{"id":6035,"date":"2006-09-07T17:36:24","date_gmt":"2006-09-07T17:36:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/09\/wheat-that-springeth-green.html"},"modified":"2006-09-07T17:36:24","modified_gmt":"2006-09-07T17:36:24","slug":"wheat-that-springeth-green","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/09\/wheat-that-springeth-green.html","title":{"rendered":"Wheat that Springeth Green"},"content":{"rendered":"

At First Things. Jody Bottum offers a lovely appreciation of J.F. Powers:<\/a><\/p>\n

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The question is why these books have faded away. Oh, they ought to be in print somewhere, and the literary critics Peter Parker and Frank Kermode were blind when they left Powers entirely out of their otherwise encyclopedic 1996 Reader\u2019s Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers<\/em>. But it\u2019s not some residual anti-Catholic bias that has caused the gradual forgetting of the man. The finest Catholic writer of the twentieth century was also, in some very important way, a failure. Who now reads J.F. Powers?<\/p>\n

John Updike, in the anthology he edited of The Best American Short Stories of the Century<\/span><\/u><\/a>, rightly included Powers\u2019 \u201cThe Presence of Grace.\u201d Another, less-often-reprinted story by Powers, \u201cLions, Harts, Leaping Does,\u201d can stand beside anything by Flannery O\u2019Connor. And for the rest, a few others still have real and important life: \u201cZeal,\u201d for instance, about a worldly bishop trapped into joining a vulgar priest escorting a Catholic tourist group to Rome, together with \u201cPrince of Darkness\u201d and \u201cDefection of a Favorite,\u201d two of Powers\u2019 stories about a middle-aged assistant pastor named Fr. Burner. But if we were able to figure out why a writer with Powers\u2019 enormous talents and sensitivity could produce only such a small body of now mostly faded work, we might have some insight into the problems, and the promises, of Catholic fiction at the end of the twentieth century.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Powers is in print – the two novels and a short story collection from the New York Review of Books publishing arm.<\/a> They don’t sell very well, and we at Loyola Classics were convinced we could sell more in any edition we might publish, but alas, the contract for the rights with the NYRB was tight for the foreseeable future…<\/p>\n

But they are <\/em>there, and should be on your list. (I have to admit that his last novel, Wheat that Springeth Green, <\/em>didn’t strike my fancy much. It was a little crass, not as subtle as the other works.). The gift of telling us about a world by showing us a tiny slice of that world – a conversation or two, a few gestures – is on display in Powers’ fiction, and he gets it just right, just about every time.<\/p>\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At First Things. Jody Bottum offers a lovely appreciation of J.F. Powers: The question is why these books have faded away. Oh, they ought to be in print somewhere, and the literary critics Peter Parker and Frank Kermode were blind when they left Powers entirely out of their otherwise encyclopedic 1996 Reader\u2019s Guide to Twentieth-Century…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6035","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nWheat that Springeth Green - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/09\/wheat-that-springeth-green.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Wheat that Springeth Green - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"At First Things. Jody Bottum offers a lovely appreciation of J.F. Powers: The question is why these books have faded away. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6035","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6035"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6035\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}