It is a tale of sin, guilt, sorrow, hardship and injustice, but it is also, finally, about finding hope in a harsh and unjust world. It is, in the truest sense, a book about Christmas.
“Mr. Ives’ Christmas” is the second novel Oscar Hijuelos wrote that was influenced by the holiday. His first attempt emphasized the festive and joyful aspects of Christmas, but his publisher rejected it. Hijuelos, a Pulitzer prize winning author, responded by saying, “OK, I’m really going to the heart of Christmas then,” his widow, Lori Carlson, recalled.
The result was the story of a man’s struggle to reconcile God’s sacrificial love with his own personal tragedy. It was inspired by the dignity of a family Hijuelos knew as a child whose son was killed, Carlson said.
The key event in “Mr. Ives’ Christmas” is the senseless killing of Edward Ives’ son, a young man who had recently confided to his parents that he felt a vocation to the priesthood. A few days before Christmas outside of church, just after choir practice, he was talking to a friend when a 14-year-old kid, in possession of a gun, walked by. An unfortunate exchange of glances, three shots, and the Ives’ only son lay dead on a New York City sidewalk.
The novel is short but complex, portraying Ives as a grieving and changed man. Each Christmas he hopes for a sign that his son was “somewhere safe and beloved by God.”
“And when life went on as usual, without any revelation, he’d await his own death and the new life or — as he often suspected — the new oblivion to begin.”
Yet Ives, moved by the shame and sorrow of the killer’s grandmother, a Saint Monica type, tries to see the young man as a victim himself and someone capable of change. His name is Daniel Gomez, an eighth-grade dropout who is almost immediately sent back to prison for violent offenses after serving his time for killing Ives’ son.
The years pass. Ives’ other child, a daughter, gets married and he becomes a grandfather. He retires. After years of mutual grief, he and his wife become closer.
Then one day, near Christmas, the phone rings. The caller is a priest who says Daniel, now a changed man, has been released from prison and would like to meet him. Over time, however, Ives has come to feel less compassion, not more, for his son’s killer, and he cannot face a meeting.
A year later the priest calls again.
Nothing monumental appears to happen when Ives visits Daniel, now a tattooed and overweight middle-aged man. But when the two men awkwardly embrace, and Daniel thanks Ives over and over again, Ives believes he feels the presence of his son in the room.
Pope Francis has often spoken of the need for humane treatment of prisoners and their need for hope. In 2015, in Philadelphia’s Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility, he greeted inmates as a pastor “but mostly as a brother.” Addressing prisoners earlier this year, he encouraged them, “Put yourselves before the crucifix, under the gaze of Jesus, before him with simplicity and sincerity.”
That is what Ives — a prisoner of grief — does, and he finally finds hope in the good news that begins with the birth of Jesus but includes the cross.
Throughout the novel, Ives remembers his son as a child and imagines him as a fully grown man, sometimes seeing him as a priest on the altar celebrating Mass. “Mr. Ives’ Christmas” ends with the father in church on Christmas Day. Still missing his son, he is meditating on the baby who came into the world to grow up and be sacrificed for the sins and salvation of all, and ultimately triumph over death.
Carl Peters is the managing editor of the Catholic Star Herald.
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