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 novel, learns the monks inherited $25,000,000 from a widow in a nearby village--an unexpected windfall that lies at the crux of the story. What are the monks going to do with the ridiculous (to Dom Gregory) amount of money that has come their way? Besides the monks having taken a vow of poverty, the inheritance makes the abbot wonder if there are dictates of the Bible that might not be achievable.