Lilli's Question

by Michael O'Neill

270 pages, Paperback

Published July 22, 2026

About the author

Librarian Note: There are more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Paul Wagenbreth · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had thought going into Michael O’Neill’s “Lilli’s Question,” with how it was billed as being about a seminarian conflicted about his vocation, that it might be in the vein of another such novel I recently read about a crisis of faith, Stephanie Sy-Quia’s disquieting “A Private Man.”
And to a degree O’Neill’s book does share some of Sy-Quia’s concerns, though to my mind without the degree of bite of her novel, which is particularly piercing on the matter of the church and sex, with her protagonist, a teacher at a Catholic school for girls, being dismissed for daring to educate her charges about the facts of life and her being appalled (“oh no,” she thinks) when she hears from her priest lover about an incident from his school days when two boys, one older and one younger, had been caught “doing things” and a school cleric called the older boy before a school assembly and, in a punishment clearly sexually arousing for the cleric, had the boy drop his pants and a colleague thrash the boy’s buttocks with a whip.
Not that O’Neill’s novel doesn’t get into sexual issues as well, just not, as I say, as bitingly as Sy-Quia, though both novels do share a picture of a church obsessed about sex, with the church’s reaction to one instance of sexual indiscretion in O’Neill’s novel being predictably inflexible, though in another instance tolerant enough that I found it somewhat unrealistic.
In the first instance, the priest protagonist, Jim McGann, by now a chancellor charged with overseeing other clerics, must deal with a priest who has sexually abused some of his school charges, and in his handling of the situation shows himself to be very much the good soldier for the church with how he strips the offending priest of his duties but doesn't, as the boy’s family wants and justice would scream out for, refer him for criminal prosecution.
Not so much the good church soldier he shows himself to be, though, in the other instance, where he has himself fallen into a sexual liaison which, in what I found to be an implausibly tolerant response from his church superiors (though perhaps just a case of protecting their own), they show a degree of sympathy decidedly at odds with the uncompromisingly rigid stance on sexual matters that was always my own experience in my upbringing in the church, with the final straw for me, the thing that sent me out the church doors never to return, being when a Newman chaplain at my college, inflamed with parochial zeal, pictured for the congregation two imaginary teens headed for hell or purgatory, I forget which, after they’d been necking in an automobile and were unable to make it to confession before being killed in a car accident. (Mary Gordon’s “There Your Heart Lies,” about the Spanish Civil War, is particularly good on the Church’s obsession with sex, with its protagonist saying at one point, “it was always something sexual they were cruel about. They didn’t care what you did, you could kill someone while you were driving drunk, you could beat your wife to a pulp, and they’d be oh so ready with forgiveness. But some wretch of a kid gets pregnant – they’d shame her until she wanted to die.”)
Not that McGann is any sort of libertine who deliberately sought out a sexual dalliance; rather, it’s pure happenstance how he comes to connect with the waitress, who, far from being a stereotyped tray slinger, is a budding scholar of sorts who wrote a college honors thesis comparing Zen monasteries to 19th century Utopian communities and who shows familiarity with the works of Jack Kerouac and Henry Miller and who will end up making for a love so profound for McGann that it even has him for a time having thoughts of giving up his vocation for her.
Decidedly not just a casual thing, then, his coupling with her, so soul-matingly intense, indeed, that I found it more than a little unlikely (what are the odds?), just as I did an overall nonjudgmental tone from the novel and its characters, including the namesake woman of the title, Lilli, with whom McGann also has an intimate, though unconsummated relationship, to where he even looks for her throughout his life.
It’s she, indeed, who will pose for him the titular question that will plague him throughout his clerical career, why he became a priest, though for all his anguishing about his vocational choice, there’s finally not for me the degree of torment or doubt from him as shown by, say, the head nun in the movie “Doubt,” where she suffers a veritable meltdown over her doubts at movie’s end.
More overall I found O’Neill’s novel, for all the expressed doubts, a paean to the church in the way of a movie from my young adulthood, “The Cardinal,” which had half the Catholic male acquaintances of my youth wanting to be a priest.
All in all, though, for all my issues, a worthy look at religious vocation, O’Neill’s fiction debut, particularly for Catholics, be they still practicing or fallen away.

[Book Reviewer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lilli’s Question follows Jim McGann, a young American seminarian whose brief, luminous encounter with a German woman named Lilli leaves him with a question he spends his life trying to answer: why be a priest? What begins as an intimate memory from a bus trip through Europe widens into a decades-long reckoning with vocation, grief, love, Catholic hierarchy, and moral courage. Jim becomes a priest, suffers the shattering loss of his brother Tommy in Vietnam, wrestles with celibacy and desire, rises through the Church, and finally finds his answer by using his authority to challenge the exclusion of women from the priesthood.

I was struck by how patiently this novel lets a life accumulate. The book is not hurried toward revelation; it gathers weather, meals, old friendships, liturgies, landscapes, jokes, silences, and losses until Jim’s final act feels less like a plot twist than the slow ignition of everything he has lived. O’Neill writes especially well about the Catholic imagination, not as a set of abstractions but as a tactile world of incense, vestments, parish kitchens, funeral prayers, institutional politics, and private doubt. The scenes around Tommy’s death are devastating because they refuse easy sanctity. Jim’s grief is raw and unbeautified, and the book is strongest when faith and fury are allowed to occupy the same pew.

I appreciated the novel’s moral seriousness without pomposity. Jim can be reflective, even theological, but he is also funny, embarrassed, lonely, and frequently bewildered by the turns his own life takes. The women in the novel, especially Lilli, Jeannie, Sally, and Anna, are not merely stations on his spiritual journey; they are the voices that press him toward honesty. The novel’s discursiveness may test readers who prefer a tighter, more conventionally dramatic structure, but I found its spaciousness fitting. This is a book about conscience forming over time, and conscience is rarely efficient. It moves by detour, recurrence, ache, and sudden clarifying flame.

This is an ideal novel for readers of historical fiction, spiritual fiction, and character-driven coming-of-age stories that stretch across a lifetime. Readers who admire Graham Greene’s fascination with faith under pressure may find a gentler but no less searching companion here, one more interested in vocation as a lived tenderness than as a battlefield of damnation. Lilli’s Question is a thoughtful and tender novel about the cost of answering a question honestly.