Summer's Coming: Relax with Catholic Novels

When I gathered my wood and bucket of nails to construct the Catechist Café in 2014, it was my hope and intention to have one corner preserved for Catholic novels and the people who write them. People still read novels, and while Kindle & Company has advanced the availability and the technology of reading, the print trade continues to thrive, if the daily email promotions I receive are any indications the print trade isn’t doing too poorly, either. To me, a printed book is a sacramental. It always amazes me how many people around the pool[s] of cruise ships are reading while they consume the drinks with tiny umbrellas, and mostly they are reading novels. It is worth noting, though, that the Celebrity Cruise Line ships have good libraries, and I have always been tempted to plant a hardcover copy of What Happened at Vatican II? in the stacks on the Celebrity Equinox. We evangelize even on the high seas.
 
But to our purposes for today, I’ll be frank that I know truly little about classic and contemporary poetry, short stories, and plays, period. My English professor in college, having read a few of my essays, told me I wrote like a small-town sports columnist, which in college is what I read. So, it would be patently dishonest to put a full Catholic “English Literature” title on the contents page of the Café. Novels, on the other hand, are often a pleasure to me and I wish I had more time to read them. I was unaware of the genre of “Catholic novel,” however, until my mid-forties when I crossed paths with the Catholic writer Amy Welborn. Amy was a teacher and religious educator who has written many Catholic commentaries over the years for youth and adults; see her Amazon page for an excellent sampling of her work, and she has an energetic blog site.
 
Amy introduced me [and her students] to the State of Georgia’s Flannery O’Connor [1925-1964], considered one of the most remarkable Catholic authors of the twentieth century. The Encyclopedia Britannica describes O’Connor’s writing in this fashion: “O’Connor’s corpus is notable for the seeming incongruity of a devout Roman Catholic [i.e., the author] whose darkly comic works commonly feature startling acts of violence and unsympathetic, often depraved, characters. She explained the prevalence of brutality in her stories by noting that violence “is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace.”
 
O’Connor certainly did not canonize violence and depravity in her novels, but she did not run away from it, either. Her Catholic spirituality, which embraced the Crucified Jesus and the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and her own lifelong painful illness that killed her before age forty, made her no stranger to the divine need for hope in suffering, and the more pathetic the situation, the greater witness to the power of God’s deliverance. The total opposite of O’Connor’s work would be Mario Puzo’s novel, The Godfather. I guess we’ve all seen the movie version. It too had violence and agony—and even a sacrament at the climax—but was anybody in that tale closer to salvation, of any sort, at the end?
 
WHAT MAKES A NOVEL CATHOLIC?
 
If you Google that question, you will become bogged down in a sea of opinions, lists of authors, schools of writing, etc. The offerings are not all wrong, simply hard to narrow down. The partner question is: how do you define a “Catholic novelist?” Can a non-Catholic write a “Catholic novel?” And does the Catholic Church ever pass judgment on a novel’s identity, character, or a particular book that author has written??
 
Again, I can only work from my personal history with texts from the United States, England, and Ireland in terms of the novel, from what I was force fed in school to works that I cherish and keep on my bookshelf to this day. [I will cite a few of those below.] First, I can safely say that there is no official office of the Vatican or of the United States Conference of Bishops that rates public books in your village library. There is no “Legion of Decency” for novels as there was for years for movies in theaters. True, the Church can issue a monitum or warning about a theological text which contradicts Church teaching, but that is a genre outside of this conversation. Bottom line: where novels are concerned, the Catholic is at the mercy of his or her judgment on what to read for recreation and/or artistic enrichment. Pornographic writing purely for its own sake [or on other mediums] is forbidden by the Catechism of the Catholic Church [para. 2354].
 
A “Catholic Novel” in my own words is a work whose plot unfolds into a greater good. This “greater good” need not be explicitly Catholic or even institutionally religious, but a good that most persons of conscience could affirm. Some examples: Edwin O’Connor’s The Edge of Sadness [1961] about a middle-aged alcoholic priest who rediscovers himself and his call; Caroline Gordon’s The Malefactors [1956], in which a rich but highly dysfunctional and morally disjointed family finds its direction at a Catholic farm-retreat center; J.F. Powers’ Morte d’Urban [1961] which portrays a fictional Catholic religious order in the Midwest gradually dying of the loss of its soul; and Graham Greene’s The Quiet American [1955] where a war-weary British correspondent walks away from the fall of the French in Viet Nam and the arrival of the U.S. CIA in Saigon. [See my Amazon Review.]
 
I am betraying my age here by citing books with a little mileage on them. In part, this is because I read most of them in my relative youth before I came into a fuller measure of maturity and life experience. Coming back to them at midlife and beyond was an amazing reawakening. As a laicized priest today, I have a much better understanding of the stories of priests who wrestled with their vocations, as well as of the people who seek pastoral shepherding. Many Catholic novels pivot around couples—married or otherwise. Alice McDermott, a prolific Catholic novelist, produced After This [2007], about a Catholic couple raising four children in the tempestuous 1960’s and 1970’s; it was a true parable/metaphor of struggling home life and parochial stress that is truer today than the day it was written. [See my Amazon Review.]  
 
It became clear to me that I needed a reintroduction to today’s Catholic novelists, and in 2021 I came across America Magazine’s review of Nick Ripatrazone’s Longing for an Absent God: Faith and Doubt in Great American Fiction. [2020, see my Amazon Review.] The author lays out a thesis I can stoutly agree with: the novel of excellence takes us to the heights and depths of the human quest for God even when God is not always recognized as the end of the hunt. Add to that the idea of the novelist as prophet, disconcerting us in our complacency. Ripatrazone does not mention this book in his work, but I immediately thought of a novel from my youth that drew wholesale criticism as a scurrilous influence, namely Peyton Place [1956]. In reading it for the first time during the Covid shutdown, I felt the book was written fifty years too early. For today we have more outrage and shame over matters of sexual abuse and economic bondage, and this work would have highlighted our growing sense of “we should have known years ago.”
 
I did not realize that the famed modern novelist Toni Morrison was Catholic, and her description of a family’s anguish in her Beloved [1987] I reviewed two years ago in an earlier post here. As we come to appreciate the inculturation of America, Ripatrazone reminds us not to overlook Minnesota’s Catholic author Louise Erdrich; her bookstore, Birchbark Books in Minneapolis, is something of a cultural hangout where Louise will autograph your purchases. There is, I understand, an actual confessional in the store. Erdrich’s mother was Chippewa and part of her store is devoted to Native American art and atmosphere. I must admit that on my top ten best novels list, i.e., what I have read in my lifetime, her The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse is on that list. My jaw still drops every time I replay the plot in my mind. I wouldn’t give the plot away—and some might [might?!] find the entire narrative sacrilegious. But set, for the most part, around a poor Native American Catholic reservation parish in North Dakota, Last Report is a tour de force of Catholic imagination [adult imagination, to be sure]. I did recommend this work to my wife’s social reading circle a few years ago. They have never asked me for another recommendation.
 
HOW TO ACCESS CATHOLIC NOVELS
 
Nick Ripatrazone’s book is a good place to get an overview of recent and present-day Catholic novelists with a thoughtful treatment of the novel in Catholic life and thought. The Flannery O’Connors and the J.F. Powers can get away with frank assessments of life and faith that you would never hear from the pulpit or in the Catholic classroom, and yet we have never explored integrating our Catholic fiction writers into adult faith formation in some way, shape or form.
 
An excellent and eminently readable sourcebook which just came off the press is Reading Culture Through Catholic Eyes: 50 Writers, Thinkers, and Firebrands Who Challenge and Change Us [2024] by James Keane, book review editor of America Magazine. The advantage of this work is its inclusion of nonfiction Catholic authors of note as well as non-Catholic writers who enrich Catholic thought with their pens.
 
If you live near a Catholic college—particularly if you are a donor, LOL—put a little pressure on the school’s English Department to expand its considerable bank of knowledge beyond the ivy-covered walls. I will continue to post Catholic fiction reviews several times annually, for my own sake as well as yours.