A Voice From The Great Plains Offers Strong Words To A Broken World. By Nancy Mairs The Cloister Walk, by Kathleen Norris (Riverhead Books). Hardcover, $24.95; Paper, $12.50. ONE OF THE chief delights of reviewing (yes, there are some--more than a few, in fact--despite the undeniable drudgery the task can entail) arises when I'm asked to evaluate a book I've promised myself to read but haven't yet found the time for. All those years in school have rendered me dutiful, if nothing else, and I am far more comfortable undertaking an assignment than giving myself a treat. I had certainly made such a promise with regard to The Cloister Walk, by Kathleen Norris. I'd been quite literally enraptured by her Dakota: A Spiritual Geography when it was published several years ago and became, somewhat surprisingly in view of its poetic language and explicitly worshipful tone, a best-seller. In it, she reflects upon the move she made from New York City to her grandparents' home in Lemmon, South Dakota, and the spiritual consequences of choosing life in a town of 1,600 on the Great Plains. Having been a Benedictine oblate for more than a decade, all the while attending two nearby Presbyterian churches, Norris has developed a complex spirituality, at once mystical and pragmatic, which informs all her reflections. I felt somewhat let down by The Cloister Walk, which lacks the coherence conferred upon Dakota by a deeply felt sense of place. Indeed, the more recent book is decidedly a mixed bag. It contains 75 pieces, ranging in length from a single page to full-blown essays, on a variety of subjects related, for the most part, to issues in monastic life--liturgy, community, celibacy, sin, saints and martyrs--or (and these are not entirely distinct) in life lived in a very small town in a very wide and windswept landscape. Although the book begins with "Dawn" and ends with "Night," and the occasional dated pieces appear in chronological order, these attempts at structure seem imposed upon rather than intrinsic to the material. I for one am a "nibbler" as a reader, and so I don't care overmuch whether a book forms a solid whole so long as the individual parts are toothsome. More troubling, I found, is Norris' tendency toward abstraction. "The monastic life," she notes, "has this in common with the artistic one: both are attempts to pay close attention to objects, events, and natural phenomena that otherwise would get chewed up in the daily grind." Yet the detail one might expect attentive practice to yield is often curiously absent. Although she lived at St. John's for nine months and much of the book is set there, I can picture neither the monastery buildings nor the people dwelling therein. None of the characters really come alive except Norris' sister Becky, brain-damaged at birth, who begins a letter, following the publication of Dakota, this way: "I feel hurt because you wrote a book and I didn't. Happy for you and I try read your book and I was bored with it." But these are quibbles, best gotten out of the way so as to savor the book's many strengths. Norris is a fiercely intelligent writer, erudite yet without pretension, who quotes comfortably and to good effect from a variety of sources, among them scripture, especially the psalms, the Desert Fathers of early Christianity, medieval nuns, Emily Dickinson, modern theologians, and the many religions she has come to know over the years. Unfortunately, these last remain nameless and all but featureless, and tend to blur, though anecdotes occasionally bring them to life: the elderly sister who, admiring the blue-and-green shawl Norris has knit for her, admits to being tired of the black of her habit; the monk who sews vestments for the Barbie dolls of Norris' nieces so they can play "mommy priest" after their mother's ordination in the Episcopal Church. Norris portrays monastic life affectionately and appealingly, as she does life in Lemmon, where "no one...thinks that being a writer is a big deal" and the whole town mourns the murder of one of its citizens. For the wider world she shows less fondness, offering incisive, though never mean-spirited, comment on a variety of social ills, among them the way the educational system scours poetry from the souls of students before they are very old; the difficulty of establishing and sustaining communality in a society where families are "so disjointed that even meals in common (are) a rarity"; the tendency of consumerism to blur the distinction between need and desire. No patent remedy exists for these, no chicken soup for the soul, however much we may yearn for ready comfort. Monastic discipline opens one avenue to "mature adulthood," which "requires us to reject much popular mythology: that life is simply handed to us, that love is easy, quick, fated, romantic, and death a subject to be avoided altogether." Only at this point can we begin healing ourselves and our broken world. This is a brave--indeed, in terms of its sternness, a prophetic--message to bring to a society in which discipline, especially in the context of community, seems an all but alien notion. Perhaps Norris' voice, crying in the wilderness of the Great Plains, can call all who heed it--and I hope there are many--to mature adulthood.

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