There is a governing method behind James Mulhern’s fiction, and it can be stated in one sentence: the sacred is never announced, only smuggled in wearing the clothes of something shabby. A crown of thorns arrives as a laurel of peach-fuzz hair. The stigmata arrive as spilled juice at the end of a housedress’s sleeves. Extreme Unction arrives as suntan oil, rubbed into a scalp and forehead by a grandmother who believes she is only preventing sunburn. This is not irony. Mulhern is not deflating the sacred by dressing it down — he is arguing that the sacred was always going to look this way, because the people he writes about have never once in their lives encountered it any other way.
“Assumptions” makes the argument explicit by yoking a Catholic dogma — the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, the body taken up rather than left to corrupt — to a woman the story opens by calling “homeliest damn woman” in her family, an alcoholic, diabetic, asthmatic, gouty, bald, mocked at card tables by her own relations. The story catalogs every affliction in its first paragraph for a specific reason: the dogma is a claim about bodies, about which bodies God intends to keep, and the story wants to test that claim against the least likely body available. Its epigraph, from the Song of Solomon — “You are altogether beautiful, my love; there is no flaw in you” — is not decoration. It is the verdict the entire narrative is quietly building toward, delivered finally not by a pope’s decree but by a boy, grown, remembering.
The same method insists that grace does not require worthy administrators. Helen invents a nickname, “Lovely Peggy,” and then rolls her eyes while the woman sings badly in a cellar. She tells the children not to stare, and in the next breath tells Peg, “You look foolish in those things.” She steals bread rather than waste it and calls the waste a mortal sin. None of this cruelty and devotion is reconciled by the story; it is simply allowed to sit together, because that is how grace actually moves through a family like this one — imperfectly, through people who are cruel and loving in the same sentence, and it works anyway. The one moment of uncalculated grace belongs, tellingly, to a child: “You’re not ugly,” blurted flatly, without theology, exactly the kind of unearned mercy the gospels reserve for the mouths of babes.
The same conviction — that dignity is not a reward for being presentable, and that the sacred hides precisely where no one is looking for it — carries over from the fiction into Mulhern’s account of his own classroom. In the essay “Teaching at Fifty-Six,” he describes telling students — “poor inner-city kids, children of immigrants, immigrants themselves” — that they “contain multitudes,” that “nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of their own minds.” He wants them to discover, under the noise of adolescence and instability, what he calls “a sacred self deep inside” — Emerson’s “infinitude of the private man,” handed to teenagers who answer him with, by his own account, “This ain’t math, Mr.” The classroom is as unglamorous a setting as a beach trip gone strange or a card table full of relatives — and Mulhern trusts it for exactly the same reason he trusts Peg’s housedress and her stolen bread: because he does not believe the sacred waits for better circumstances before showing up.
What unites the fiction, the poetry, and the teaching, then, is a single, stubborn refusal: the refusal to let dignity be conditional on being impressive. The narrow doorway a dying woman is helped through, drunk, on someone else’s arm, is the same doorway a student walks through carrying an essay he is embarrassed to read aloud. Mulhern’s sentences do not raise a finger to tell you which moments are holy. That withholding is the whole point. If you have to be told, the story assumes, you have not yet learned to look for it in a bottle of Coppertone, a bag of stolen bread, or a classroom that smells faintly of chalk and impatience — which is, this body of work insists, exactly where it has been the entire time.