God: Stories - Review

Commonweal, March 12, 1999 by David J. DeLaura

Edited by C. Michael Curtis Houghton Mifflin, $30, 400 pp.

David J. DeLaura

The blunt title of this collection mirrors the even bolder God: A Biography, Jack Miles's 1995 bestseller. C. Michael Curtis, in his thoughtful introduction, speaks of his own religious reawakening in 1977; not surprisingly, a number of the stories gathered here first appeared in the Atlantic, where Curtis has been a senior editor for many years. The book conveys, as few theologians and sociologists have done, the emotional texture of some unsettling encounters with God.

Although some of these stories were written in the past couple of decades, the volume as a whole captures a distinct period, now past, though the spiritual condition it captures is by no means merely historical. Of the twenty-five writers represented here, only three were born after 1945. As a result, these short stories - many written by masters of that subtly suggestive form - will be most engaging for readers old enough, and literate enough, to have had personal experience of that interim culture, when the mainstream Protestant churches remained largely central, unchallenged realities of American life.

These stories, many set in the decades after World War II, and written by and for - and usually about - solidly middle-class North Americans, sometimes present a God of faint presence as well as loving concern. But that mild divinity - when he does put in an appearance - seems close to the gentle Jesus of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Liberal Protestantism. Evangelical preachers, in a number of stories, in effect offer dramatic contrast, one that helps us assess the strengths and weaknesses of educated Christianity. This is the older Evangelicalism of the ill-educated in small towns - ranging from the American South to Ontario, Canada, and South Dakota - and before the coming of high-tech televangelism, the suburban New South, and militant fundamentalism as a global political threat. But in any case the religious experience of Evangelicals, here and in the past, has rarely if ever been viewed by serious writers from the inside, and with sympathy.

Catholicism, variously present in at least six stories, is a decidedly indistinct phenomenon. James Joyce's "Grace" is a pleasure to reread, as is J. F. Powers's equally masterful "Zeal" - first published in Commonweal in 1956; but Andre Dubus's finely meditative story of a divorced Catholic man coming to terms with loneliness, with the help of a Catholic priest friend, offers only a glancing sense of his specifically Catholic sensibility. The stories of Jewish life and identity by Bernard Malamud, Cynthia Ozick, and a young Philip Roth make the reader sigh for a now expired age of fiction that explored the serious comedy of ethnic and religious identity in America. The devil has his moments in this very American collection, but plainly we can never again imagine (or perhaps even comprehend) the high baroque drama of flesh and spirit, sin and salvation, that marked the early twentieth-century fictions of Bernanos and Mauriac. In stories by Alice Munro and Joe Ashby Porter, hot-gospelers terrorize and enthrall their followers and others; but there are no calls to extraordinary virtue, or to a Franciscan ecstasy of union and self-emptying, little sense of the awesome older Mysterium Tremendum and the Dies Irae, and nothing of the more demanding parts of the Sermon on the Mount. Not with a bang....

The best of these stories, with only occasional rumblings of larger cultural shifts, succeed in registering the interior lives of their protagonists. This fact helps the reader see that the widely noted recent lifting of the taboo against religion in the mainstream press is less a sympathetic response to spiritual longings than a recognition of the highly politicized issues that fracture the denominations, long in decline and facing alternative spiritual options, ranging from a revitalized Evangelicalism on the one side to postbiblical self-improvement programs on the other. Paradoxically, the churches - while steadily losing influence in an even more fragmented and individualistic society - find themselves entangled in many more public and divisive arguments (for example, religion in the schools and the public square) simply absent in these period pieces. The book, then, is unintentionally a good index of immense and irreversible recent changes, both in church and society. The scope of this collection is thus defined by its conspicuous absences. Probably the most notable recent dissent in the churches has centered around sexual morality and reproductive biology. But the comedy and anguish of young Catholics regarding birth control, in David Lodge's novels of the 1960s, would be scarcely comprehensible to young Catholics in the 1990s. Of the two most vexed religious/political issues of our day, one - abortion - has simply not risen above the horizon here. The other, the morality and social status of homosexuality, is alluded to in four stories; but fascinatingly, only one, the subtle J. F. Powers story, treats it thematically, associating it - in the resonant but strangely distant terms of the older French Catholic novelists - with the mystery of evil.