John Jeremiah Sullivan inhabits Paul Lakeland’s “space between.” One of the joys of Verdicts is that I get book recommendations and I get help thinking through the books I’ve read. Because of the recommendation of Anthony Domestico (and James Woods) I recently read Pulphead, Sullivan’s collection of essays. And because of Lakeland’s recent post, I’ve been able to frame why I enjoyed Pulphead so much. Although only two of Sullivan’s fourteen essays explicitly deal with issues of religious faith and doubt, all fourteen deal with faith and doubt about what we can know and what, to quote from the title of one essay, is “really real.”

Sullivan’s essays explore what is “really real” in politics and culture, whether those reflections be essays on post-Katrina New Orleans or the Southern writer Andrew Lyte or making sure blues recordings are saved or cave drawings in Tennessee or Bunny Wailer, the last surviving member of Bob Marley’s reggae group. His essay, “Upon this Rock,” which opens the collection and is the result of his visit to a Christian rock festival, and his essay “Feet in Smoke,” which is about his brother’s electrocution, coma, and revival, are superb. They show an intellect struggling with questions of meaning and community, life and death, faith and doubt. Sullivan is not a Christian, but he has a deep respect for genuine belief. Writing about the six young men he befriends at the rock festival, he notes, “it may be the truest thing I will have written here: they were crazy, and they loved God – and I thought about the unimpeachable dignity of that, which I was never capable of. Knowing it isn’t true doesn’t mean you would be strong enough to believe if it were” (40-1). Read the rest of this entry »

Since there appears to be a lot of interest on this blog, both from posters and from commenters, in detective fiction (see here, here, and here for starters); and since I’m just about to start reading Faithful Place, Tana French’s third novel about the Dublin Murder Squad; and since I continue in my quest to get more people to read the poems of W. H. Auden, I figured I would share Auden’s 1936 “Detective Story,” in which the poet imagines a hunt for the murderer of “our happiness.”

Auden loved detective fiction. Besides “Detective Story,” several other poems, including his long, baroque work The Age of Anxiety, engage with the genre and its conventions. You can find Auden’s most developed thoughts on the topic in his wonderfully titled essay “The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on the Detective Story, by an Addict.” In it, Auden admits to a lack of self-control when faced with a good potboiler—“if I have any work to do, I must be careful not to get hold of a detective story for, once I begin one, I cannot work or sleep till I have finished it”—and speculates that the “interest in the detective story is the dialectic of innocence and guilt.” This dialectic, he thinks, appeals to a specifically religious kind of imagination: “I suspect that the typical reader of detective stories is, like myself, a person who suffered from a sense of sin.” (Maybe this explains why G. K. Chesteron and Dorothy Sayers were such great writers of detective stories.) Read the rest of this entry »

I just finished reading  David Plante’s old (1991) novel, The Accident, having also delved a few days ago into Jens Peter Jacobsen’s older (1880) Danish novel, Niels Lyhne. Plante’s short book takes place in Leuven in the days when it was still known as Louvain. Its central character is an American undergraduate spending a year abroad, uncomfortable in the Catholic atmosphere of the city because he is, he says, an atheist. In much the way, sincere and yet posturing, that many a young person tried it on in those days. Today it’s not so clear that anyone cares enough to be so clear about it. And of course the unnamed young man isn’t really clear at all. Which is where the story gets interesting. In contrast to the conventionally religious Tom, he doesn’t go to mass but he seems occasionally to pray. And his biggest argument with Tom is about the conventionality of belief. A real God, he suggests, would be much stronger. Shades of Elie Wiesel’s famous comment in Night that “there rose in my heart a prayer to that God in whom I no longer believed.”  And the young Niels in Jacobsen’s novel seems to be an atheist malgré lui, or at least one who would find the blanket rejection of religion that is the calling card of the new atheism to be simply boring.

When you put these two together with more accessible works like Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and Rilke’s charming Stories of God, it seems clear that fiction about belief and unbelief is interesting when it focuses on the space between the two. I suppose this is because good fiction thrives on ambiguity. There’s nothing so dull as a believer without doubts or an atheist without—dare I say it—a soul. Imperfection makes a person interesting. That’s why I always used to sit among the smokers in the bad old days when airlines allowed  it (and gave you free food); you were simply more likely to meet someone worth talking to. The whisky priest or the lieutenant or Scobie would never show up in the no-smoking section. Read the rest of this entry »

Just can’t get enough of cutthroat politics? Find yourself on YouTube, replaying the meaner jabs from the Republican primary debates? You might want to add the 1990s BBC miniseries House of Cards to your Netflix queue. Based on a novel by a onetime Chief of Staff to Britain’s Conservative Party, House of Cardstracks the legal and illegal intrigues of Francis Urquhart, a Machiavellian party operative who wrangles his way up the rungs of power in post-Thatcher Great Britain. Urquhart (Ian Richardson) uses the press and the ambitions and paranoia of statesmen to his own advantage, but he hides his ruthlessness beneath a polite and even grandfatherly exterior. “You might very well think that: I couldn’t possibly comment,” he primly responds, whenever he has cunningly planted an idea in the mind of a reporter or colleague.

Manipulating journalists, tangling with the monarchy, destroying lives and careers with relish,  Urquhart is a charming and seductive antihero, and his schemes and deceptions make for an engrossing soap opera. But it’s the theatrical trappings that really distinguish House of Cards and its sequels, To Play the King and The Final Cut. The scheming Urquhart is a Shakespearean figure—part Richard III, part Iago and a very large part Macbeth, and the scriptwriters highlight these resonances with Shakespearean quotes and allusions. The spirit of Macbeth, in particular, haunts the story: Egged on by his equally ambitious and amoral wife (Diane Fletcher), Urquhart eventually racks up so many misdeeds that he might easily say, with Shakespeare’s thane-turned-king, “I am in blood/Stepped in so far that should I wade no more,/Returning were as tedious as go o’er.”

Even more striking are the impishly self-satisfied remarks that Urquhart periodically delivers straight to us, the audience: In the middle of a scene, he will turn his head, look straight into the camera and share an unnervingly honest confession or observation, while the folks around him carry on, oblivious. These break-the-fourth-wall moments are like miniature Shakespearean monologues, and they underscore an all-too-familiar truth: that politics is, to a large extent, theatrics.

It will be interesting to see whether a forthcoming remake of House of Cardsmanages to be as interesting and sly: Director David Fincher (Fight Club, the Hollywood adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, etc.) is an executive producer of the forthcoming remake, which will be a Netflix original series and will star Kevin Spacey.

In his 1941 poem “At the Grave of Henry James,” W. H. Auden expressed his hope that writers would be judged not by their lives, but by their works:

All will be judged. Master of nuance and scruple,

Pray for me and for all writers living or dead;

Because there are many whose works

Are in better taste than their lives; because there is no end

To the vanity of our calling: make intercession

For the treason of all clerks.

In a recent review in Harper’s (subscription required), Giles Harvey addresses just this question—how to understand the writer’s work in relation to the writer’s life—by considering the case of Philip Larkin. Larkin is probably the most celebrated British poet of the post-World War II era; as his posthumously published letters have made clear, he’s also probably the nastiest. His letters are sprinkled with casual (and not so casual) misogyny, with racial insensitivity, with snobbery, with self-pity, with a grouchiness that borders on the pathological. Harvey quotes several particularly nasty bits, but the worst—worst because the simplest and most symptomatic—is this throwaway: “all women are stupid beings.” And there’s lots more where that came from. (Which is a shame for all the obvious reasons, but also because, if you can ignore the foul bits—which of course you can’t—Larkin’s letters are a remarkable read.) Read the rest of this entry »

It’s official: America has Downton Abbey fever. You can’t open a newspaper or visit a culture/books website without reading about how Downton Abbey is revitalizing PBS, or affecting the publishing industry, or reflecting poorly on our “class-stratified” military. This interest is all for the good. I agree with Emily Nussbaum, who writes in the New Yorker that Downton Abbey “is situated precisely on the Venn diagram where ‘prestige’ meets ‘guilty pleasure’: it’s as much cake as it is bread.” (Though I have to disagree with Nussbaum’s adoration of Lady Edith, who not only is the show’s weakest link, but is generally acknowledged to be so by characters within the show itself.)

I want to talk briefly about a different British TV show, however, one that has gotten some publicity in the U. S. but hasn’t captured the popular imagination in the way that Downton Abbey has. If Downton Abbey allows us to figuratively travel to a different time, then the show I’m talking about features literal time travel; if the posh characters of Downton Abbey seem alien to us nowadays, then the show I’m talking about has actual aliens from faraway planets; if Downton Abbey straddles the line between high and low culture, then the show I’m talking about obliterates this line altogether, showing that the most condescended-to of genres, science fiction/fantasy, can create lasting, affecting stories. I’m talking about Doctor Who. Read the rest of this entry »

“A ‘canon’ so established in practice serves not so much to enshrine a hundred books as to help students to develop their own standards of evaluation. The canon (if such it be) and the questioning of it go together. There must be questioning, and there must be something of value that has stood the test of time worth questioning” (38). – Wm. Theodore de Bary, Finding Wisdom in East Asian Classics.

In describing one of his teachers, a friend once said that the professor was able to teach his own ideas through teaching Hegel. That is to say, the professor had so thoroughly apprenticed himself to Hegel that it was impossible to tell where Hegel stopped and the professor’s  interpretation began. I think the best teachers do that. In talking with Herbert McCabe and reading his work, for example, it was always difficult to figure out where Thomas Aquinas ended and McCabe began. The same can be said about Ralph McInerney, even though he came to quite different conclusions about Thomas than McCabe did. And the fact that both could be such devoted students of Thomas says more about Thomas’s breadth than it does about these scholars fine interpretations of him. Great texts, to borrow a phrase from Whitman, contain multitudes. Great teachers help us to navigate those multitudes.

In my last post, I discussed Harold Bloom’s The Anatomy of Influence, and I noted how Bloom hoped that he could help his readers get lost in great literature. But often when we read, especially when we encounter a new body of literature, we want someone to help us find our way. And if you want to find your way among the classic texts of East Asia, there is no better guide than Wm. Theodore de Bary. His latest book, an edited collection entitled Finding Wisdom in East Asian Classics, is the perfect map for beginners to navigate the vast territory that is East Asian languages and cultures. The book is the fruit of more than 60 years of research and teaching. Read the rest of this entry »

At one point in Jonathan Franzen’s 2010 novel Freedom, Walter and Patty Berglund, the married couple at the center of the narrative, discuss Patty’s recent visit to their lake house in Minnesota. They don’t talk about the most consequential thing that happened during Patty’s lakeside idyll: Patty slept with Richard Katz, a dark, sexy musician who also happens to be Walter’s best friend of many years. What they do talk about is Patty’s fevered reading, for the first time, of War and Peace.

“I’ve been reading a ton,” she said. “I think War and Peace is actually the best book I’ve ever read.”

“I’m jealous,” Walter said.

“Ah?”

“Getting to read that book for the first time. Having whole days to do it.”

“It was great. I feel kind of altered by it.”

“You seem a little altered, actually.”

“Not in a bad way, I hope.”

“No. Just different.”

This is meant to be painfully funny, of course. Having just cheated on her husband, Patty is in fact altered. (And her marriage with her.) But Franzen is also getting at something else in this passage: the strange, exhilarating, unrepeatable nature of reading a great work of literature for the first time.

I’m a firm believer in re-reading—I’ve probably read Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead at least ten times—but this doesn’t blind me to the fact that the first reading of a book is a special reading. It’s that first reading that allows you to approach a text with a sense of wonder, with an openness that allows the text to work on you even while you work on it; it’s that first reading that can cause you to exclaim with delight, “What a world that such books exist in it!” Upon subsequent readings, these thoughts and feelings can come to seem naïve, even sentimental. But that doesn’t make this initial sense of exhilaration any less real.

Over Christmas break, I read War and Peace for the first time, and I find myself agreeing with Patty: it’s actually the best book I’ve ever read. In part this is because it’s perhaps the most encompassing book I’ve ever read. It contains fully embodied characters, intense historical and philosophical speculation, and precise, beautiful sensual details. Marilynne Robinson has written that great books are “witnesses to the strangeness and brilliance of human experience.” By this standard, War and Peace is a masterpiece. I constantly found myself thinking, “Yes! That’s exactly how life is!”

As I type these words, I see how they might seem naïve, even sentimental. War and Peace isn’t life, after all, but Tolstoy’s rendering of it. Now that I’m no longer under the novel’s trance, I recognize that there’s a bit too much romanticizing of the Russian soul for my taste, and that the concluding section, in which Tolstoy offers his philosophy of history and free will, might strike other readers as dull, though I loved it. I’m not sure if I will stand by my (and Patty’s) judgment of the novel a year from now; I suspect I will, but I can’t be sure. I do know, however, that my thrilling first reading won’t be recovered. It’s why we’re so often sad to close the final pages of a great book: not just because we don’t want the book to end, but because we don’t want our experience of reading the book to end, either.

I do feel as though I am lowering the tone of this enterprise by writing once again about crime.  Robert Lewis’s The Bank of the Black Sheep is set in the gray, damp, cold of a Welsh winter, a variation on the theme of the feckless private detective.  It’s a dark read that deftly combines bleakness with hilarity.  The cast of characters–almost all losers–have enough quirky humanity to matter.  That quirkiness, and the edgy excellence of the writing, kept me interested to the end.

Robin Llewelyn awakens handcuffed to a bed in the Howell Harris Hospice with no memory of his identity or why he is there.  He is on a morphine drip, apparently because he is dying of cancer.  Doctors have told him that enough morphine would erase his memory, but only temporarily.  The handcuffs, and a visit from a couple of unpleasant fellows from the local constabulary, lead Llewelyn to think that he has perhaps committed a crime or is suspected of having done so.  His handcuffs are removed and he asks to be taken off the drip so he can attempt to find out who he is, and what he may have done.

Llewelyn sneaks out of the hospice at night into the nearby market town of Llandovery.  At the bar of the White Hall Hotel, he orders a Watkins Ale and is so transfixed by its amber beauty that he cannot drink it.  Nothing much happens  until an oafish local farmer named Gerald blows through the door.  He spies Llewelyn and lumbers over to his table, behaving as though they knew each other well.   Llewelyn questions him about it, but Ger justs laughs.  Soon after their meeting, a parcel is delivered to Llewelyn’s room at the hospice.  It contains several thousand pounds in twenty-pound notes, a sawed-off shotgun, and a cryptic message.

The money means opportunity for Llewelyn.  He has no  friends at the hospice except for a brief acquaintance with the gentle Hilary Price.  She brings a breath of civility into his life–they attend a concert of Schubert’s music together–and he feels that she deserves a kinder fate than to end her days at Howell Harris. “Better, surely, that the sound outside your bedroom door is the soft tread of a husband or a daughter on the landing, and not the boots of nighttime security or foreign nurses.”   But Hilary dies, and Gerald’s money enables Llewelyn to escape the hospice altogether.

It is not entirely plausible that a man dying of lung cancer could survive the feats of physical endurance and abuse that Robin Llewelyn does, but he is a man driven to find out who he is  before death gathers him.  He pays a call on Gerald at his family farm only to find that Gerald has fled.  Poking around the barn Llewelyn makes two discoveries, one of which terrifies him and one which excites him.  He also finds a photograph of a young couple with a baby that tugs at his memory.

At this point the story becomes more of a caper, perhaps a noir-ish Big Deal On Madonna Street, with a hodge-podge of bad guys, less bad guys, and almost-good guys warily circling each other.  It begins to dawn on Llewelyn that he knows the bad guys fairly well, and it does not cheer him up.  One of them, Tomos Blethyn, accuses him of betraying them all, spitting out the words that stun him: “Even your own son.”

The pieces of Robin Llewelyn’s puzzle fall slowly into place.  The circle of felons, actual and potential, expands and contracts in various unpleasant ways.  Two bent coppers are disposed of.  Of himself and his small band of new friends, Llewelyn observes: “You should never underestimate the criminal who can consider himself a half-honest man.”  The author’s sly affection for this odd group of characters gives them life.  His attitude toward the caper that changes their lives is implicit in the quotation from Brecht which opens the book: “What’s breaking into a bank compared with founding one?”

The final week of the year is a still week. The calendar counts down the days of December, and although there is always work to be done, people might be able to enjoy a day or two of recreation.

The Prophet Elijah learned that God speaks not in a heavy wind nor in an earthquake nor in a fire, but a “still small voice” (1 Kings 19:11-13), and so I’ve tried to be a bit more attentive to finding wisdom during this still week. As you might expect, this attentiveness has come in the form of reading, and the latest works of two great scholars have been my guides. It is nearly impossible to do justice either to Harold Bloom or to Wm. Theodore de Bary, and so I won’t even dare to write about them together. For today, then, I’ll focus on Bloom’s latest book The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life, and I’ll have to leave de Bary’s edited collection Finding Wisdom in East Asian Classics until next week.

In the Anatomy of Influence, which Bloom describes as his “final reflection upon the influence process” (ix), the gnostic of New Haven writes that “the art of literary criticism for the present time” is to “read, reread, describe, evaluate, appreciate” (24). A key component of Bloom’s description, evaluation, and appreciation is his argument is that all literary influence is labyrinthine. He writes, “Belated authors wander the maze as is an exit can be found, until the strong among them realize that the windings of the labyrinth are all internal. No critic, however generously motivated, can help a deep reader escape from the labyrinth of influence. I have learned that my function is to help you get lost” (31). It all depends, I suppose, on how you define “lost.” Read the rest of this entry »

‘Tis the season for “Best of” lists, so here is my personal list of the best books of 2011.

Best Fiction Published in 2011

Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding

My admiration for Harbach’s first novel has only grown since I first read and reviewed it. Harbach writes as intelligently about curveballs as about undergraduate life as about nineteenth-century American literature. Well plotted and beautifully written, The Art of Fielding was the book I most enjoyed reading this year.

Edward St. Aubyn, At Last

I’m sort of cheating here—the novel came out in the U.K. in May, but won’t be published in the U.S. until February—but I couldn’t not include At Last, the final installment in St. Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose cycle. (The first four novels, Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother’s Milk, will be published as a single volume by Picador next month.) These novels have dark source material, ranging from run-of-the-mill social cruelty to child rape and drug abuse, but St. Aubyn has been able to turn this incredibly disturbing stuff into something that is funny, engaging, philosophical, and, in At Last, surprisingly warm. St. Aubyn is often compared to Evelyn Waugh, and it’s easy to see why: there’s the lancing wit (“Of course it was wrong to want to change people, but what else could you possibly want to do with them?”), the snobbishness (“There was no doubt about it, he was a fattist and a sexist and an ageist and a racist and a straightest and a druggist and, naturally, a snob, but of such a virulent character that nobody satisfied his demands. He defied anyone to come up with a minority or a majority that he did not hate for some reason or another.”), and the ability to seemingly throw off aphorisms at will (“To a man of the world, the universe is a suburb.”) At Last is really a stand-alone work, and can be read on its own; it’s also one of the best novels I’ve read in the last several years. Read the rest of this entry »

Alan Hollinghurst is to me that rare find, a novelist in total control of his material. His latest novel, The Stranger’s Child, stretched over most of the twentieth century and taking up the perspectives of multiple individuals as the scene moves from one era to another, tests this capacity to its utmost. The book begins in the years just before the First World War at the middle-class suburban London home of the Sowles, where the fifteen-year old Diana awaits the arrival of her slightly older brother George with a guest, an up-and-coming poet. Immediately, class comes into play as Cecil Valance, the poet, hails from minor aristocracy and has in Corley Court a much grander home to show for it. Before long the scene switches to the Valance home some years later, where Diana has married into the role of Lady Valance, though not to Cecil as we might have anticipated in the earlier pages. A third segment, set in the 1950s, brings us into the later fortunes of the Valances and the Sowles through two new sets of eyes, those of Paul Bryant and Peter Rowe. Bryant is a bank clerk with literary ambitions,  Rowe a schoolteacher in what the British call a prep school—a boarding school for junior high boys—now occupying Corley Court. Again we jump, this time to London some years later as Bryant struggles unsuccessfully to extract information for his biography of Cecil Valance from the now impoverished Diana, and once more to a concluding scene at a memorial service at which Bryant’s shabby pretentiousness and evident literary success are equally apparent.

What keeps the novel together is a poem, written by Cecil Valance on that first visit to the Sowle home. The poem is named for the house, “Two Acres,” and becomes a much-anthologized piece which schoolchildren learn as a matter of course. Everything else about it is matter for speculation. We never see the whole poem, though snatches of it are quoted here and there throughout the text. We are not even sure for whom it was written. Diana certainly thinks it was for her, and Cecil allows this, but our suspicion is that George may have been the real inspiration since he is surely Cecil’s romantic attachment. But as the century progresses both houses and the families that occupied them decay, while the poem persists. Written in a moment long ago by a long-dead minor poet, it continues just as the memory of Cecil is kept alive, less because of its or his essential significance, but just because it is there in the anthologies like Cecil’s white alabaster funeral monument in the chapel of Corley Court. Read the rest of this entry »

Ruth Franklin begins her review of Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel The Marriage Plot in the December 1 New Republic with a “truism”:

Women write about love and marriage; men write about everything else. Like all truisms, this one is best served with a heaping spoonful of caveats, but they don’t alter its essential flavor.

She cites evidence, drawing on the reading list of Eugenides’s main character:

Dickens, Trollope, the Brontës, Austen, George Eliot, Edith Wharton, Henry James: with one important exception, they break neatly along the gender divide. Dickens and Trollope wrote about society, history, religion. For Wharton, Austen, Eliot, and the Brontës, the primary drama is a woman’s choice of husband—“the marriage plot.”

Henry James is the exception she mentions, and the other ladies can fend for themselves, but I must register an objection on behalf of George Eliot, whose name, I feel, is being taken in vain here. Dickens writes about “society, history, religion,” but Eliot writes about “a woman’s choice of husband”? Really? You could say that Middlemarch is largely concerned with young women and their marital choices, but you can’t say that Middlemarch is not about “society.” You could perhaps say that Adam Bede’s “primary drama is a woman’s choice of husband,” provided you had a flexible notion of “primary” and “woman” and “husband.” But if you’re looking for a novel about “society, history, religion,” what about Daniel Deronda? Or Romola? Or Felix Holt? Would they get filed under “choosing a husband” if George Eliot’s pseudonym had never been cracked? And then there’s The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner, no more principally focused on “a woman’s choice of husband” than is, say, Great Expectations. In short, I think Franklin might need to check her bookshelf again.

There’s nothing wrong with writing principally about marriage and love, I should add. Dismissing domestic matters as unworthy of great fiction is an old excuse for marginalizing women’s writing (as we’ve already discussed). Franklin’s description is certainly true of Jane Austen, to take another of her examples, and there’s no need to pretend otherwise; a great novel about a woman’s choice of a husband is a great novel, and it need not stand aside for a mediocre one about world history. But I think this demonstrates why breezy generalizations about women writers vs. men writers are insidious even when they’re not inherently disparaging. Franklin brings this one up so that she might go on to say that Eugenides is an exception (the review’s title is, heh heh, “The Hermaphrodite”). The categorization of Eliot et al. was not meant to be controversial. I believe it goes to show that, even if you think you’ve applied a sufficiently heaping spoonful of caveats, a truism like this one may start doing your thinking for you, to the point where you can stumble on a significant counterexample and never even notice it.

(For further reading on a somewhat related topic, I recommend the critical essay “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,” by Mary Ann Evans, better known as George Eliot.)

It’s easy enough to enjoy a novel whose characters you love. While you read you can find yourself rooting for them, and after you finish the novel you might wish there was a sequel so that you could meet them again. The novel makes its own world, and you happily inhabit that world for a few days or a few weeks. You learn from it, and, one hopes, learn about yourself and your world in the process.

Here’s an honest question, though: what do you do with a novel whose characters you can’t stand? As I read Helen DeWitt’s latest novel Lightning Rods, I found myself actively rooting against the main character. Joe, a failed salesman of the Encyclopedia Brittanica and of vacuum cleaners, realizes that he needs to sell something he can believe in. And he decides what he can really believe in is selling anonymous sexual encounters in corporate America. Read the rest of this entry »

Last month, with the New York University Creative Writing Center, we sponsored a panel discussion featuring Paul Elie, Alice McDermott, Valerie Sayers, and Rand Richards Cooper. They wrestled with the question of the hour: How does the faith of a writer — or her subject — influence her creative process? Here’s a video of the event:

Commonweal Conversations 2011 – The Writing Life: What’s Faith Got to Do with It? from Commonweal Magazine on Vimeo.

Over at the Millions, Robert Fay has an essay with the provocative title, “Where Have All the Catholic Writers Gone?” Fay tells a story of decline, arguing that there has been a profound falling-off in both the quantity and quality of Catholic writers since the mid-century. (Paul Elie made a similar but more subtle argument in Commonweal a few years ago.)

In the years immediately following World War II, the “Catholic novelist” seemed to be an easily identifiable, well respected type. A list of the most prominent mid-century Catholic writers—Muriel Spark, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy—reads like a veritable Who’s Who of post-1945 Anglophone fiction. And these writers were not Catholic in name only: Greene’s The Heart of the Matter, for instance, is almost as much about Eucharistic theology as it is about adultery, and Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie offers a startlingly original (and disturbing) exploration of the tension between free will and divine providence.

In Fay’s view, these halcyon days are long gone. Nowadays, Fay writes, there are few writers who offer “searing inquiries into the nature of man and his place vis-à-vis the Divine.” He argues that “there has not been a new generation of Catholic writers to take up” the mantle of O’Connor and others. It’s not just that writers don’t fully believe in Catholic doctrine; it’s that Catholic doctrine doesn’t even really occur to them as an option. The Catholic writer, it seems, has gone the way of the dodo. Read the rest of this entry »

Someday someone will write a book about what swell people real estate developers are, but not just yet.  Anne Zouroudi’s second book,  The Taint of Midas, is another cautionary tale, this time about greed, set on the fictional Greek island of Arcadia.  The island’s sun-drenched charms have been discovered by tourists from Scandinavia, Britain, and Germany.  Aris Paliakis, developer and entrepreneur, wants their business.

Many of Arcadia’s people are saddened by the rampant destruction of olive groves and other beautiful sites as corrupt local officials change zoning laws to benefit developers; hotels and villas for foreign visitors begin to sprout all over.  One of the most beautiful sites, a hilltop with the crumbling remains of a temple to Apollo, belongs to Gabrilis Kaloyeros, an elderly beekeeper who is nearly blind.  Aris Paliakis covets that land.  Even though it is protected as a historic sight, he know which officials to bribe.  Shortly after he connives to have Gabrilis sign a document waiving his interest in the land, the beekeeper is struck by a car, while on his way to market, and left to die.

Enter the so-called fat man, Hermes Diaktoros.   Read the rest of this entry »

In a review in the last issue, Scott Moringiello described his primary criterion for judging a critic: “If a critic makes me want to read a novel or see an opera or painting, I judge the criticism useful.” I thought of this rule as I was reading Changing My Mind, a 2009 collection of essays by the British novelist Zadie Smith. And surely it is a sign of Smith’s critical power—and flexibility—that after finishing Changing My Mind I wanted to, among other things, sit down and watch Adam’s Rib, Syriana, Romance & Cigarettes, and the entire seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I wanted to read Tom McCarthy’s Remainder and President Obama’s Dreams from My Father and reread George Eliot’s Middlemarch , David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Vladimir Nabokov’s lectures on Russian literature. Finally, I wanted to go back and give two of Smith’s own novels—White Teeth and On Beauty—another shot. (I read White Teeth while spending the night in a Dublin airport; I don’t remember much except for its frenetic energy. As for On Beauty, which is a re-writing of E. M. Forster’s Howards End, I remember admiring the chutzpah it took to make such an attempt but also being unconvinced by the execution.)

Changing My Mind gathers together essays that Smith wrote over the last several years, mainly for the New York Review of Books. As my list of things to watch/read above indicates, Smith’s interests are varied. She writes on highbrow, lowbrow, and middlebrow topics; on television, film, literature, politics, and family history. Her writing is supple and often surprising. She is unafraid to pair seemingly incongruous subjects and see where this pairing will lead her. In one essay, for instance, she connects President Obama’s philosophical outlook to John Keats’s notion of negative capability, an imaginative responsiveness that enables the poet (or politician) to project himself into other persons and positions. (This essay was written in 2008. President Obama’s empathetic imagination seems less endearing after we’ve witnessed the consequences of his on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand manner of dealing with Republican intransigence.) Read the rest of this entry »

I grew up listening to opera.  Every Saturday afternoon at two, during the season, the Metropolitan Opera of the Air filled our kitchen with music.  My mother would raise the volume really high for favorite pieces; at intermission we listened to Milton Cross host the Metropolitan Opera Quiz, with famous guests who knew a thing or two about music.  The show was fun, civilized, and it formed in me a lifetime’s passion for music.

Listening to hours of opera recordings and seeing perhaps a few dozen performances at the Met, the City Opera, and a few other places did not make me a music critic, just a fan.  But since moving to the suburbs forty-five years ago, I have seldom gone to see an opera at the Met.  Tickets are expensive and getting there from here is not only tiring, it leaves you hostage to a train schedule.  And, in case no one has told you, the opera crowd is an older crowd.

What changed everything a few years ago was the arrival of large-screen HDTV performances in theaters.  Now, you can live a thousand miles from the Met and still see a simulcast performance of your favorite Verdi or Wagner or Mozart opera just minutes from home in a local theater.

I went to the first local broadcast at Fairfield University and it was  a mob scene.  No one anticipated such a stunning turnout and, with no reserved seating that day, everyone was anxious to be near the head of the line.  The crush of gray-haired old folks with canes, walkers, crutches, and wheelchairs was so great that I thought they had emptied out all the nursing homes in Fairfield County. (I feel it is okay to say this because this is the voting bloc to which I belong.) In any event, it was Donizetti’s The Daughter of  the Regiment and it was heaven.  For opera lovers it was paradise indeed: a small theater, close to home, with no bad sight lines and tickets priced at $20.  Performances now are routinely sold out.

When a neighbor’s plans changed last week and I had  a free ticket to see Don Giovanni, it was a mere stone’s throw from home.  Both the singing and the acting were superb, maybe even stupendous.  As a musical experience it was to be in marked contrast to the performance of Jersey Boys which I saw just four days later, a birthday gift from my two oldest grandchildren.

Jersey Boys, the story of Frankie Valli and The Four Season, is as much a morality play as Mozart’s portrayal of the dissolute nobleman Don Giovanni and his fearsome end.  The guys from Jersey, of course, got a much happier ending. And why not?  They were four  scrappy, talented kids from nowhere–gritty neighborhoods in and around Newark.  They made mistakes, some worse than others, but they ultimately handled the trials and temptations of fame reasonably well.  It’s a great story and is everything musical theater should be.

Without taking anything away from the dozen great opera performances I have now seen on the big screen,  I felt the rocking, stomping,  live energy of Jersey Boys to the bone.  This was a different kind of stupendous, but stupendous it was.  The connection between actors and audience was palpable.  It was the real thing.

The camera can only partially capture the heat of a brilliant performance.  When I saw Renata Tebaldi as Violetta in La Traviata years ago I was seated so close I could hear her shoes squeak on the stage floor.  My cousin tossed flowers at her as she took her bows.  It was unforgettable.

Even badness is more memorable when it is live.  Once, after a meal of truly terrible Chinese food, I went with friends to a truly terrible amateur performance of Lucia di Lammermoor.  The production embarrassed everyone except its benighted cast and its director, who should have been shot.  Its awfulness gave it high entertainment value, and my friends and I still reminisce about it.

Yes, I plan to continue going to HDTV performances of the Met.  They have enriched my life.  Along with a few other souls, I get into the operatic spirit by applauding when the live audience at the Met applauds; it gives me a feeling of connection.  I love to shout “brava” when a soprano belts one out the park.    And as I learned from those Jersey boys, once in awhile ya gotta get the real thing.

I tend to enjoy novels that depict students in college or recent college graduates. So some of my favorite fiction that I’ve read in the last ten years or so includes Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children, Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai, and Tom Wolfe’s I am Charlotte Simmons. Needless to say, these novels differ greatly, but perhaps owing to the fact that I read them in college or just after college or that I teach college students now, I have enjoyed them all.

I can now add to that list the two biggest literary novels of the fall: Chad Harbuch’s The Art of Fielding and Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot.* Like the novels I’ve listed above, both deal with students in college and just after college. In a way that surpasses any of them, these two books do an excellent job describing falling in love in college. After all, the real point of college is to fall in love. And I speak from experience when I say that it is easy to fall in love with and fall in love in a small liberal arts college. Given all the recent discussions about higher education in the United States (some of it helpful, most of it not), it is easy to lose sight of how important it is to fall in love with what you learn. You probably aren’t able to learn any other way. It is also easy to lose sight of the fact that students can fall in love with all sorts of things: accounting, poetry, chemistry, each other, God. What sets both books apart, however, is not that they depict falling in love in and with college well. Instead, what sets them apart is that the main characters in the novels learn the most difficult thing to accept in college is that they are loved. Read the rest of this entry »

The sex abuse crisis has brought many in the Church to a painful awareness that there is something very wrong in the way our clerical system operates. Many have asked: Are we treating the problem at the systemic level, i.e. addressing the institutional culture that enabled abuse?

The need for deeper reflection on questions of institutional culture was brought home to me recently as I read a feature in the Irish Times in July – not long after the release of the Cloyne Report—that asked “Where were the good priests?” The story captured some of the fear, sadness, anger, and even despair that such priests feel. Built into their very lives are features of a clerical culture that defeated or at least impeded the moral force that ought to have been exercised. Read the rest of this entry »

It was only a matter of time before the New Atheists were challenged from within their own ranks. Hitchens and Dawkins and Dennett and Sam Harris, the leading figures among the self-proclaimed “brights” (seriously, with no sense of irony) offer sometimes serious and thoughtful challenges to the possibility of theism but fail spectacularly to present an alternative vision with any charm or warmth or—let’s face it—any brightness at all. One of the first to recognize this was Terry Eagleton in his Reason, Faith and Revolution (read an excerpt here), who wittily excoriated the hybrid “Ditchkins” for a shallow and naïve reading of Christianity as an alternative to a scientific explanation of the universe. Something of an atheist himself, Eagleton saw very quickly that you can’t build an alternative vision of reality simply by a shabby misreading of religion.

Now along come more secularists in what I think we might want to call “second-wave new atheism,” killing their fathers at least by implication in The Joy of Secularism: 11 Essays for How We Live Now. The cover is wittily picked out in the reddish gingham that connotes The Joy of Cooking or some equally classic 50s guide to cuisine, most certainly not about the way we live now. But between the covers there is a serious effort to provoke secularist thought to offer the kinds of satisfactions for which religion has traditionally been responsible. Darwin and Freud and, of course, Charles Taylor, are much in evidence here as George Levine (the editor) and his contributors make a very good case for secularism as meaningful and, yes, in a way, enchanted. Of course, there’s a lot for religious believers to take issue with, but there’s a lot to agree with too. Secular or religious we are all postmoderns despite ourselves, and science presents us with more than enough wonders for most imaginations. Who needs angels when you have quantum physics and black holes? There is enchantment, wonder and ethics aplenty in this collection of essays, at once learned and intriguing, intellectually demanding without being dry or daunting (with perhaps one exception that I couldn’t finish). Read the rest of this entry »

In the last issue, Brian Davies described Denys Turner’s Julian of Norwich, Theologian as “the best theological exposition of Julian to appear so far.” I couldn’t agree more wholeheartedly. In a manner that will be familiar to readers of Turner’s previous work, Julian of Norwich, Theologian weds philosophical rigor with stylistic grace. It systematically examines the most serious challenges to the Christian faith, asking why God would choose to create a world in which sin is possible, for instance, and how we can reconcile free will with divine providence. Yet, even when considering these thorny topics, Turner’s writing is never pretentious and always lucid, an enchanting blend of intelligence and elegance. Here is Turner on sin: “Sin is real in the sense that an unreality can become the real substance of a person’s or of a society’s existence, a kind of really lived refusal of the real.” On Julian’s claim that sin is “behovely”: “that sin is behovely means that sin is needed as part of the plot—or, if you like, that the plot needs sin in the way that plots do—contingently indeed, but all the same just so.” On the relationship between Purgatory and narrative: “It is not the sins committed that differentiate purgatory from hell, but the story that is told of them, the narrative to which they belong. The souls in purgatory have all repented, that is to say, they are learning how to be able, and how to desire, to situate the record of their sins within the comedy of divine love that redeems them.”

I could go on, but instead I briefly want to draw attention to Julian’s presence in the work of two of the twentieth century’s greatest poets: T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden. Eliot discovered Julian while studying as an undergraduate at Harvard in 1908-1909, shortly after Grace Warrack’s edition re-introduced Julian to the broader world. (Contrary to popular belief, Eliot’s interest in mystical theology long predated his 1927 conversion to Anglo-Catholicism.)

Much of Eliot’s early poetry dealt with saintly mystics and bloody visions, and these poems surely were influenced by Eliot’s exposure to Julian’s showings. (They also show the influence of the other mystics he was reading at the time, including St. Theresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross.) However, it wasn’t until the 1942 publication of “Little Gidding,” the last poem in Eliot’s sequence Four Quartets, that Julian appeared explicitly in Eliot’s verse. In the third section of “Little Gidding,” Eliot begins a stanza by quoting Julian directly: “Sin is Behovely, but / All shall be well, and / All manner of thing shall be well.” It is a startling transition from the stanza before, where abstract language prevailed and Eliot mused that “history may be servitude, / History may be freedom.” Now, with his direct quoting of Julian, he moves to a simpler yet more powerful register, asserting the hope that sin is behovely and that history ultimately will be redeemed.

The whole sequence has been building to this transition. Throughout Four Quartets, Eliot acknowledges, even seems resigned to, the problems of earthly existence: the world’s ugliness (“Garlic and sapphires in the mud / Clot the bedded axle-tree”), humanity’s weakness (“human kind / Cannot bear very much reality”), and the violent need for self-purgation (“If to be warmed, then I must freeze / And quake in frigid purgatorial fires / Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars”). But, looking to Julian, Eliot asserts that all of this—disease, deception, suffering, evil—is part of a larger pattern, a pattern that we can’t know from our temporal perspective but that will be revealed in eternity. As Turner would say, all this pain is part of a happy story, a divine comedy that transforms pain into bliss, suffering into comfort.

The final section of “Little Gidding” once again looks to Julian in its concluding image of eternal reconciliation:

And all shall be well and

All manner of thing shall be well

When the tongues of flame are in-folded

Into the crowned knot of fire

And the fire and the rose are one.

The existence of pain is not denied, but Eliot asserts that, when placed in the context of eternity, it will be understood as behovely, as fitting. For Eliot, Julian remains the best articulator of this realistic yet hopeful Christian vision.

Eliot’s channeling of Julian is hard to top, but Auden’s 1949 poem “Memorial for the City” comes close. Auden, a less devoted reader of Julian than Eliot, appears to have first come across her writing in the work of the Anglican theologian, poet, and novelist Charles Williams. Auden opens “Memorial for the City” with an epigraph from Julian’s Revelations of Divine Love that reveals a different facet of the English mystic’s thinking: “In the self-same point that our soul is made sensual, in the self-same point is the City of God ordained to him from without beginning.” It is precisely our embodiment, Julian argues, that allows us to look forward to the Kingdom of God. We are not pure souls but souls plus bodies, and this mixture is necessary for the salvation history of which we are a part.

“Memorial for the City” is wonderfully complex in both form and argument. The poem is divided into four sections. The first three survey, in order, a devastated, war-scarred landscape; history’s many failed political, spiritual, and intellectual revolutions; and the various divisions and alienations the self is subject to in our worldly existence (an Eliotian theme if ever there were one). All of these implicitly deal with Julian’s concept of the behovely. Despite the nightmares of history, we are told, “We know without knowing there is reason for what we bear.” We must remain hopeful that the story will turn out right; we must remain like “Adam waiting for His City.”

The final section is the poem’s most powerful, and the one that most explicitly looks to Julian. The speaker of the final section is the pure body, removed from consciousness or the soul. We might call it the Body, except that this allegorization would ignore the physical specificity that Auden (with Julian) is so eager to retain. Looking to Biblical and literary history, the body celebrates its own worth. “Without me,” the body brags, “Adam would have fallen irrevocably with Lucifer; he would never have been able to cry O felix culpa.” Impatient with existential angst, the body declares , “With Hamlet I had no patience”; concerned with creaturely comforts, the body complains, “time after time I warned Captain Ahab to accept happiness.”

After this long catalog, Auden’s poem ends with a vision of salvation:

As for Metropolis, that too-great city; her delusions are not mine.

Her speeches impress me little, her statistics less; to all who     dwell on the public side of her mirrors resentments and no peace.

At the place of my passion her photographers are gathered together; but I shall rise again to hear her judged.

Auden emphasizes the importance of the individual as opposed to the collective. Celebrating embodiment means celebrating the individual, embodied self, and it is precisely this individual, embodied self, the poem declares, that will be resurrected at the end of days. Then, judgment will be given; then, the body will be revealed in all its sensual glory; then, Eliot, Auden, and Julian claim, all manner of thing shall be well.

First, fair warning: this is a frivolous post, a tale of pop culture, written to accompany the eating of leftover Halloween candy.

The week leading up to Halloween brought television two new fairy-tale inspired dramas, NBC’s Grimm and ABC’s Once Upon a Time. Grimm is a police procedural with a supernatural twist (one of the cops is a descendant of the Brothers Grimm and has inherited a vocation for hunting monsters). Once Upon a Time supposes that an evil curse has trapped fairy tale characters in the modern town of Storybrooke, Maine, unable to remember where they came from, but with a prophecy about a lost daughter returning to break the curse. The monsters in Grimm are derived from the original, gory tales of the Brothers Grimm; the characters in Once Upon a Time are drawn from the sanitized Disney tales.

Of course I was much more optimistic about Grimm. I can’t stand sanitized fairy tales with simpering princesses and sugar-coated endings. So I watched Grimm first – and was sorely disappointed. The show feels like a third-rate imitation of a Joss Whedon series. The production and writing are sloppy; the plot twists are predictable; nothing about it feels original.

Once Upon a Time, on the other hand, which I expected to hate, left me impressed. The characters have complex and plausible human interactions, in the fairy-tale scenes as much as in the real-world ones. Prince Charming tells Snow White that surely the Evil Queen can’t hurt her; Snow White shoots back in a tone dripping with sarcasm: “Really? She poisoned an apple because she thought I was prettier than her.” Costume and set design are richly imagined and have a distinct realism about them – the princesses wear gowns that suggest Alexander McQueen more than classic Disney animation. Rumpelstiltskin is not just mischievous, he’s unhinged and possibly malevolent. The casting is brilliant. The story is not predictable, and the writing is tight – all the guns on the wall in scene one are fired by the end of the episode.

Once, in other words, attempts to present the Disney tales come of age, imbued with real human drama and stripped of their saccharine trappings. It’s a tall order. The promises of the pilot episode are going to be hard to follow through on. One slip in tone and the story could veer into the saccharine or even ridiculous. Pacing is also going to be a challenge: the initial setup suggests the beginning of a feature film more than a multi-season television drama, and it’s hard to imagine the premise holding for more than one season. Still, the pilot was good enough that I’ll stick around for a few more episodes and see what these writers can come up with – they might just be able to work a bit of magic. If you’re in the mood for some lighter viewing, this series is worth checking out.

My one criticism, at this point, is that its feminism might be overdone. Like the literary fairy tales of Angela Carter, Once introduces strong female characters – three of them, on whom the story centers. The men don’t have a whole lot to do; so far they seem to exist mostly as pretty faces or else pawns in a dangerous, female-dominated game. (The one exception, the male creature with designs of his own, is Rumpelstiltskin; but he is monstrous.) This arrangement felt skewed to me, a sort of reverse sexism, and brought to mind all the recent journalistic buzz about “the end of men.” It’s not that I think the princesses should go back to behaving like wilted lettuce and let the men rescue them, it’s just that having at least one fully developed male character in the ensemble (and/or a weak female character to contrast with all the strong ones) would make the story more believable. The objectification of one sex is never a good idea. Ethically, it’s unfair; artistically, it drains half the human race of its agency and therefore weakens a story, no matter which half the artist decides to favor.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled high culture.

You may disagree, but I believe that the many sleuths, amateur and professional in English crime fiction are also largely the creations of English, or British, writers.  In contrast, it also seems to me that the most famous sleuths in Italian crime writing have been created by non-Italians.  Guido Brunetti, the urbane, philosophical inspector at the Venice questura, is the creation of Donna Leon, an American.  The edgier, less settled character Aurelio Zen, also a Venetian, was created by the late English author, Michael Dibdin.  The utterly captivating carabinieri Marshall Salvatore Guarnaccia, a Sicilian fish out of water posted to duty in Florence, was the creation of the late Magdalen Nabb, also English.

A few years ago when I discovered Andrea Camilleri, a Sicilian-born writer of exceptional talent, and his estimable protagonist, Salvatore Montalbano, I was ready for something different: an Italian detective created by an Italian.  (Of course it is also true that many Italians, particularly in the north, do not consider Sicilians to be Italian at all but simply amalgams of human deviousness.)

Montalbano is a police inspector in the fictional Sicilian town of Vigata where crimes of every description seem to occur, often with colorful or vulgar flourishes.  Although corruption is in the very air they breathe, Montalbano and his trustworthy staff serve a police commissioner of unassailable–if weary–integrity.  Camilleri is both sly and droll, qualities that enable him to write about the corruption that is central to his stories without giving in to despair.  In an author’s note to his first book, he writes that the story comes only from his imagination and not from crime news headlines.  He goes on: “But since in recent years reality has seemed bent on surpassing the imagination, if not entirely abolishing it, there may be a few unpleasant coincidences of name or situation.” Read the rest of this entry »

The pleasures of indulgence yield the worry of surfeit. To have too much is to lose appreciation of what is particular. Reading five or six works by Justin Cartwright, seriatim, has driven home this too obvious truism. The book jacket notes that Cartwright is South African by birth, and that he resides in London. His novels show he is well-traveled enough (in the USA in particular)  to write of three continents with easy authority. The New Book section of the library gave the first hint of his range and, being hooked by Other People’s Money, I read through five other novels. I put down the last, To Heaven by Water, with a sense that I had done the writer an injustice by way of excess. This should not be a surprising reaction, yet I wonder how often it is shared. Surely the strengths of a writer that attract at the start should not pall, yet, and perhaps this is the key, authorship is both the pursuit of an art and a profession. To be a writer, one must write and the daily “x” number of words demands to be cast as plot, character, analysis, voice.

Writers I have heard interviewed have mention being surprised where a character will take them as they progress with the fiction. Surely detective fiction writers, constrained by the “who done it?” or procedural aspects of the form, must work within a frame, but how widespread is this in other genre? Given the “professionalism” of the craft, certainly some books just get finished and others achieve mastery. Surfeit can blur discrimination of just such difference.

Cartwright’s great strength is his analysis of family dynamics. His plots often introduce a sharp disjuncture – unexpected death, infidelity, even imprisonment. His characters often wonder over their inability to know even their most intimate partners, and yet his plots move towards deep psychological understanding, at times issuing on to spiritual illumination. To Heaven by Water ends with the chief character quoting Hopkins’ “The Windhover”  in an assertion of divine presence.

Everything I have written points to a very gifted writer (He has been awarded many literary prizes.), and I feel I have done him a disservice simply by reading too much at once, Yet in spite of this, and almost perversely, I number as most memorable and remarkable the novel, The Song Before It Is Sung, which is somewhat uncharacteristic. It recreates in fictional form the long relationship of the Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin and the German aristocrat Adam von Trott in the years before and during WWII. The story is the account of a student (Conrad Senior) of the fictional Berlin, E.A. Mendel, who has entrusted Conrad with all his papers. He has enjoined him ( a posthumous obligation) to tell the story of his relationship with Axel von Gottenberg (the fictional von Trott). The complexities of plot, the time shifts, the number of forms employed are remarkable as the conclusion of the work is low key – the resolutions occurring again by way of literary allusion (to W.G. Sebald). Cartwright is at pains to place before us the burden and the liberation that we inherit from the dead. The novel bears this heavy freight remarkably well – as its protagonist in the concluding lines swims, literally, in a lake of regeneration, inspirited by memory.  Such immersion is redemptive, but take it also as a warning of reading too much too closely in time.

Sometime around 1993 (I remember it was my first year of high school), the singer Joan Osborne had a hit song “One of Us.” At one point in the song, Osborne sang

If god had a face,

What would it look like,

And would you want to see,

If seeing meant that you would have to

Believe in things like heaven, and in Jesus and saints,

And all the prophets.

If I remember correctly, the song was an especially big hit among young Evangelicals, although their interest in Osborne was short lived after it became clear that Osborne was not particularly interested in Christianity. As a top 40 hit in the days before Spotify and iTunes and Napster, the song was catchy enough. (I’d take the Fleet Foxes or Wilco over Joan Osborne any day.) I don’t know what happened to Osborne’s career after that.

Of course, Christianity makes the startling – and, to some, blasphemous — claim that God does have a face. But Osborn’s question remains: what did this face look like? A show currently up at the Philadelphia Museum of Art presents one artist’s answer.

Rembrandt van Rijn (1606 – 1669) was born in Leiden in the Netherlands and in 1631 he moved to Amsterdam. In 1639 he moved again in Amsterdam, this time to Vlooienburg neighborhood, which was home to Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jewish communities. This move was to have profound implications for understanding what God’s face looked like and how Christians understand Christ. Read the rest of this entry »

A little over a week ago, I read Paul O’Donnell’s post on Wilco with eagerness. I love the band, and I was excited to see a Commonweal writer engaging with popular music so enthusiastically. (The post reminded me of Eric Bugyis’s interesting thoughts on the Hold Steady.)

Then, however, I got to the comments. There I found an awful lot of doom and gloom being proclaimed. Young people and their music are embittered and whiny, I heard; they express no hope in humanity; all popular music (or at least all somewhat popular indie rock) is just so much rhythmic moping.

Of course, this isn’t a true assessment of young people or their cultural expressions. Speaking from my own area of expertise, I can tell you that the defining characteristic of fiction in the last fifteen or so years has been an increase in sincerity and hopefulness. People like Dave Eggers and David Foster Wallace have argued again and again that an ironic, embittered attitude towards the world isn’t enough, and that any art that reflexively resigns itself to this kind of attitude is necessarily impoverished. One of the major projects of post-post-modernism (or whatever you want to call our current moment) is the reclaiming of huge swathes of human experience—love, joy, commitment, sacrifice—as viable subjects for literary representation.

But, looking back to music, I want to point out one band that should disprove any sweeping claims about the self-indulgent despair of my generation: Fleet Foxes. The band hails from Seattle, and it shows in their predilection for flannel shirts, unkempt beards, and long hair. Their sound, however, is anything but grungy. The band’s 2008 self-entitled debut album was filled with sweet-sounding harmonizing and pleasing melodies. (And the band appeared unembarrassed to write and perform sweet, pleasing songs.) Displaying a variety of influences from Neil Young to gospel and sacred harp music, Fleet Foxes was really more a tone poem than anything else: singer/songwriter Robin Pecknold seemed less interested in telling a story than in creating a particular mood or feel. The title of the album’s most popular song, “White Winter Hymnal,” hints at this mood: light, mysterious, haunting, angelic. (Here is a lyrical sample: “I was following the pack, / All swallowed in their coats / With scarves of red tied ‘round their throats / To keep their little heads / From fallin’ in the snow.” Lest this sound overly precious, listen to the song, through Spotify.) Fleet Foxes was a tremendous debut. The songs were lush and moving, with Pecknold’s lyrics often beautifully blending into a kind of choral chanting. Read the rest of this entry »

In a recent essay, J. M. Coetzee offered a quotation from “Distinguo,” a short poem by the Australian poet Les Murray. Here is the poem in its entirety:

Prose is Protestant-agnostic,

story, discussion, significance,

but poetry is Catholic:

poetry is presence.

In a mere quatrain, Murray summarizes the vast theological and aesthetic differences between Protestantism and Catholicism. Obviously, Murray is being hyperbolic; as Coetzee mentions, Murray converted from Presbyterianism after marrying a Catholic, and his words have the convert’s fervor. And, to state the obvious once again, Murray’s prose/poetry, Protestant/Catholic division doesn’t quite hold: Protestantism has some pretty good poets, too, from Milton to Marianne Moore, and, thanks to Evelyn Waugh, Flannery O’Connor, Muriel Spark, and others, whole courses are taught on the Catholic novel.

Still, Murray seems to be on to something. A list of the great sacramental poets of the English language, those who most memorably render the divine presence manifesting itself in the world, would feature more than its fair share of Catholics. There is perhaps no greater sacramental poet than Gerard Manley Hopkins, and there is certainly no greater sacramental poem than “God’s Grandeur,” which opens with the dramatic pronouncement that “The world is charged with the grandeur of God” and closes with a vision of the Holy Spirit “brood[ing] with warm breast and with ah! bright wings!” Read the rest of this entry »

There is an art to reading book blurbs and my wife has mastered it. She has an astute way of working through the new book shelves at the library and finding authors we will both find so good that we read them exhaustively. The key for her is remembering which of the blurb writers are reliable witnesses. Her knack has yielded impressive results, the latest Justin Cartwright. If you are shaking you head wondering that we had not heard of him “before” (mea culpa), we have made up for this in the number of his works we have read through happily.

To go back to “What do I read next?” Blurbs are one sort of cue, but I know I rely on the literary periodicals – TLS, LRB, NYRB, Commonweal – and the New York Times books columns – for suggestions.  There are also publishers of particular genres that I look to: The SoHo Press, for one, which features detective fiction set in unusual locales. We also listen to the radio and often hear, on NPR or using the internet radio, to BBC Radio 3, of books to read. I have friends who assiduously write down any titles I might mention, but I never seem to remember to reciprocate in a similar way. There is also the accusatory uprightness of books on our shelves that have arrived in myriad ways; these I have never read but sometimes I yield to their stiff regard and read them.

The major literary prize winning titles are a sure way of piquing interest. The Booker Prize, the Pulitzer, the Orange or Whitbread Awards, those for crime fiction, and many others can all point a way.

Then there is the question of an approach to an author. Do I read exhaustively through the works of someone new to me? Sometimes, virtually gagging from surfeit, I stop and return later, perhaps with more appreciation. The negative aspect of reading every title of an author available, especially in detective fiction, is that the plots and characterization show themselves to be formulaic, a problem which is one inherent in the genre. In another sense, if this limitation does not distract from the novels, it marks a really good writer. Familiarity need not always breed negative responses.

Then there are favorites to reread, classics to revisit, the suggestions offered by “Staff Picks” on library shelves. In the end, “What next?” is bedeviled only by the choices available. E-readers and the internet have only broadened these. The question becomes in its own way an invitation to discover.