{"id":94,"date":"2007-08-07T14:02:30","date_gmt":"2007-08-07T14:02:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2007\/08\/a-religious-fiction.html"},"modified":"2007-08-07T14:02:30","modified_gmt":"2007-08-07T14:02:30","slug":"a-religious-fiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/08\/a-religious-fiction.html","title":{"rendered":"A religious fiction"},"content":{"rendered":"

As magazine-followers know, a couple of years ago, the Atlantic Monthly<\/em> inexplicably dumped its age-old custom of including a short story in each issue for doing instead, a yearly fiction issue. The reasoning still escapes me.
\nAnyway, the point of interest this year is that the 2007 fiction issue<\/a>\u00a0is heavily weighted with stories with religious themes and settings, most of them unfortunately unsuccessful.
\nThe first story in Updike – The Apparition<\/em><\/a>\u00a0 – which follows an older couple on a tour of India. As you would expect from Updike, the descriptions of the landscape, the temples and the tourists are specific, lush and evocative. The gist of the tale is involves the impact of a younger female tour member on the older man. Interesting, but mostly atmosphere, and honestly, you can’t help, as you read, but think, “Well, yes, Updike must have gone on a tour of India, and he went to these places, and maybe he even knew this stunning Hispanic trophy wife…”
\n
\nTobias Wolff has a tale called Bible<\/a>, in which a Catholic school teacher is confronted by an irate parent. The twist is that the Catholic school teacher isn’t very spiritual and the irate parent is Muslim, angry that his son (who truly is a pill) has been disciplined for cheating. I found the whole set-up (she is basically abducted by the guy in a parking lot after she’s been out with friends) artificial, her responses to him completely unrealistic and the whole thing to be more of a construct built on interesting notions rather than on imagined doings of real people.
\nFinally (well, the last one I read), Specific Gravity by Marjorie Kemper<\/a>\u00a0attempts to venture into J.F. Powers <\/a>territory. The story is about a young middle-aged parish priest who has run himself into debt through his excessive handouts to folks in his life who are in need. He falls into a solution by agreeing to write speeches and such for a repulsive right-wing pro-life activist and television personality.\u00a0 Selling his soul, you know. It’s just not a good story, for, first of all, there is no understanding or knowingess about priests, how they live, how they talk to each other or how they think. (Not that these are monolithic things, but, if you read Powers, you know what I’m talking about.). The talk-show guy is a caricature, and there is no exploration of the tension here.\u00a0 Why is this business dirty work to this priest? How does what he does and how he thinks connect to him, well, being a priest? A Catholic? What’s the bigger story about human beings, how they come to be how they are? No – it’s another artificial construct.\u00a0 Generic priest jumps into the\u00a0muck with the Bad Right Winger and frets a little, perhaps standing in for the rest of us who dirty our hands every single time we turn on Fox News. Or something.
\nPriests can be powerful fictional characters, but only when used carefully. They are so because a priest is inherently symbolic – he symbolizes, primarily, total comittment to a cause, to the possibility of living an ideal.\u00a0 The best priest characters stand in tension in the midst of this commitment – the whisky priest of The Power and the Glory<\/em>, Morte d’Urban<\/em>, Diary of a Country Priest, <\/em>the priest in the wonderful Tim Gautreaux story, Good for the Soul,<\/em>\u00a0 found, among other places, in this excellent recent collection of American Catholic short fiction. <\/a>Those priests may be as fallen as can be possible, but it not interesting unless the ideals of which they’ve fallen short are understood, and in some sense, the character is written so that we all, priest or lay, can see ourselves in the struggle to live our commitments, fall short, and find redemption.
\nEven in Powers’ story, as prosaic as they may seem to be on the surface, as clergy squabble over the most mundane and ungodly matters, there is a sense of this, mostly because it is understood – the context of the time, the expectations of priests, provides the context for understanding his clerical characters, and seeing, not just an expert portrayal, but ourselves and our own smallness, even as our greater possibilities shine tentatively around the rectory corner.
\nBut in this story, there is no such context, either provided or understood. The priest is just a guy who was too nice to some people, then has to do this thing that is distasteful to him to get out of the hole. The irony at the heart – that he sees working for a prolifer as distasteful – isn’t even treated as ironic, so thin is the context, so drained is the priest character of any real identity as a priest – even a liberal priest, of which there are many, who found himself in that position would have more going on in his head about it than this fellow does. Meh.
\nThere’s another story about LDS missionaries which I’ve not read, but I will..when I find the magazine again….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As magazine-followers know, a couple of years ago, the Atlantic Monthly inexplicably dumped its age-old custom of including a short story in each issue for doing instead, a yearly fiction issue. The reasoning still escapes me. 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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\/94","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=94"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}