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I was hesitant to begin a Catechist Café Stream on Catholic novelists because, sad to say, I never received a strong education in American literature. In the seminary I read J.F. Powers’ Morte d’Urban, the story of a Midwesterner priest during the collapse of his religious order in the 1950’s, just prior to Vatican II. I confess, then, that this Stream of the Café is as much for me as the reader. The inspiration to enter the world of Catholic novelists came from two sources. Nick Ripratazone’s Longing for an Absent God: Faith and Doubt in Great American Fiction [2020] caught my eye and I eventually reviewed it for Amazon last year.
The other source of inspiration was, surprisingly, a short-lived weekly podcast called “Marlon and Jake Read Dead People.” The Jamaican bestselling novelist Marlon James teamed up with Jake Morrissey, editor of Riverhead/Penguin Books to discuss literature by authors who have passed away. [Their tongue-in-cheek premise: the dead cannot complain.] This was a humorous, salty, and erudite examination [R-rated] of authors and their works, going back as far as Dante’s Inferno and Milton’s Paradise Lost. What surprised me—stunned me, actually—was the interest of these two worldly academics in authors and works in a Catholic milieu. There was never a week, for example, when mention of Flannery O’Connor or Toni Morrison was overlooked. It would surprise many Catholics, I think, to learn that one of our own, namely Morrison [1931-2019], is an aggressively targeted author in states which are into the book banning business, such as Texas. Morrison’s body of work is a vivid description of the African American experience, past and present. To my way of thinking, an exploration of Morrison’s novels on racial struggle would be an ideal resource for older adolescents and adult faith formation. Morrison is the first African American woman author to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature for her body of work. [1993] There are four ways I study Catholic novelists—a format I developed for myself. [1] What is the author’s biography, or specifically, how did he or she encounter the Catholic Faith in the first place? Edwin O’Connor [1918-1968], the author of the classic The Edge of Sadness [1961]’ was a cradle Catholic from Rhode Island. [I reviewed this work for Amazon in 2014.] By contrast, Graham Greene [1904-1991] converted to Catholicism to marry his girlfriend, a devout Catholic. Caroline Gordon [1895-1981] converted in her adult years, influenced by fellow Catholic novelists Flannery O’Conner and Walker Percy. Morrison converted to Catholicism in her teen years. The second stage is examining how a Catholic novelist lived and/or experienced the faith and how that experience impacted the writing. This is not always easy, and in some cases I have had to read biographies of the authors to get a sense of that. The Unquiet Englishman [2021], for example, reveals that Graham Greene did not give up all his worldly habits of the flesh immediately after his adult baptism, but neither did he give up going to confession in times of crisis. We know a great deal about some Catholic novelists, and precious little about others. I am sure that as I sit here at the keyboard, there are dozens of graduate students working on doctoral theses involving Flannery O’Connor [1925-1964], whose small but powerful body of work—novels and short stories—is one of the most enigmatic of all Catholic twentieth century writers. O’Connor, in turn, received considerable guidance from a lesser-known Catholic novelist and professor, Caroline Gordon. The third thing I look for is the religious influence in the authors’ novels. The question of the relationship of Catholicism to the author’s product is not accidental. Graham Greene’s biographer notes that the author gave considerable thought to the question, as did Flannery O’Connor in her letters, and Gordon with her students in her years as a professor at the University of Dallas. In some novels the connection is obvious, in that the very subject is a Catholic setting. I reviewed Jame Carroll’s The Cloister [2017] a few years ago, a novel set intermittently between the medieval couple Abelard and Heloise, the Holocaust, and a burned-out Catholic priest in the 1950's. I just completed my second read of The Edge of Sadness by Edwin O’Connor. This is the story of a middle-aged priest returning to his diocese after four years in alcohol rehabilitation. He is assigned pastor to the poorest downtown church in his diocese. What he discovers about his soul and his priesthood in this broken parish is profoundly moving. And yet, the novel is not clumsy piety, far from it. Flannery O’Connor—who, as my mother was wont to say, “had a mouth on her” -- despised what we would call in the seminary “smarmy tales” of piety, religiosity without art. As a rule, outstanding Catholic novels in my experience are true to either Aristotle’s principles of drama in The Poetics, one of the most valuable books in my seminary training, and/or the existential “slice of life” style, the unvarnished account of human experience that penetrates the soul. Reading Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood [1952] the first time was a punch in the gut. The fourth focus of Catholic novels is their purpose—all the works by Catholic authors which have stood the test of time are conversion and redemption stories. It is as if the Catholic novelist can never quite run away from the essential truth of the universe, that God has reached out to save—sometimes in the most subtle of ways, and at other times in overly dramatic ones. The way that the conversion is narrated in their plotlines varies, as well as the depth of the conversion. In Graham Greene’s The Quiet American [1955] the jaded British journalist reporting on the 1954 defeat of the French in Viet Nam is changed by the traumatic experience—though we are not talking Paul on the road to Damascus here. Conversion in this work is confined to giving up a Vietnamese lover and the opium pipe, but it is something, with a promise of more to come. [As a working journalist Greene did cover the final French-Vietnamese clash in 1954, and having gotten caught in a crossfire, he desperately sought and found a Catholic priest to hear his confession.] Which brings me to an ultimate point. What I am about to say regarding Catholic authors and their novels has been true of all the great art in history. Those creating from positions of Faith, in its broadest sense, are preaching sermons that we can never hear from our pulpits. In our churches and religious education programs we teach and learn the framework—the outline if you will—of Biblical/Christian life. In art—in this case, the novel—we see the framework lived or not lived in real time. Jesus was a master at the existential expression: his parables, notably the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan, to cite a few, put flesh on the bones to the question of what I must do to be saved. I referred earlier to Aristotle’s Poetics; written several centuries before Christ. In this treatment on the rules of classical tragedy, Aristotle describes the emotional catharsis [literally, the “washing out of the emotions”] of beholding good people who make dreadful mistakes and the inevitable fates that befall them. Consider Oedipus Rex. The Catholic novelist with any meaningful grasp of the Redemptive Act cannot but reenact the fall of Adam and the Redemption by Christ in his or her narrative. The great Catholic novelists, past and present, are celebrated not just by elegant narrative and imaginative events—though these are present—but for taking us to a deeper dimension of the Christian Mystery. They belong in our journey of Faith.
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Earlier in 2021 I came across several commentaries in the Jesuit journal America featuring the persona and writings of the Irish novelist Sally Rooney. America’s description of her was glowing. In reviewing her 2021 work Beautiful World, Where Are You? Cieran Freeman entitles his piece “Sally Rooney writes for millennials in a post-Catholic world” [October 15, 2021]. In the same week James T. Keenan penned for America “Sally Rooney isn’t just the ‘Snapchat Generation’s’ Catholic novelist (but she is that).” [October 19, 2021] And over in Catholic Commonweal, Anthony Domestico, in his year-end summary of 2021 fiction, writes “Lord knows the world doesn’t need more Rooney discourse, so I won’t add to it other than to say that this novel’s [Beautiful World] vision of beauty suffusing and sustaining the world was the most Catholic thing I read in fiction all year.” [December 14, 2021]
I do not read many novels, preferring non-fiction, and I started the Catholic Novel Stream of the Catechist Café to enrich myself as much as anyone. One of my problems is rebuilding a cultural ego after my English seminary professor told me to my face that I was an unlettered philistine. After I looked up the word philistine, I was deeply wounded, and I always felt [and still do] that I am at a cultural literary disadvantage even at this late age of my life. It does not help, either, that my favorite Catholic novelist, J.F. Powers, wrote only two novels in his lifetime, twenty-five years apart. Sally Rooney, by contrast, has written three extraordinarily successful novels by the age of thirty: Conversation with Friends [2018]; Normal People [2019] and Beautiful World, Where Are You? [2021]. All three works have won awards and sold immense copies while stirring considerable conversation in book circles about the challenges of contemporary life for the Millennial and Generation Z cohorts. Father Liam Power summarizes his impression of her body of work: “She has given us an insight into the issues that are troubling and challenging for the millennials and Generation Z. I must confess that I find it difficult to appreciate how that generation really feels about the deeper spiritual challenges that life throws at us. She pulls back the curtain for us. She at least raises the question of the presence of the Divine as a response to the angst or ennui, the restlessness and the search for meaning in a troubled world.” [November 16, 2021] Dublin’s Trinity College entry in Wikipedia cites the great authors who have graduated from the institution: Oscar Wilde, Jonathan Swift, Bram Stoker, Percy French, William Trevor, Sally Rooney, Oliver Goldsmith and William Congreve. Ms. Rooney stands in vaunted company. I will look at the novels in a moment, but an introduction to the author herself is appropriate. Sally Rooney was born in 1991 in Castlebar, Ireland, and freely admits in her interviews that she remains a parochial Irish resident despite her fame and recent wealth. At Trinity College she excelled as a debater as well as a writer, and she began her first novel while a graduate student. In her self-deprecating humor in interviews, she states that given her limited world experience—home and college—she set her first two novels in those contexts, because this is the world she knew. Born a Catholic, Rooney bears no great love for the institutional Church today. In this she shares considerable company with others in her generation. But Ireland is not exactly the United States. I am reminded of the Anna Karenina Principle which states that “all happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Young Catholics or alienated Catholics in Ireland have somewhat different stresses with the institutional Church than their United States counterparts. In Ireland, given the intimacy of church and state over many generations, youthful reformers—mostly Catholic by birth--working toward economic justice and human rights have often found themselves at odds with their religious leadership as they attempt to address the recent spate of difficulties on the Emerald Isle. Ireland’s economy, which looked so promising at the turn of the century, has never recovered from the 2008 economic crash. Much of the burden of this enduring economic downturn has fallen precisely on the Millennial-Generation Z population, most of whom are well educated but frustrated by limited job opportunities. Rooney identifies herself as a Marxist, but she is no Lenin or Trotsky. Rather, she is acutely aware of the shortcomings of the capitalist system and its inability to “self-correct,” so to speak. In her interviews she has expressed surprise and discomfort at the attention and particularly the money that has come her way with the success of her books. There is a strain in her thought that her money has come too easily while many who have worked harder have far less to show for their labors. Given the author’s sympathies for a just society, one would think that the papacy of Pope Francis might get a good hearing for those of Rooney’s generation. However, the issue of abuse of minors and vulnerable populations has ravaged religion in Ireland in ways far greater than, say, the Cardinal McCarrick revelations in the U.S. in 2018. To grasp the religious dispositions of Rooney and her generations, one must understand “The Magdalene Laundries.” “Magdalene” is shorthand for the forced institutionalization of thousands of young Irish girls in religious reformatories without due process—most as victims of rape, incest, forced prostitution, illegitimate pregnancy, mental health issues, etc., a practice which began before 1900 and endured as late as 1996. Put simply, “bad girls” as labeled thus by parents, police, social workers, and church personnel, were warehoused for the purposes of providing institutional laundering services and similar production. There was no secret about these institutions. Clients ranged from clergy to the Irish Army, and eventually private contracting became a source of revenue for the Church. James Joyce makes passing references to these institutions in several of his novels. The recent discovery of unmarked graves and the reluctance of some religious authorities to release records, as well as the state’s awkward ambivalence about making a full apology for its role in the enduring saga, has prolonged a sense of anger and alienation from the Irish Catholic Church, which has seen its influence and numbers drastically diminished in the twenty-first century. [I happened to be vacationing on Valencia Island, the westernmost tip of Ireland in 2015, and was present when the Church announced the closing of the two parishes on the island: Knightstown, where I was staying, and Chapeltown down the road.] Rooney has commented on the Magdalene scandal as the “institutionalization of the unwanted” in Irish society. Her criticism of the Church has prompted comparisons to the Irish singer Sinead O’Connor, who in 1990 infamously tore up a picture of Pope John Paul II on live TV, during an appearance on “Saturday Night Live.” What was not known or widely appreciated at the time was that O’Connor herself had spent eighteen months in a Magdalene Laundry for shoplifting as a teen. Rooney was born the year after O’Connor’s TV appearance became an international controversy, and thus she grew up in an environment where Catholic credibility was crumbling in her formative years. _____________________________________________________ This brings us to the essence of Rooney’s writings. Some may argue, I suppose, that calling Rooney a “Catholic” novelist is something of a stretch. However, I am not aware that her call for the Church to disengage from its unholy marriage with Irish politics is a disqualifying factor. Nor do I think her disillusionment with structural Catholicism is particularly disturbing. She has plenty of company there, on both sides of the Atlantic. Catholic novelists are not simply novelists who happen to be Catholic. They bring their experience of Catholic life and belief into their work product, whether that experience is positive or negative. What I see in Rooney’s writing is an effort to rebuild an ethic of love, meaning, and just relationships in the tangle of a rudderless society, or more succinctly, in an Irish culture that has been orphaned in some real sense by the failure of the Church of her origin and the onrush of a secularism that is more fuss than feathers. Rooney’s novels are slices of life. There are no climactic finales like the Baptism scene in The Godfather in these novels. Rather, we are pulled into interpersonal dynamics with an ongoing captivating attraction that evokes strong reactions from the readers, or at least this was my experience of her second and third novels. Rooney’s first novel is Conversations with Friends [2017]. This is the novel I did not read, and I am attaching a review/synopsis here. My first venture with Rooney’s writing was Normal People [2018]. The plotline is quite simple, the story of a high school romance of sorts between Connell and Marianne that continues into college and early adulthood. When my wife asked me about the book halfway through my reading, I joked that it seemed like a cross between Catcher in the Rye and “The Gilmore Girls” [which we are presently binge watching.] As it turned out, I was not far wrong, for Normal People embodies the enormously complex chess game of youthful relationships from popularity to economics to sexual intimacy. [The HULU streaming service turned the book into a TV miniseries.] Normal People does not belittle religion; it simply assumes its irrelevance. Given this vacuum, Connell and Marianne must reinvent the wheel and create an ethos to their relationship that is, at times, painful to behold. The reader can deduce the construction of relational rules and the consequences of when they are broken. In high school Connell is the alpha male and the heart throb of every girl on campus. Marianne, by contrast, is a Plain Jane with no friends. It is only by pure chance that they hook up. Connell’s mother cleans Marianne’s house, and in a sequence of quick hellos they discover that rarest of adolescent mediums, actual conversation, stilted as it is. Marianne’s insecurity in this relationship is not assuaged by Connell’s fear of discovery—not by his mother, who advises him to use condoms—but by the student body, which would condemn his slumming around with an undesirable. If anyone has lost belief in the reality of mortal sin, such belief will be quickly restored when Connell commits a biggie. As the prom comes up on the calendar, he disses Marianne and invites a class starlet, to keep up appearances. As a reader, this betrayal was a blow to the gut, and I wondered if this couple would/could ever survive this breech. But in some inexplicable way they soldier on into a new world where Marianne becomes a popular and accomplished collegian as Connell finds his old high school successes are insufficient for the brave new world of higher education. This reversal of roles brings its own generational challenges, but without spoiling the plot, I found the conclusion hopeful and satisfying. Connell steps up to the plate later in the book when the stakes are much higher, and the work closes with a sense that somehow both parties have achieved a measure of moral consciousness around friendship and respect. Beautiful World, Where Are You? [2021] takes us into the world of that 25–30-year-old window of life where adults begin to fret over what they have not yet accomplished—such as arriving at a satisfying and sustaining philosophy of meaning, and successful coupling. The plot line is uncomplicated: the heroines are Alice, a successful novelist, and her best friend from school days, Eileen, who labors away as a proofreader. Some reviewers see the Alice character as an autobiographical projection of Rooney herself, for Alice has made a bundle from her success but is clearly discontent. Both women are looking for life partners though they adopt different strategies for the hunt. Rooney adopts an intriguing literary device into this novel: the narrative is interspersed with lengthy emails between Alice and Eileen. I found these interjections intriguing, as they serve as a window to how each writer interprets the events of their lives in the expanse of a lengthy email letter. Much of the email correspondence, particularly in the early going, is the philosophical exchange one used to hear in coffee houses on college campuses: the search for a philosophical system to make sense out of a scrambled twenty-first century with its economic and social injustices. As the book progresses, the correspondents begin to question the honesty and the efficaciousness of their intellectual strategizing and begin a very subtle shift toward a more existential and practical approach to their life dilemmas. Alice, in a state of exhaustion and mental health issues, rents an old rectory in the countryside for something of a sabbatical. She uses an online dating app and meets Felix, a blue-collar worker in an Amazon-like warehouse. This union of a rich novelist with a day laborer produces colorful exchanges, as one might expect. It also produces what I would call “a politicization of sex” as both partners seem to jockey around their intimacies as a barometer of their general relationship. There is a fair amount of explicit sex in this novel, but as I joked to a good friend who also read the book, “they kind of talk it to death.” Eileen, for her part, knows exactly whom she wants, her friend Simon, five years her senior whom she has known since childhood. The problem here is that Simon is in no hurry for a commitment. He is content with his work in a social reform bureaucracy. He also happens to be a devout Catholic. To the degree that after finally bedding Eileen for a long night of bliss, he announces in the morning that he is attending his parish’s 9 AM Mass. Eileen tags along and witnesses Simon’s devotion to the parts of the Mass. After Mass, she asks him if, during the penitential rite, he was seeking forgiveness for their activities of a few hours earlier. Simon assures her that he had not; a spot-on unintended commentary on the religious/sexual mores of the generations behind me. It is also intriguing that Jesus of Nazareth enjoys several cameo appearances in this work. I found hope in this. At several points as the book progresses the two email correspondents begin to question their quests for answers from nineteenth and twentieth century philosophers and haltingly begin to speculate about Jesus. Both respect that he delivered a good message for the world and seemed to resonate with their concerns for a more just society. Neither is quite ready to “buy the resurrection from the dead” thing. The author, certainly, and the novel’s two women characters, must have learned about “the resurrection thing” in their youth in Ireland. How did they lose it, or what convinced them to abandon the key tenet of Catholic faith? What I would not give to invite both Alice and Eileen to a coffee shop and ask them about their faith journeys. I am going to return to Rooney’s works for a second entry on this blog stream, this one to discuss her works from a Catholic catechetical and evangelical perspective. I should add here that Rooney’s novels are appropriate for adults who freely wish to take them up. I would not recommend them for use in parish sponsored programs, as the story lines contain “R” material and language. That said, it does seem that these novels are widely read across all generations. Again, for parents/catechists/church ministers, Rooney’s writing provides helpful insight into the challenges of cross-generational dialogue. This site is under final phases of construction. First book review will be on or near November 1. Still working on the photo linkups.
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CATHOLIC NOVELISTS and the BOOKS THEY WRITEArchives
June 2024
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