The novel of belief

“Where has the novel of belief gone?” Paul Elie asks, spotting yet another of the dubious literary trends the New York Times Book Review is notorious for. Author of The Life You Save May Be Your Own—an appealing study of four Catholic writers in postwar America—Elie is a critic who should know what he is talking about. Where Flannery O’Connor called upon Christian novelists to shout if necessary to “make belief believable,” Elie worries that more recent novelists “with Christian preoccupations have taken the opposite tack, writing fiction in which belief acts obscurely and inconclusively.”

The obvious counterexample is Marilynne Robinson, whose 2009 Terry Lectures, published together as Absence of Mind, established her as the most powerful and convincing advocate for religion’s place in the human experience. Her masterpiece, Gilead, would seem to be exactly what Elie is calling for. He dispenses with it, though, by placing a rigorous condition on the novel of belief. Gilead, he says, is “highly representative” of the American novel’s abandonment of religion: it is “set in the past, concerned with a clergyman, presenting belief as a family matter, animated by a social crisis.”

It is not immediately clear why a setting in the past should disqualify any novel from the category “of belief.” Perhaps the greatest religious novel ever written by an American—Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop—is also set in the past. So too Vardis Fisher’s Children of God, Janet Lewis’s Wife of Martin Guerre, Frederick Buechner’s Godric, Brian Moore’s Black Robe, and Ron Hansen’s Mariette in Ecstasy. There have been enough historical novels of religious faith written by Americans that Elie’s demand for contemporaneity begins to seem arbitrary.

The stipulation is convenient, though, in eliminating from consideration a profound novel of religious insight like Marly Youman’s Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, which is set during the Depression. Otherwise Youmans’s novel, among the best of 2012, satisfies all of Elie’s criteria. It draws on sacred texts and references, expecting its reader to recognize the Pauline theology of radiance or apaugasma. It dramatizes the encounter with a “supreme being recognized through faith” (in O’Connor’s words), whom Youmans describes as the “radiant other.” It shows how the encounter changes a person’s life: the main character, a wanderering exile, decides to make a home with his older sister and her sons. It exhibits the transformative religious event as an “individual one” rather than a “social matter” (those phrases are Elie’s). Moreover, it is not the story of a clergyman, but of a solitary young man who has never before felt the presence of God.

Elie also stipulates that the novel of belief be a novel of Christian belief, which leaves out of account the remarkable turn toward religion on the part of Jewish novelists like Steve Stern (The Frozen Rabbi), Zoë Heller (The Believers), and John J. Clayton (Mitzvah Man). I spotted the turn back in January in an essay for Commentary, and since then Joshua Henkin—himself descended from a famous rabbinical family—has explored the tension between Jewish secularism and the Jewish religion in The World Without You.

There is no possible stipulation, however, which can explain Elie’s neglect of Christopher R. Beha’s extraordinary What Happened to Sophie Wilder. I’ve called the novel a modern saint’s life. It has everything Elie is looking for—the living language of religious faith, a distinct and conclusive personal transformation under the influence of the Holy Spirit, the acceptance of religion’s explanatory power, a commitment to the established Church instead of the Do-It-Yourself religiosity that so many Americans seem to prefer, an ethical quandary that is directly caused by Christian faith, an emphatic and unembarrassed Roman Catholic character, and best of all, it is entirely contemporary in its setting—but its author is young and not yet famous (he will be), his publisher is a small house (not like Elie’s own Farrar, Straus & Giroux), and it does nothing whatever to confirm the trend away from novelistic belief which Elie is at such pains to illustrate. Even worse, Beha’s novel may be part of a countervailing trend toward a new Catholic fiction, which rejects the literary Catholicism of Flannery O’Connor for predecessors like Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh instead.