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a kid, I was never a big fan of the Sugar Creek Gang novels. I must
have been the odd boy out, however, because our church library had tons
of volumes, all of them lined up straight and tall on their own shelf as
if they were themselves proud of the universal parental and ecclesiastical
approval they brandished. Even today, those books stand in my memory
as truly righteous stories for truly righteous boys.
Of which I didn't know many. Perhaps that's why I didn't care for the books. Despite the fact my mother wanted me to read them, despite the fact the church library was full of them, despite the fact that the boys in their pages occasionally got in trouble, I found the novels rather odd. They were, to me, unreal. Often as not the boys were naughty, but they always came out of fray on their knees, in prayer, smelling as sweet as the rose of Sharon. I attended a Christian school, went to church twice every Sunday, and lived, for all practical purposes, in a verifiably Christian community. But among the Sugar Creek Gang boys, I didn't recognize a soul. They weren't real. So a decade and a half later, about the time I began to think seriously about writing books myself, my sense of becoming a Christian writer meant having to churn out the next generation of Sugar Creek Gang novels, a task I could easily forgo. Like almost every other boy from my generation and tradition, somewhere along the line I'd had to make a decision for or against the ministry, and when I'd decided not to become a preacher, I'd meant it. To me, writing Sugar Creek Gang novels was just another form of preaching. By that time, I'd grown to love two mainstream novelists who'd emerged from my own Dutch Reformed background, Peter DeVries and Frederic Manfred, both of whom had established national reputations. In De Vries's Blood of the Lamb, I found characters who looked and talked and acted a great deal more like people I knew than the boys in the Sugar Creek Gang. What's more, De Vries nearly made me cry. I may be the only reader in the world who loved Manfred's The Man Who Looked Like the Prince of Wales, but I did. But when I read it as a freshman in college, I once again found people I knew. Via Manfred's work, the felt life of literature became palpable, and I knew for the first time the magic of literature. Manfred made me want to write. But both De Vries and Manfred had left the church. So, for me the equation was quite elementary: write Sugar Creek Gang books and stay in the fellowship of believers, or write the truth and leave. Some may bridle at the parochialism of Christian higher education, but for me a Christian college education was mind-blowing because it offered a broader perspective of both Christianity and literature than I'd imagined and, in the process, totally destroyed the old equation. What I saw before me in college was writers whose work didn't assault my sense of either good fiction or faith. What I began to understand is that fiction that grounds itself in the truth does not have to be renege on commitment to God. I read the English novelist Graham Greene. I read the Canadian novelist Rudy Wiebe. I read Christian Century's own Shirley Nelson. And I read Flannery O'Connor. So strong was and is the voice of Flannery O'Connor that some of her titles have been summarily retired in the manner of a superstar's jersey. It simply isn't possible to use the phrase "a good man is hard to find," or make some character refer to his friends as "good country people" without suggesting her work. I first read O'Connor's fiction when I was a student at the small Christian college in Iowa, the college where I teach today, hundreds of miles from any literary center. At that time she was championed, even canonized, as the premiere Christian writer, the role model, the Joan of Arc of all onward, Christian soldiers. She was one of us, a Christian writer who made it big on sheer excellence. I was surprised, a few years later, when Raymond Carver assigned Mystery and Manners, O'Connor's book of essays, to a fiction writing class I took when Carver was a visiting lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He told us he thought no other book on the craft was quite as comprehensive, quite as simple, quite as strong. He said we all had to read it--the whole thing, not just selected essays. So I did. And I blushed when I read lines like this from "The Fiction Writer and His Country": "I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. This means that for me the meaning of life is centered in our Redemption by Christ and what I see in the world I see in its relation to that. I don't think that this is a position that can be taken halfway or one that is particularly easy in these times to make transparent in fiction." Today, almost thirty years and several books of fiction later, I still hold before me the work of Flannery O'Connor, even though I'm not the symbolist she is and likely never will be, given her Roman Catholic sacramentalism and my own steep Protestantism. But today I've got more heroes, more role models to demonstrate ways to link faith and writing. I've got Wendell Berry, Doris Betts, Andre Dubus, Ron Hansen, Madeline L'Engle, Lee Smith, John Updike, Larry Woiwode, and more, many more, in what seems to be an ever-burgeoning group of American writers whose minds and souls understand both sides of the equation: first, that fiction which blatantly preaches isn't literature at all; and second, that literature which does not take into account the undeniable religious impulse in all of us fails to negotiate the whole territory of our humanness. But a crowd of good role models does not necessarily make the job of writing a novel any easier. Those "Christian" writers who, like me, live within the community of believers face a task which, in many respects, hasn't changed substantially from what it might have been three decades ago in the world I lived in as a boy. Wonderful, devout believers--good friends, compassionate human beings--don't always see eye-to-eye about what is or what isn't righteousness. What I may see as an deep plunge into the depths of human sin, other believers will see as shameful, filthy, and unbecoming of a Christian bound by the words of the apostle to think only about "whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable." Some good Christians--Christians I pray with--see the use of vulgarity and profanity, language today as ubiquitous as the media itself, as beyond the pale. I draw their ire when I say a naughty word. Years ago, my mother offered to buy me the very finest electronic typewriter I could find if only I'd promise not to write bad words. I kept my old beast. But there is a market for squeaky clean fiction today, just as there was when I was a boy. For almost fifty years, the Christian Booksellers Association (CBA), an organization of 2,500 bookstores in the US, has provided evangelical Christian readers with novels and non-fiction general interest books as a supplement to the annually strong business they do in Bibles, hymnals, and biblical reference texts. What the CBA calls "Christian products," which includes much more than books, annually brings in three billion dollars or more. Even though I didn't choose to write this generation's Sugar Creek Gang stories, others have. The castle walls around the CBA bookstores successfully keeps the infidels out. The criteria by which books are chosen are very rigid--even though the CBA itself very quickly tells you that they don't stand guard on the walls of Zion. Publishers who look to market in CBA stores are very much aware of the thin-skinned sensibilities of bookstore owners, and violating the code means banishment from the aisles, stockpiles in the factory, and early remaindering. What does pass muster? A clear sense of a "Christian," evangelical vision is required, an open acknowledgment of orthodox Christian faith. But many bookstores' written or unwritten guidelines also cover subject matter, style, and word choice (any profanity will keep you out), because part of the mission is not to offend anyone in the pew--there are biblical injunctions against causing offense after all, and many of the devout will be more than happy to offer quick reference to chapter and verse. In many CBA stores, the only potentially scandalous fare on the shelves is the Bible itself, whose seamy stories always manage to get by, creating the impression that it is the only book in the store not written by a Christian. The CBA bookstore, right there between The Gap and Victoria's Secret in hundreds of shopping malls, has become a cultural center for politically conservative American evangelicals. Christian writers who choose to write exclusively for the that market, therefore, are forever ghettoized. A significant percentage of those customers who patronize CBA stores would not, because of their faith, darken the doorway of a Barnes and Noble. They want their stores, like their reading material, perfectly safe. On the other hand, many a Walden Books' patron wouldn't enter a CBA store for fear of being proselytized--and they would be. The result, in both marketing and readership, is a vast chasm that separates evangelical Christian books from the mainline readership, something that threatens those writers who profess the Christian faith, but who see a world much less sanitized than that prescribed and enforced by CBA bookstore censors. Many Christian writers find themselves too worldly or too earthy for those rigid constraints, but too religious in orientation for mainline publishers and agents. The Mason-Dixon line that separates the American Booksellers Association and the Christian Booksellers Association means that some developing Christian writers are intimidated by CBA publishers, who question their faith based on their work, and ABA publishers, who question their work based on their faith. Last year, a newspaper reviewer told me she liked a recently published novel of mine, even though she'd thought she wouldn't when the review was assigned her. "Why does the book say the word Christian on the back cover?" she asked me. "Now nobody is going to read it." Yet the same novel was reviewed almost fearfully in some Christian publications by reviewers who claimed it should be read very carefully since its content included references to homosexuality, drug use, and adultery. We need also to acknowledge the fact that some "Christian" writers (I know the word is problematic as an adjective) are castigated by secular critics who view their work as Christian apologetics. Fred Buechner has suffered such criticism, as has Walker Percy, whose novelistic visions seem justly framed to make him a twentieth-century Jeremiah, maybe the closest thing we have to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Doris Betts' new novel _________________ was recently criticized by a critic in the Washington Post as "____________________." What I'm coming to is this: it is not at all easy to write novels and believe, like O'Connor, that Truth does, in fact, exist in spades. Betts herself calls the work of the Christian writer to a strategy of "whispering hope." Is it possible to write stories as if one weren't a believer? If it is, what does that fact say about belief itself? Today, most everyone agrees that writing imaginative literature is a process of quite personal discovery. For any writer, therefore, to believe any a priori truth before she puts the pen to the page may seem not only difficult, but murderous--the effort is bound for failure. Yet, for the orthodox Christian, truth does exists--Christ died that we might live. Believing that--really believing that--does place boundaries on one's work, as it did on O'Connor. For despite the heavy doses of both humor and violence in her work, she was certainly still a preacher. When criticized for the violence in some of her stories, she told an audience that in a world antagonistic to the Christian faith it is sometimes necessary to bang people up side the head to get their attention. She wanted, clearly but symbolically, to tell the truth as she saw it--that the truth of God's love was made flesh in Christ. Belief is central, as O'Connor says. And yet, for some of us at least, belief is a strange bird, since believing does not for a moment relieve us totally of certain and substantial moments of unbelief. No less a saint than King David suffered his share of doubts, moments when for some unknown reason God Almighty seemed to have left the building. Psalm 13 is a fascinating little piece of writing; so vehement is David of God's absence that his call to the Lord is chilling in its antagonism. Yet, a moment later on the page, David is reconciled. There's a subtle paradox at work here, something that can be negotiated only as mutually exclusive assertions. Christians believe--certainly we do; but there are times in all of our lives when we doubt with just as much certainty. We believe and we doubt. Our doubt is not so much a manifestation of our sin against God as an emblem of all-too-fully human inability to grasp the whole of the gospel. After all, even the disciples, who were there with Jesus Christ, who saw him teach and perform masterfully designed miracles, didn't know him totally. Even they doubted. Faith--deep, abiding faith--does not for a minute preclude doubt, not in humans. And humans, finally, is all we writers have to work with. Those Christian writers who don't entertain the possibility of doubt are simply not comprehending the reality of our human condition. The unreality of the Sugar Creek Gang novels was not that everybody got saved at the end (although those episodes were hard to take), but that everything always simply worked out. Sometimes, in life, things don't work out. As the bumper sticker quite poignantly maintains, shit happens--often enough, it seems, to make the epithet breath with validity. So while Christian writers may well carry a priori faith into the task of writing, that doesn't mean that that very faith will not or should not be tested, poked, and prodded in the process of writing, just as it is in life itself. Halfway through a novel I recently wrote I knew that my own belief about human forgiveness was going to be tested to the core. I believed then, and I do today, that human beings are capable of forgiving each other the most abominable sins; the Bible says it's true, the creeds say so, Christ even commands it in his parables. But in the process of writing the novel, I realized that the story itself was testing my belief, and the conflict between what I believed and what I didn't know shook me to the core. I couldn't sleep. My job was to investigate a truth I believed by giving it human flesh, a task I wasn't sure I could accomplish, because, finally, I was sure I really believed it. In Oscar Hijuelos's fine little novel, Mr. Ives' Christmas, a father whose son was murdered learns to forgive the killer. Hijuelos claims that the writing of that book--his pursuit of the truth of human forgiveness--was itself a religious experience. What he was likely doing was proving something to himself, something he may not have believed himself when he began the story, but came to know after pursuing the truth in the process of writing. It is possible to begin the process of discovery we call writing with a basic conviction about Truth, as long as we allow that truth to be tested--just as it is often in the lives we lead. What good fiction has always done is approximate life. When what we read creates a world we recognize and feel deeply, it succeeds. The mysteries of life, as O'Connor liked to say, can only be communicated through the manners with which we live. Writers who don't know what it means to be human will never create fiction which leads to understanding. And what exactly are we? An odd fusion of failure and success, capable of becoming heroes and goats, aces and asses, all in the same afternoon. Our capacity for chicanery is no more or less than our potential for compassion, and we are fully capable of delivering one outfitted in the trappings of the other. We are indelibly affected by sin, even though we carry nothing less than the image of God. We are, all of us, absolutely fascinating, and the only way to tell the truth about us is to tell it all. But I have an agenda--let there be no doubt. For me at least there is such a thing as Truth--not only about us but about our Creator. Despite the fact that I am not a preacher, I know that my job is still to bring something of the good news in a form peculiar to and consonant with my trade as a fiction writer. Somewhere, somehow, my faith has to tell, or I'm not sure it's faith at all. We believe the tale, not the teller, after all. The bottom line for me is hope. What I feel compelled to bring to the work, finally, is hope, for the truth, by my heart, is that hope exists. It is there. It is real. It is promised to those who believe. It may be no more my job to preach the gospel than it is the job of a mason, an editor, a farmer, or a salesclerk; but it is my thanks-filled joy to glorify God in all that I do--in my roles as father, teacher, husband, and writer. There are as many different Christian writers as there are different Christians. But for me, telling stories is a matter of truth--the truth about being human, about the world we live in, and another world we are promised in the name of our Lord. In short, my calling is to tell the truth, and the truth is the gospel. I could try to refine that statement, but I'll let the narrator of my most recent book tell it the way he sees it because, in this case, he speaks for me too. "The blessing of the gospel, after all, is not simply happiness, but eternal joy that knows so much more than a smiley face shows, joy which comes from two humbling realizations: that our sin is real--and that it is gone. That's the whole story, the real good news." |