Our Lady of the Highway

by Hal Hartley

A funny, warmhearted, and provocative entertainment about a beautiful but troubled insurance adjuster who believes she has psychic powers she cannot control. She decides to enter a Catholic convent for three months to protect society from her powerful emotions and her devoted math teacher boyfriend hopes this will cure her of these delusions. But the only convent that will accept her is an impoverished cloister run by a gang of outlaw nuns opening a brewery to help finance their radical activist plans.

Genres: Contemporary

316 pages, Paperback

First published June 14, 2022

About the author

Hal Hartley is the writer, director and producer of numerous feature films. He received the best screenplay award at the Cannes International Film Festival in 1998 for Henry Fool as well as prizes at Sundance (Trust), Tokyo (Amateur), Prague (Meanwhile) and Berlin (Ned Rifle). He is a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of the Republic of France and an alumnus of the American Academy in Berlin. He lives in New York City.

Reviews

[Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

This novel is a lot of fun. If you love Hal Hartley's films (Amateur, Simple Men, Trust, Meanwhile, etc) you will love this book too. I do and I did. Wonderful characters, fun hi-jinks, gentle social commentary and a whole lot of heart. And at least one in-joke for the fans. Classic Hal.

[Patrick Steadman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love works of literature that inspire me to try new beverages. For example, as a teen Good Morning, Midnight inspired me to order Pernod and Porto on a date at the Mariott in Ningbo, China. Our Lady of the Highway is nothing like Good Morning, Midnight but I enjoyed it very much. In Our Lady of the Highway our protagonist Lola orders a sort of "Hal Hartley special":

- a frozen margarita
- a pint of Stella Artois (draft)
- a glass of water with ice
- a shot of Jameson
- a hot chocolate (or a cappuccino is fine if hot chocolate is unavailable)

Lola confirms with the bartender that she wants all of these beverages at once. And a straw.

This combination of beverages and their respective temperatures is one of the few things that neutralizes her brain, putting a damper on her emotions, and by extension her unexplained and disturbing telekinetic abilities.

Our Lady of the Highway takes place in an East Williamsburg that is quite realistic, but a better East Williamsburg, where groups of strangers chat about relationship issues on the subway. Catholicism is recognized as potential gimmick, but that's not all it is. There is much more. People have jobs and love their boyfriends. Having a conscience is a burden, but it's much better than the alternative.

You're around people, lots of things are happening, and there's no time to think about yourself.

[Rachael · Rating 5 out of 5]

A laugh-out-loud funny story about a convent/brewery in Williamsburg (only in Brooklyn)! The nuns smoke, drink (obviously) and one even has a shoe fetish. But their short-comings endure us more to their plight of keeping an ongoing vigil for peace on earth. I even recall a line that went something like, we’re nuns, not angels! But when developers and the police get involved, antics ensue. This needs to be made into a film or TV series, now!!

[Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a person who considers Trust and Henry Fool two of the thirty best movies ever made, and has a number of other Hartley films dotting my top 250, I'd like to believe my expectations were kept in check for this, his first published novel.

Unfortunately, Hartley doesn't appear to be super-clear on what novels are for, or rather he has created this one as a sort of screenplay adjacency rather than exploiting what novels do best (world creation and internal climates). Instead, this is clever narrative setup, and clever dialogue, i.e., exactly what screenplays are for.

I get it, he probably wouldn't be given the necessary funding to make this (though it doesn't feel like it would be that expensive)[1], but it's still kind of a bummer to see it delivered in this non-optimal form.
______________________

[1] Make it his way, I mean. Netflix absolutely would have given him $50mil to turn this into an 8 episode TV show.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a surprise hit.

The high-concept accurately says it all: "Radical Nuns! Magic Powers! Decent Beer!"

There is a humanity to Hal Hartley's characters that -- in addition to the situational and smartly peri-satirical humor -- made this an entertaining read that inspired reflection.

If the flap premise appeals to you, then you will likely enjoy this book. If not, then you won't. It delivers precisely what it promises plotwise -- and for me more so storywise.

Having recently discovered filmmaker Hal Hartley, I was intrigued to discover he had also in 2022 written this novel.

Though there are a few textual and grammatical miscues in this Elboro Press title, if you as the reader accept the screenplay-like manner in which character and action are delivered -- and I found that in Hartley's confident storytelling hands I could and did -- then you enter a warm if weird world at once acutely and relatably mundane and magically wonderful.

This reads very much like watching a Hal Hartley film -- I have now seen three -- in that it feels on the surface like a B-movie but you keep watching because of the attention and care paid to the visual story and the story and the way that the story balances and undercuts its own sense of irony or moral. There is something rewarding and -- I shudder to deploy the term though it feels apt -- authentic about the storytelling as a result.

This is not a polemic, though there are many potentially polemical threads -- Hartley manages to array all the threads before you but without tugging on any so far so as to disrupt the weave and weft of the whole cloth. I really respect that.

He also treats his characters -- outlandish as some of their attributes may on the surface seem -- with a thorough respect. He treats them like a director treats actors, it seems to me, deploying them to serve the story wherever and however, and in this book for me it worked. We see and feel and associate with many perspectives but there is one unifying cinematic viewpoint. Inter-paragraph transitions may jump from place to place or head to head or through time from scene to scene, and even partially repeat to remind us of narrative anchor points now explored in an extended way, but we are confidently guided through all these movements as though navigating cuts and splices in a film. It all makes narrative sense, we're prepared for it from participating in a culture saturated in visual media for decades, and so it's not jarring.

The story itself is both playful and serious, without ever taking itself too seriously. It also manages the delight of being an ensemble piece but in prose. This is not just about any one character's arc or concept. The young possibly graced novitiate Lola is the star, but she may have less *page time* than Sister Bernadette, the steadfast nun who finds herself and her honorable if rigid traditions being challenged or usurped by younger characters and the outside world threatening the integrity of the cloistered convent surrounded by New York City's sewage and recycling district. Each of the characters fills out a caricature of their role but somehow also invites greater empathy than the role requires -- one reason I gave this book 5 stars. There is a dedicated math teacher, a young priest -- both facing challenges of how to reconcile their human sexuality in the societal roles they find themselves. There are two hapless street punks, who are, perhaps in the tradition of Dogberry and Verges, both silly and honorable. There is a radical nun on the run and a bishop with a desk job in love with her, both representing their castes and imbuing much more than the caricature through very simple but relatable choices by the author in terms of movement and speech. For antagonists, there is a cop who is somewhat dirty but also complex at the same time he seems despicable, plus the corporate overlord of the sewage treatment plant industry with political ambitions. There is the feckless insurance executive who is both served a warped justice for his boorish inhumanity but also exerts his own small redemption. There are various nuns with various predilections, addictions, and each is rendered humanely but also honored for their continuing service outside of society but for the sake of all. There is a neighborhood bar, with a regular bartender and regulars who still surprise. There are supporting roles whose cutesy flatness all contribute to the sense of scenery and society surrounding us -- reminding the likely reader of our complicit white-collar proclivities, inanities, and weakened reasoning in the face of circumstances beyond the norm. Not to mention the groundskeeper named Jesus.

This is actually quite a complex little book.

That it fits and flows and flits together so pleasantly made for an effervescent reading experience. The chapters are also nicely sized and the writing easy to access so it made for a week of great bedtime reading.

I laughed out loud quite often at various observations and truisms and perfect ironies. The story kept its energy throughout the entire length, and though it might have ended any number of ways, the ending itself felt honorably and humanely rendered. There is actually change that happens and there remain unknowns beyond the frame of the story that extend into our own world and lives and choices. There is implicit commentary without judgment.

I don't claim that this is classic literature by conventional means, but this is a worthwhile book. I came away thinking and feeling more deliberately about our world for reading it.

[Corey · Rating 5 out of 5]

With comic verve and a large cast of outrageous characters filmmaker Hal Hartley, in his first novel, has created a unique and entertaining work of art. It’s as offbeat, and as joyous, as his wonderful films and, at times, might remind you of the young Tom Robbins. There’s an energetic audacity to the story, which is about a cloister of nuns setting up a beer business. At least that’s one story-strand. There are also thieves, corrupt businessmen, cops, radicals, a math teacher, and a telekinetic novitiate named Lola. It’s a hoot, but if this sounds too broad, I assure you that Hartley’s sly wit and authorial control ground the novel; it’s eccentric with just the right amount of zany. And it’s as funny as a flood in a Fizzie factory. I hope Hartley is going to continue to make his singular films, but I also hope he can produce a literary output alongside them. He seems to have unalloyed imagination enough to accomplish both.

[Josh · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm a huge fan of Hartley's films, so wanted to give his novel a try. It definitely feels like a novelized version of one of his films, replete with many of their overarching themes and types of moments. And while the book is good, it is almost as if Hartley was developing his prose style during the course of the novel: it's rough at the beginning and then smooths out by the last half. However, I wish more editing had been done as there are many errors throughout the book (perhaps most strikingly is the constant misspelling of "altar" as "alter"). All in all, though, if you like Hartley's films, you'll likely enjoy this book as well. You can't go wrong with anarchistic, beer-brewing nuns seeking world peace!

[Hannah Evelyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

*DNF
I was so close to finishing this book but I got in such a reading rut. So I’m counting it as finished. It wasn’t because of the book. NYC nuns in a decrepit building making beer and smoking cigarettes? Count me in. I wanna join.

[Eric Smooth · Rating 4 out of 5]

I pictured Martin Donovan as basically every applicable male character

[Ally]

so random, not really worth reading but cool that it read like a movie

[Cammi · Rating 5 out of 5]

hehe i thought this was awesome