Where Are the Catholic Writers Today?

Gregory Wolfe, editor of Image and Slant Books, writes about the idea that strong Catholic writers can’t be found today. He is responded to a piece by Dana Gioia, which lists many Catholics in letters from several years ago, but none working today. Wolfe disagrees:

To take just one example, in arguing that few contemporary writers take on the fundamental question of belief versus unbelief, Elie dismisses Alice McDermott’s fiction as being merely about Irish Catholic New Yorkers from the 1950s and ’60s. But this is an oddly literal and obtuse reading of, say, Charming Billy. True, the novel is set in that earlier time period, but the novel is told from the point of view of a younger woman—a disaffected, lapsed Catholic—whose exploration of her Uncle Billy’s life slowly and quietly brings her back to faith. Billy the alcoholic protagonist is a mess, and yet he is a loving soul, a kind of saint—a man of boundless faith in spite of his woundedness.

Then, in an unexpectedly poignant turn of events, the novelist Oscar Hijuelos wrote to the Times in response to Elie, citing his own novel, Mr. Ives’ Christmas, just days before his sudden death of a heart attack. Like Charming Billy, Mr. Ives’ Christmas is another whispered tale of a wounded saint, a man of deep Catholic faith whose seminarian son is senselessly murdered. These novels by McDermott and Hijuelos are meditations on sainthood in the same vein as Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, but instead of a protagonist as priest hunted by totalitarian thugs, they show us New Yorkers as unlikely saints: an advertising executive and a worker for Con Edison.

"Mitt hjerte altid vanker"

I have been dilatory in my responsibility to provide you with Sissel Christmas videos on this blog. Here is the greatest singer in the world in concert in Iceland, doing what I believe is her favorite song, a Swedish Christmas hymn called “Mitt Hjerte Altid Vanker” (My Heart Always Wanders).

Holiday Shopping with a Smile

Libby’s famous smile flickers when she sees another woman smile from the opposite escalator with a wide, toothy grimace.

“A face only a mother would love,” she mutters, striding over to the next mall store with extended sales. She smiles at the cashier. He grins back, his ears vanishing behind a wall of gleaming teeth.

Forgetting everything now, she hurries back into a suddenly manic throng, passing from leer to leer as other shoppers direct her to the fire-lit house built with toys. Waifs grab her hands and pull her to an enormous, red man with a wide, open mouth.

(Written for Loren Eaton’s 2013 Advent Ghost Storytelling Fest)

How to Publish a History Book

Professor Thomas Kidd walks through publishing his next book, a biography on George Whitefield. He says, “There are already excellent biographies on Whitefield, written both from explicitly Christian/pastoral perspectives, and from more academic/scholarly perspectives. I thought perhaps I could bridge those two approaches, as a professional historian and an evangelical Christian. Whitefield’s 300th birthday is coming up in December 2014, so the timing seemed right.”

"Da Night Before Chris-moose"

Posting this video is probably an act of self-indulgence, but I keep remembering it around Christmas. And just today I discovered someone had put a video up on YouTube. Except that it’s not a video video, just a sound recording illustrated with a recurring loop of photos. The real visual image that should go with the poem is this one.

It’s a Scandinavian-dialect parody of “The Night Before Christmas,” which a Minneapolis kids’ TV personality named Clellan Card (in his character of Axel Torgerson, an eccentric immigrant who lived in a tree house with a dog and a cat) did every year around the holiday. For kids who grew up in southern Minnesota, this is a precious memory.

Clellan Card was a clever radio comedian who had something of a national reputation, but the accidental deaths of his two oldest sons in 1952 and 1953 impelled him to devote himself entirely to entertaining children. The best I can do to describe him is to say he was sort of a talking Harpo Marx – a five year old kid grown up in body but not in spirit. You can’t fake that attitude. Kids can smell a phony. Card was the real thing.

In 1966, he started being absent from his show more and more frequently, his sidekick “Carmen the Nurse” filling in for him. And on April 14, Carmen tearfully announced that Axel had died. We had a lot of local kids’ shows in those days, and some of them were pretty good. But nobody ever achieved the heights of nonsense that Axel did.

'The Death of a Citizen,' and 'The Wrecking Crew,' by Donald Hamilton

I reviewed one of Donald Hamilton’s Matt Helm novels, newly reissued, a few days back. I’ve now read two more of the series, The Death of a Citizen and The Wrecking Crew, and I’ll do a brief review of them as a unit.

The first point to get out of the way is that this isn’t Dean Martin, and this isn’t a Dean Martin movie. In a way you could say that the Matt Helm novels (which had their heyday in the 1960s) are less violent and sex-saturated than the thrillers we read today. But that would be misleading. There’s a sense in which these novels are more brutal than any I’ve ever read, not in terms of explicitness but in terms of emotional (even spiritual) violence done and suffered. I’m not an expert on contemporary action novels, but I don’t think Jack Ryan or Mitch Rapp ever pay the kind of price Matt Helm does.

At the beginning of The Death of a Citizen, the first book in the series, Matt is a happy husband and father, older and softer than he was when he served as an assassin in World War II. He’s content with his life as a journalist and photographer in New Mexico.

Then, at a party, in walks a woman he worked with—and slept with—in the war, and she gives him the old recognition signal. And for all his efforts to hold back, he gets drawn into a dangerous murder and espionage plot. The lengths to which he is willing to go to save his family from a threat bring a price—separation from that family forever. The “citizen” who dies in this book is Matt himself.

The next book, The Wrecking Crew, takes Matt on assignment to his ancestral homeland, Sweden (his old family name, we learn, was Stjernhjelm), where he’s expected to work with domestic agents to thwart a Russian espionage operation. He meets a couple women to whom he’s attracted, but the things he does for a living come between him and them, a moral (or judgmental) barrier that will separate him from other humans for the rest of his days.

Though the language, violence, and sex are less explicit than in more modern books, these novels pack an impact that may surprise you. Matt’s 1960s attitudes toward sex, and women, will certainly be troubling to some readers.

But if you like your spy stories straight up, these are very good. Excellent of their kind.

You Gots a Big Platform? I Make You a Deal.

A platform is a way to “get noticed in a noisy world,” to borrow from Michael Hyatt’s book of the same subtitle. Hunter Baker has a helpful critique of this idea.

Stop badgering would-be authors with applications designed to tease out how large their platforms are and spend more time locating the best manuscripts,” he writes. In the near future, he suggests a big platform will be the very reason speakers and authors will not submit their document to a traditional publisher. They will self-publish.


Follow Chris Henley

Scot McKnight also has several questions about platform and current publishing tactics:

I get hundreds of books sent to me each year, many of them by people with a sizable platform, and I can say without reservation that the bigger the platform the less the author has to say (not always, but often). Big platform authors are guaranteed sales. They’re not guaranteed good content. I get books on my desk from no-name authors that have much better content than big-name authors. …

I know a pastor who was given a 3-book contract, a previously unpublished pastor, had no idea what he wanted to write about, but was told “We’ll take care of that by listening to your sermons.” At about the same time a young author sent me a manuscript that was rejected by the same publisher because he had no platform, but they did agree he had very good content.

All of this is troubling, but I don’t know what to recommend as a sane alternative. Aren’t there publishers who print what they believe to be the best manuscripts they receive? What success are they having? Should litblogs, like this one, have cutthroat review competitions to compare good vs. big platform books?