The Fine Delight: Postconciliar Catholic Literature

CONTINUE TO BILLING/PAYMENT

The Book of Numbers, the second novella, does much the same. Halfway through this metamorphosis, one character makes a prescient point: I will never get to. Maybe this is all there is. He replaces the catacombs of boredom with the ancient art of eternal contemplation. The Three Sunrises feels like it were written by the hand of a 5th-century monk dropped in present-day Brooklyn, and asked to document what is present, and what is absent.

In a matter of lines, the poem ends with the opposite of time's eternity: Warren would appreciate Mullany's religious sense. Something notable is happening within literature on the margins of publishing. Although its destination is unknown, its essence is ancient. At Kirkus , S. Kirk Walsh recently linked the men: Each year distances father from son.

The publication of his memoir, Townie , has resulted in literary-genealogical displacement for Dubus III: As the son rises, the memory of the father might drift away.

That would be a shame. His father's story has never been given its proper due. I was a seasonal assistant, charged with helping keep the campus pristine for visits by rich donors. I set post-and-rail fences, pitchforked steaming mulch from the back of a dump truck, and weed-whacked rocky hills. Afterward, I stripped out of the black and gold spattered suit, and kneeled under the Gatorade cooler that sat on the bed of our pickup.

I chugged the grainy, poorly mixed drink, kept cold by sloshing ice. I spread out in the grass and watched trainers lead blind students forward, golden retrievers leashed to hopeful hands. This was a place for people to gain independence by placing complete trust in others. I rode a Steiner tractor, one used to trim minor-league ballfields, and listened to Bad Company while cutting rows of light and dark. In the middle of the field, on breaks, I unstrapped my backpack from the seat and read Dubus. His father, an ex-Marine who carried a.

Sunburned and weak, his mouth is dry. He does not tell the foreman; he does not want to tell his father. But his father learns, and takes young Dubus to lunch. He buys the boy a pith helmet for the sun. But he knew he must not, and he came tenderly to me. My own father is similarly muscled from his college football days, but carries a gentler side. He was more pleased about my free lunch at work: I sat at the long cafeteria tables with my boots unlaced, joking with the other summer guys. The outside work was tough, but inside there were strawberry-printed tablecloths and shiny urns of coffee.

Reading Dubus was like entering a rougher world of work, and a place where the love between father and son could be expressed in silence. His stories document the sexual and violent collisions between men and women. Manipulation, jealousy, and revenge: They are shadows of the male archetypes chiseled by his similarly Catholic predecessor, Ernest Hemingway.

When the narrative leans toward her, Dubus trades first person for third person limited. I devoted a chapter in The Fine Delight , my book on contemporary Catholic literature, to the fiction and non-fiction of Dubus. To read him otherwise is to ignore his moral and cultural center. I quickly discovered that scholarship on Dubus is surprisingly scarce. Shorter examinations peaked in the s and '90s.

Revue Delta, a French publication, released a special critical issue on Dubus in His interviews have been collected twice; first in Leap of the Heart: Andre Dubus Talking , and more recently in Conversations with Andre Dubus , which spans interviews from to Tributes includes a foreword from his son, and an afterword by Tobias Wolff.

The appreciations extend to those who learned from reading his work. In , Edward J.

The Life of Andre Dubus. It would be incorrect to say that Dubus has exited the literary conversation, but there is one telling fact: He first met Dubus at a Vermont bar in Kennedy used those recordings as the basis for his critical study. Dubus was out of place in his literary moment. His characters are trapped in worlds timed by their immediate needs: Marriage falls into adultery, adultery into loneliness, and then the cycle repeats.

His characters still sin, but they look over their shoulders, they go to confession, they weep for their souls. His is an unapologetically sacramental vision of life in which ordinary things participate in the miraculous, the miraculous in ordinary things. She receives Communion every morning, wears a gold Sacred Heart medal on a gold chain around her neck. We leave Dubus wounded, but fuller. Ripley is divorced, owns and boards horses, and tells the reader about his daily Catholic rituals for the first half of the story.

This telling would lumber forward in the hands of lesser writers, but Dubus makes the prose confessional, and we later learn the reason Ripley needs forgiveness.

Dogma and Beauty

His grown daughter, Jennifer, spent a night drinking with friends. She struck a man while driving home, and weeps to her father in the early morning. He drives his pickup to the scene and voices simultaneous prayers: He disposes of the body, and this is what he tells God: For when she knocked on my door, then called me, she woke what had flowed dormant in my blood since her birth, so that what rose from the bed was not a stable owner or a Catholic or any other Luke Ripley I had lived with for a long time, but the father of a girl.

Dubus recognizes that sometimes we must act poorly, immorally, in order to love. I cannot think of another writer who forces me to question God. The readings were followed by dinners: That little-known writer was Andre Dubus. On July 23, , on Route 93 in Massachusetts, a selfless act left Dubus paralyzed. I asked her why she thought Dubus, who is so loved by practitioners of his craft, was not given his critical due: Someone needs to come along and 'discover' them, as Dawn Powell and Edith Pearlman were 'discovered.

Andre's books are in print. I wanted each piece to fit on the page. Something that could be read in under two minutes, that simultaneously felt complete but also opened toward more stories. What you said about a given piece feeling complete but opening up to more stories was definitely true in Oblations. That final section of the collection, by the way, shows a clear religious thread. Tell me about your history as a writer and your history with religion or belief.

Review: The Fine Delight: Postconciliar Catholic Literature

Where do they intersect for you? Belief and writing have always been united for me. What makes the difference between good religious fiction — even in a particularly Catholic sense — and devotional fiction, in the pejorative sense you mentioned? I think the laziness occurs when the writer assumes that because a theological position exists that is articulated by the Church, that he or she can default to it, or reference it, rather than doing the dramatic work.

My real lesson in this idea was taught to me by Alice Elliott Dark, who was my mentor at Rutgers and a excellent fiction writer.

When my new novella This Darksome Burn was still in the manuscript stage, Alice pointed out that I was writing from a dogmatic stance, not one of faith. Dogma is given to people, suggested, sometimes forced, but faith is the complicated, lived reality. Hopefully good Catholics are shooting for everything, but we slip up. We need faith, not dogma. The responsibility is on us. In the same way, characters in great Catholic or religious fiction need that free will.

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This is probably why I like Catholic or religious fiction that unsettles me. The concept of Christ is an amazing thing—we should be unsettled, and then moved to act. When I think of that story, images control my memory: Or maybe she started with image she was interested in tattoos, but from afar. She was a once-in-a-century writer. The rest of us probably should be careful with dogma in fiction. Does any of this resonate with this big question of what Catholic writing is for us today? It might be instructive to see how she leads into, and exits from, that quote.

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Powers, who of course was the most parish-centric fiction writer of recent memory. The sum total of what I think to be a difficult essay is, for me, that a Catholic novel requires God. Is that not the light she mentions? What makes me nervous is when Catholic reading and writing becomes an insular system, as if studying non-Catholics writers or thinkers will cause one to break out in hives. To offer a Catholic possibility, so that people consider that it is a life worth living?

I think that as we move forward as Catholic writers and Catholic critics, we need to become fully part of the secular literary world without compromising our beliefs. The spiritual test is to write powerful fiction from a Catholic worldview that passes the litmus test of good fiction—so that the audience becomes wider, and that readers do not feel as if they can guess the ending from the first word. In Catholic fiction, hope exists, but hope does not always win; in Catholic fiction, a sacramental vision exists, but it might not save troubled characters.

Maybe this points to how human good Catholic storytelling is: It embodies, in the particular language of free will and grace, salvation and perdition, hiddenness and revelation, some principal elements of good storytelling in general. The greatest story ever told, the Passion narrative, is so dramatic it brings people to tears.

That Passion narrative is violent, troubling, sad, splintered, and wild—but there is absolute hope. The end of The Power and the Glory , of Mariette in Ecstasy , those conclusions hit in the gut, and give the possibility of real hope and transcendence, whether it be in this world or the next. In this way, as you mention, the most un-Catholic thing to do would be to only hold the literary door open for Catholics, or Christians. The best stories will draw people in—and, I think, the best of Catholic faith and practice, when properly and accurately represented, rings true as human and inspiring.

What do you think is behind this pessimism? Are you equally as wary, or are you more hopeful about where Catholic writing is going? Sweeping generalizations about literature make for good ledes, but rarely survive critical examination. The new becomes the old, which was the ultimate new, in Christ. Amazing—and inspiring, and, for me, evidence that people are hungry for the Catholic worldview in all of its permutations, and I happen to think that there are many Catholic writers out there willing to represent those struggles with imaginative fiction.

In the spirit of Francis, critics should not be lining up Catholic writers for doctrinal judgment. Do we really want to drop him from the list? Or is it better to see him as he was—imperfect, a sinner, but Catholic? My reason for writing The Fine Delight was to offer evidence that Catholic literature is not only thriving in the present, but that its alleged splintering is in fact representative of post Vatican II cultural shifts and reconsiderations. The conversation might start with Catholic fiction, but I think we want to bring poetry and non-fiction into the mix.

Catholic literature is alive, and more than well. Just to fill our readers in, both agree that the place for Catholic writing in the public eye has greatly receded in the last half-century. Is this more or less how you read them, Nick? And if so, is there a remedy? It is simply a must-read: But it also pissed me off. Here is where that happened:.

They may still have a modicum of local color amid their crumbling infrastructure, but they are mostly places from which upwardly mobile people want to escape. Economically depressed, they offer few rewarding jobs. They no longer command much social or cultural power. Think Newark, New Jersey. A punching bag for lazily generalists: And how are we being Catholic by reducing their populations to that?

You know, Gioia is an incredible writer, a force of literary culture. Gioia has, in one swoop, reduced the current Catholic literary presence to a footnote. He has ignored the great Catholic writing in small presses and literary magazines, not to mention the mainstream work. His sum definition of what makes one a Catholic writer—let alone a great one—is reductive and narrow.