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.