An Infinity of Little Hours: Five Young Men and Their Trial of Faith in the Western World's Most Austere Monastic Order.

By Nancy Klein Maguire. Public Affairs, 272 pp., $13.95 paperback.

IN OUR NOISY and technologically correct secular society, mystery and silence are as absent as they are secretly craved. Two of the most austere Western monastic orders to distill this countercultural craving are the Carthusians and Trappists. They share the three vows of obedience, stability of place and conversion of life. The Carthusians are the focus of Nancy Maguire's book. I myself belong to the Trappist tradition.
Maguire's accomplishment in description is all the more impressive because she is a woman plumbing a severely masculine domain. She brings to this work not theological training but scholarly expertise in theater (she has been a scholar-in-residence at the Folger Shakespeare Library since 1983). Through her marriage to an ex-Carthusian, she was able to locate five men who from 1960 to 1965 experienced the rigorous formation in the virtually closed Carthusian world of the Parkminster Charterhouse in West Sussex, England. Maguire teases us throughout to guess which of the five men is the one who takes the lifelong vows of solemn profession. I guessed wrong.

Her research included 6,000 pages of e-mail communication, a considerable number of faxes, and extensive use of letters, pictures, books, journals and telephone conversations, culminating in a face-to-face reunion of the five, who had retired and were in their 70s.