In an interview I had with Elie last week, Elie, paraphrasing Flannery O’Connor’s quip about Faulkner, referred to Robinson as the “Dixie Limited” among contemporary American writers.

What of Marilynne Robinson’s 2004 Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead? Is this, for Elie, just the exception that proves the rule? Not quite. Speaking sed contra, however, was Gregory Wolfe, editor of the literary journal, Image, and of the recent volume of essays, Beauty Will Save the World, in a Wall Street Journal essay entitled, “Whispers of Faith in a Postmodern World.” In his essay Wolfe countered: “the myth of secularism triumphant in the literary arts is just that–a myth.”Įlie acknowledges that there are writers working today who touch on Christian belief in various ways, but they do not do so, he goes on, in ways that show the faith’s “explanatory power.” He observes that contemporary American fiction, for example, treats of belief “as upbringing, belief as social fact, belief as a species of American weirdness: our literary fiction has all of these things. Such are the lines of an intriguing debate that got kicked off late last year when Paul Elie, author of The Life You Save You Might Be Your Own, a fourfold biography of Flannery O’Connor, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, and Walker Percy, and the more recent Reinventing Bach, published an essay in the New York Times Sunday Magazine entitled, “Has Fiction Lost Its Faith?” With his eye mainly on novels having to do with Christian belief, Elie proclaimed: “If any patch of our culture can be said to be post-Christian, it is literature.” Or maybe it has all but disappeared from the literary landscape and is sorely in need of a renaissance.

Maybe the novel of belief is perfectly alive and well, though of a different character than the kinds of novel produced, inter alia, by Waugh, Greene, Percy and O’Connor in the last century.

The testament of mary torrent