“Every Day Is Like Sunday: Rediscovering Wilfrid Sheed’s ‘The Hack'”

Me at AmCon:

Don’t call Wilfrid Sheed’s 1963 The Hack a forgotten Catholic classic. I don’t want it to be dismissed so easily.

Sheed was the scion of Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward, the Catholic publishers and apologists; he knew that pre-Vatican II world of professional religion from the inside. The Hack is a satirical tragedy about Bert Flax, a man who supports his wife and five children by writing pabulum for the lower levels of the Catholic press: angels with cotton-candy wings, Irish-surnamed Fathers playing improving outdoor games with hearty children, sub-Chestertonian cutesy polemics. Over the course of a particularly harrowing Advent (in a nice touch, it isn’t ever called Advent but always Christmas) Bert slowly realizes that his work–and perhaps his faith–have always been childish, sickly-sweet, and unreal.

The Hack comes from a specific immediately pre-Vatican II subculture, but its emotional and spiritual concerns feel totally at home in our mommy-blogging, #soblessed performance culture. This is a book about meta-emotions: what we feel about what we feel. It’s a book about knowing yourself utterly inadequate to the mystery of God, but not knowing how to express that without tinsel and puff; and about the duty we feel to manufacture and display the correct emotions. You have to stay strong for the children! You’re an inspiration.… You should be grateful, you should be present in the moment, you need to really feel it.

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