A Succession of Days

A Succession of Days opens and closes in St. Marks Abbey, a monastery where a community of Trappist monks is nearing the 75th Anniversary of its founding in upstate New York. The celebration is awkward because Dom Gregory Eckert, the abbot and protagonist of the story, learns the community inherited $25,000,000 from a widow in a nearby village-an unexpected windfall that lies at the crux of the novel. What are the monks going to do with the ridiculous (to the abbot) amount of money that has come their way? Besides the monks having taken a vow of poverty, the inheritance makes Dom Gregory wonder if there are dictates of the Bible that might not be achievable.