Greeley, 54, is a Roman Catholic priest. It is not so much the money that disturbs his critics: diocesan priests do not take a vow of poverty. The sticking point is the novels themselves, in which Greeley seems bent upon airing the dirtier linen of the church he professes to love and serve. Not only do Greeley's Cardinals sin, but lower prelates, priests and parishioners are awash in anger and avarice, deceit and envy, pride and lust--especially lust. Greeley pleads that his novels are not so much about sex as about love--God's love for sinful humans. Like biblical stories of adultery and incest, he argues, they demonstrate how God "draws straight with crooked lines." Greeley's attackers charge that those crooked lines are drawn all too luridly and are being accepted by non-Catholics, at least, as an insider's scandalous portrait of what the church is really like.

The Cardinal Sins shocked many with its tortured, bisexual archbishop, whose encounters with women are invariably brutal. Thy Brother's Wife (contrary to Greeley's mock self-review) is in fact a better, more hopeful book. The pace is quicker, the characters more firmly drawn, the sexual rites gentler. Greeley's turf remains Camelot West: the Chicago of lace-curtain Irish who have pushed their way to the top. Multimillionaire Mike Cronin, who beds women faster than Joe Kennedy could say "Gloria Swanson," has set the course for his two sons. Paul, the Notre Dame boy who goes off to win a Medal of Honor in the Korean War, is going to be President. Sean is bound for the priesthood, and will of course be a Cardinal. Paul's wife is to be Nora, orphaned daughter of a family friend and a foster child in the Cronin home. Sean loves her; Paul gets her, hence the temptation of Thy Brother's Wife.

Everything moves fast for the Cronins--even tragedy. Paul goes to Washington on Bobby Kennedy's team; Nora plays football with Bobby, pushes him into his pool, sees him assassinated in Los Angeles. Paul, singlehanded, is made to exaggerate all the faults imputed to the Kennedy men. His war heroics are accidental as he flees from the enemy; he helps steal a test in law school; he becomes a compulsive bed hopper, driving one girlfriend to suicide and leaving her daughter, a campaign aide, to die in a hotel fire. Paul is a Senator running for President when fate catches up with him.

Sean's fate seems to be Greeley's fantasy. He is ordained at St. Mary of-the Lake Seminary in Mundelein, the author's alma mater, in 1956, just two years after Greeley was. Greeley remembers being "very cautious, very conservative. I kept all the rules." So does Sean. Assigned to a black parish (unlike Greeley), he works himself to near collapse. A new archbishop sends the exhausted curate off to Rome to study the history of church marital theology, and Sean finds himself on the famous papal birth control commission, where he stubbornly decides to abstain from voting. The move wins him an interview with Pope Paul VI, whom he lectures about the need for a new theology of sexual morality. Sean could use it himself: he has just spent two weeks in bed with Nora. Neither the interlude nor a brash period of liberalism prevents his rise, however, first to bishop and then, after a telephone call from Pope Paul, to Cardinal Archbishop of Chicago.

Sean's triumph is something more than diverting summer fiction for Greeley. For years he was an outspoken foe of the late, scandal-plagued Archbishop of Chicago, John Cardinal Cody ("One of the most truly evil men I have ever known," he once said). Assuming Cody's position would be the ultimate revenge. That is a basic problem with Thy Brother's Wife: its mean streak. Most of the tragedies in the novel result not from too much lovemaking but too much getting even. Perhaps this is less a reflection of Greeley's art than of his anger. There are many Andrew Greeleys, and there are clearly two working at cross-purposes here: Greeley the romantic, wishing that life could be full of grace, and Greeley the realistic priest, who knows how dark human souls can be. The priest keeps trying to explain, but it is the bitter romantic who keeps getting even. --By Mayo Mohs. Reported by J. Madeleine Nash/Chicago

Excerpt

"... Nora stood up. 'Well, I'd better leave now...'

'I wish you happiness,' Sean said, putting his arms around her.

For a moment they stood silently together. She was soft and sweet, an angel of love. He could feel her determination begin to melt into surrender. If he insisted now he could have her, he was sure, have a life with her in which the sweetness would never end. Images from their past love tumbled through his mind. Oakland Beach ... Amalfi ... Yet surely the sweetness would be short-lived. Having her, he would lose her. Not having her, he could love her forever. Not for Jimmy McGuire, not for all the priests of Chicago, not even for the Pope, but for Nora ... yes, for Nora ... he would do what his damn fool Church and his damn fool God wanted him to do. He disengaged himself from the embrace. 'I've got to get ready for Mass.' "

With reporting by J. Madeleine Nash/Chicago

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