FICTION

MOTHERHOUSE by Jeanine Hathaway (Hyperion: $22.95; 184 pp.) Whatever you think about nuns, you’ll think differently after reading this autobiographical novel. Nothing Jeanine Hathaway does here is predictable, though the plot would seem to be a standard one: An 18-year-old Catholic girl from Chicago, oldest of nine children, enters a Dominican “Motherhouse” in 1963 as a postulant. Her security in centuries-old ritual is upset by the reforms of Vatican II; her faith in God is shaken by a brother’s death and her father’s abandonment of the family. The long struggle between her desire for self-expression and the order’s ideal of self-abnegation is resolved when she becomes, like Hathaway, a poet.

The originality, like God himself, is in the details. The narrator, Sister Kristin, is a rebel but a quiet one. Her faith is neither sweet nor harsh; it’s complex, nuanced, intelligent. The order can tyrannize--in the name of discouraging exclusive friendships, a superior brands Kristin and another postulant as possible lesbians--but it also can comfort: When the news about her brother arrives, “at no time am I not connected; someone always has her hand on my shoulder, her arm around me.” A session of “spiritual renewal” under the guidance of a priest is, in one sense, the church’s way of enforcing conformity; but it’s also humor and therapy and something close to a love affair.

Above all, the author has been there. “Motherhouse” isn’t a work of stylistic bravura and thrilling intuition like Ron Hansen’s convent novel “Mariette in Ecstasy,” but it has the ring of authority--all the more so because Hathaway, who left the Dominicans, shows no bitterness. Her writing is tough, elliptical, almost too compressed; it takes poetry’s leaps, a personality’s risks. “Maybe this is how nuns will be in the future,” Kristin says. “Stubborn, a little self-indulgent, outspoken”--and, in her case, with a voice all her own.