An elegant motif of surfaces and depths runs through the novella, developed through image and scraps of dialogue—standard tools of classical realism from the mid-nineteenth century on, and Mojtabai wields them as nimbly as anyone. But what sets Thirst on a very special shelf is how that idea seeps into the very texture of the prose. This is not easy to explain. For the first quarter or so of the book, every sentence is built up with such careful needlework that the characters’ every thought or action is simultaneously perfectly natural and a working out of cosmic drama. To read these chapters fully requires maintaining a sort of double vision.^[1] This is not allegory: the characters are not glass-eyed puppets enacting the understory; they are going about their business as any of us would, but each, like Kierkegaard’s knight of faith, “at every moment is making the movement of infinity.”

“Isn’t that just what fiction, some fiction anyway, does?” you ask. No—not like this.  Most writers who attempt this kind of effect cheat, wink at the reader. The pretense of realism drops at key moments, the characters give big speeches that telegraph what’s going on, an omniscient narrator drops in to underline things. Mojtabai never flinches from the story she’s telling, only uses the words Theo or Lena would say. Two examples: in the book’s first chapter, the aged priest leaves his house.

Weather on the way…. Clouds blot what little sun there was before Father Theo entered the convent at noon. He isn’t properly dressed for the chill but knows that if he steps inside his house to fetch a jacket he’ll be disinclined to face the outside again.

A pedestrian moment in simple prose; there are no thoughts from outside Theo’s head. But here is a pilgrim on the threshold of life and death (if there is a cheat, it’s the specification of the time to point us at Mark 15:33). Then, in the second chapter, two widows meet in an airport during a snowstorm. Weather again, and another threshold moment, this time presided over by a Janus who has been split in two for the occasion. The reader will have to see for herself how the effect is wrought, but note that neither Mojtabai nor her characters at any moment draw attention to the parable unfolding.

It is a very tight, dense weave, and Mojtabai does not sustain it forever. She loosens the texture once Lena arrives at Theo’s bedside; having taught the reader how to follow along, she relaxes a bit. There’s a moment involving a crucifix that even the characters perk up and notice as symbolic. It’s a very dry joke, but of course this is what death does; it freights everything around it with unbearable meaning.

The narrative fabric breaks up enough towards the end of the book that Lena, and the reader, are left with loose ends. What is the final meaning of Theo’s choice to cease eating? Different characters suggest it is ascesis or stubbornness or simply having “heard enough” from the world. No one uses or even thinks of the word suicide; is it worth wondering why? Theo’s name (and his Christ figuring—see the title and watch for the sponge), and Lena’s (Magdalene: at one point she guesses—correctly—that someone is a gardener)—do these have significance, or are they as much of a distraction as the answers Lena sifts for among Theo’s notebooks? Two readings of Thirst have not yielded the answers, but I am looking forward to a third.

There is one more aspect of Thirst I want to make note of by way of a postscript: It demonstrates the possibility and value of an author not just appropriating but truly inhabiting a context not her own. It seems impossible this book could be written by anyone other than a Catholic—and one who is moreover intimately familiar with rural parish life, various internecine squabbles, the felt banner pieties of the early post-Vatican II years—but Mojtabai is Jewish and has never practiced Catholicism. When she uses words like pyx and alb, or weaves in very careful references to the Passion narratives, they feel natural and well-thumbed, not like an author showing off her research. It should cheer us all to find such selfless and imaginative immersion still practiced by writers of fiction. Perhaps that is the only way this novella could work: an actual Catholic writer might try to make it into too much of a parable; one can visualize the page of ten discussion questions appended after the novella’s end. Those questions aren’t not present in Thirst, but they seem beside the point after reading. Life and death are much greater mysteries than anything a novelist could concoct.

^[1] Here is how a much better critic (John Jeremiah Sullivan) describes the same achievement in a Donald Antrim story: “It’s a way of rendering permeable the surface lens that divides the underworld of fantasy from the ‘painful realism’ hovering above it, so that writer and reader at moments seem joined in not being totally certain whether what’s happening on the page should be taken literally and naturalistically or as mythical, otherworldly.”