Brian Doyle |
In the long and colorful story of American literature, which began many thousands of years ago with stories around thousands of campfires, several Catholic writers stand in the very front rank of the best storytellers we have ever had.
There is Flannery O’Connor, whose stories (novellas, really) are piercingly about bruised grace and the irrepressible miracle of belief in a world that belittles faith at every turn. There is J.F. Powers, whose stories (and wonderful novel Morte d’Urban) beautifully caught the rise of Catholicism from ostracized minority to established social pillar in the twentieth century. There are Annie Dillard and Barry Lopez, who brought a fresh emphasis to attentiveness as a ‘necessary muscle for prayer,’ as Simone Weil wrote. There is Andre Dubus, renowned, and rightly so, for his stories, but also a wonderful essayist about grace, Eucharist, and faith – see his lovely collection Meditations from a Moveable Chair, the single best collection of Catholic essays I have ever read. And many more – Mary Gordon, Ron Hansen, the superb essayist Richard Rodriquez. But the finest Catholic writer in America today may well be a wry gentle woman who will be visiting the University of Portland on February 26: the great novelist Alice McDermott.
Seven novels, one of which (Charming Billy) won the National Book Award, and several of which were finalists for a bevy of other prizes. A gifted essayist and speaker, blunt and honest and penetrating about Catholic life in America especially as the Church morphs from powerful corporate entity back toward the alluring outsider idea it was at its inception. Mother, wife, Johns Hopkins professor, parishioner – Alice McDermott is many things, but foremost she is, I think, a riveting novelist who owns Irish Catholic New York, from the 1930s through the 1970s, just as William Faulkner owned his slice of Mississippi, and Walker Percy owned his piece of Louisiana, and John Steinbeck owned the Salinas Valley, and Ken Kesey owned his rough wild burly chunk of Oregon.
Three of her seven novels seem to me masterpieces: Charming Billy, the story of the tumultuous life and loves of Billy Lynch and his family; After This, which covers three decades in the life of the Keane family, from the Second World War to the Vietnam War; and her exquisite recent Someone, the story of Marie from Brooklyn – not especially lovely or dashing or charming, certainly not famous, just a quiet woman you would never even notice on the train; but McDermott brings her so wholly and resoundingly to life that you see her holiness and grace, her patience and endurance, and you will not easily be able to forget her after the book is closed.
In recent years I have read two novels that seemed to me as close to perfectly crafted as they could be by human hand. Both of them shimmered with attentiveness to the small, the ungainly, the easily-ignored; both were about quiet people who are the very antithesis of a culture in which would-be celebrities play the loud lewd clown for cash and acclaim; and both were written by American women who are eloquent and articulate about how their deep Christian faith informs their writing. One of those two books was Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead; the other is McDermott’s Someone.
McDermott, I note with pride in the University of Portland’s remarkable Schoenfeldt Visiting Writers Series, will be reading from and talking about her work in the University’s Buckley Center Auditorium at 7 p.m. on Thursday, February 26, free and open to all (I would get there early for seats, was I you). If you, like me, are absorbed by glorious literature, especially Catholic writing in headlong pursuit of love and hope and grace beyond our understanding, then you will, I hope, join me at Oregon’s Catholic university when one of the great Catholic writers in our history steps to the lectern, and begins to tell a story. Our faith began with a Word, after all, uncountable years ago; every one of us tries to encapsulate and share the story of the Word made flesh, with every breath we draw; and when one of that story’s greatest artists comes to our village, how can we miss the chance to hear her spin a tale?
Brian Doyle is the editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland. He is the author most recently of A Book of Uncommon Prayer (Ave Maria Press).
