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<\/a>Writing a response to a published essay can be seen as public service, a way of contributing to the larger cultural conversation. On the other hand, writing several responses within a relatively short period of time can easily come across as carping or sour grapes.<\/p>\nThat consideration is very much at the forefront of my mind as I set out here to extend a running dialogue I\u2019ve been having with Paul Elie, the author of The Life You Save May Be Your Own<\/em>, a braided biography of four American Catholic authors: Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Flannery O\u2019Connor, and Walker Percy.<\/p>\n A year ago, Elie published an essay in the New York Times<\/em>, \u201cHas Fiction Lost Its Faith<\/a>?\u201d to which I replied<\/a> in the Wall Street Journal<\/em>. In an interview<\/a> just published at Dappled Things<\/em>, Elie was asked to respond to my WSJ piece. I\u2019ve engaged in a similar exchange with Dana Gioia, whose \u201cThe Catholic Writer Today<\/a>\u201d appeared recently in First Things<\/em>, with my response, \u201cCultural Anorexia<\/a>,\u201d following on their website.<\/p>\n Because Elie and Gioia are not only friends of mine but writers I admire\u2014and because the debate has been eminently civil so far\u2014I\u2019m hoping to avoid the charge of carping if I thwack the tennis ball over the net just one more time.<\/p>\n The short version of my responses to these gentlemen is that their allegation of the decline and fall of literature informed by faith is, in essence, a \u201cnarrative of decline\u201d not borne out by the facts. But in this blog post and the one that follows, I want to flesh out my argument a bit more.<\/p>\n Judging from his interview at Dappled Things<\/em>, Elie is quietly backing away from the untenable generalization that began his Times<\/em> piece: \u201cChristian belief figures into literary fiction in our place and time\u2026as something between a dead language and a hangover. Forgive me if I exaggerate. But if any patch of our culture can be said to be post-Christian, it is literature.\u201d<\/p>\n That\u2019s not an exaggeration; it\u2019s simply untrue. But it is a myth to which many people, undoubtedly including the editors of the Times<\/em>, still tenaciously cling.<\/p>\n Elie\u2019s more modest current argument is that what we lack today is fiction set in the present moment that is centrally about the struggle with belief.<\/p>\n This claim enables him to dismiss a number of highly-lauded novels, including Marilynne Robinson\u2019s Gilead<\/em>, which is set in the middle of the twentieth century.<\/p>\n When I mentioned Elie\u2019s argument to a friend, he replied: \u201cThat\u2019s like saying George Eliot\u2019s Middlemarch<\/em> wasn\u2019t about contemporary issues because she set it forty years in the past.\u201d<\/p>\n Many of the greatest novels ask a fundamental question: \u201cHow did we inherit the world we live in, and how might we change it for the better?\u201d By enacting that \u201chistorical\u201d drama, Middlemarch<\/em> investigates the first awakenings of social reform and personal transformation.<\/p>\n A great deal of fiction is set in the past, for this and other good reasons.<\/p>\n Ironically, many of the religious authors that Elie cites with approval in his New York Times<\/em> piece wrote books set in the past. Consider Brideshead Revisited<\/em>, People\u2019s Exhibit #1, a novel often criticized for nostalgia for the era it depicts. Graham Greene\u2019s classic The Power and the Glory<\/em> was set neither in England nor in the present (the Mexican persecution he wrote about had taken place more than a dozen years before). And Tolkien? He created a world before time.<\/p>\n In the Dappled Things<\/em> interview, Elie adds, apropos of his strictures about contemporary settings: \u201cSo that leaves out Alice McDermott, who was Greg\u2019s counterexample in his\u00a0Wall Street Journal<\/em>\u00a0article. I went to her book party a month ago\u2014I love Alice. I\u2019ve read all her works, we swap books as Christmas presents, but she writes about the 50s and 60s.\u201d<\/p>\n Aside from the unfortunate name-dropping, the disappointing thing about this claim is that it completely misreads a book like McDermott\u2019s Charming Billy<\/em>.<\/p>\n Yes, the book is substantially set among Irish Catholics from Queens, New York in the 50s and 60s, but it is narrated<\/em> in the present. Though most of the story is immersively set in the earlier time period, there are half a dozen places where McDermott briefly allows the narrator a chance to identify herself and hint at her perspective on the story she\u2019s telling.<\/p>\n The narrator in Charming Billy<\/em> is a woman living in Seattle (a place light-years from Queens, culturally as well as geographically) who describes herself at one point as \u201capostate,\u201d one who has given up debating with her pious father all that she had rejected about church teachings.<\/p>\n But in the end the story she is compelled to tell is that of an unlikely saint, an alcoholic whose heart had been broken as a young man but who continued to live by faith\u2014a man not only charming but deeply charitable.<\/p>\n In the telling of the story we see the narrator change from anger at the church to a sense of her own generation\u2019s inadequacies (\u201cSelf-sacrifice having been recognized as a delusion by then, not a virtue. Self-consciousness more the vogue\u201d) to a tentative but sincere allegiance to \u201cmy father\u2019s faith and Billy\u2019s and some part of my own\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n Elie misses the fact that any novel preoccupied with the struggle of belief will entail protagonists questioning how an earlier generation came to\u2014and maintained\u2014their faith. Charming Billy<\/em> cannot be reduced to the study of a bygone era any more than Middlemarch<\/em> can.<\/p>\n A classic question asked by someone wrestling with belief is: \u201cWhy does it seem harder for me to believe than for earlier generations?\u201d In a sense, it\u2019s not only a generational question but a familial question, a searching gaze into the \u201cfaith of our fathers\u201d and mothers.<\/p>\n Even Robinson\u2019s Gilead<\/em>, seemingly set in a tranquil mid-century Midwest, pits the settled faith of John Ames against the restless modernity of Jack Boughton. Both are unsettled in the process, making that book, to my mind, yet another contemporary novel of belief.<\/p>\n To be continued tomorrow.<\/em><\/p>\n Gregory Wolfe<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0is the founder and editor of\u00a0Image<\/em>.<\/p>\n