Appendix B: More Marilynne

On Saturday, January 24, 2009 at a packed event at the Housing Works Bookstore Café in Manhattan, the National Book Critics Circle announced the finalists for its forthcoming book awards, covering books published in 2008. Books competed in the areas of fiction, general nonfiction, biography, autobiography, poetry, and criticism, and the competition was hot.

Fiction Finalists
Roberto Bolaño, 2666. Farrar, Straus
Marilynne Robinson, Home, Farrar, Straus
Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project, Riverhead
M. Glenn Taylor, The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart, West Virginia University Press
Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kittredge, Random

Bolaño will win, as he recently died underappreciated, but still . . . more proof that Christian literature is recognized and rewarded.

Appendix B: Another National Award?

I know I beat the Marilynne Robinson drum a lot, but there’s a bunch of reasons for that: 1) She’s an excellent author; 2) She’s an openly Christian writer; 3) Despite early recognition earlier with Housekeeping, she’s blossomed later in life, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Gilead in 2005; 4) She's been wildly successful without compromising her beliefs or her artistic vision.

I’m not alone in this assessment, as the Sunday Times calls her the best writer in English today.

Now her latest novel, Home, has been nominated for a National Book Award (almost ensuring she won’t be nominated for this year’s Pulitzer). I’ve reviewed it here, but you should read the book if you want to dig into a rich prodigal son story.

Enjoy a longer interview here at the Paris Review.

Appendix A

Another Prize Winner?
Marilynne Robinson's Home is out & it's a complementary tale to 2004's Pultizer winner Gilead. Expect more prize nominations for this one. Here's an audio interview.

Lazarus, Come Forth!
Here's a short, short story that's more Jewish in sensibility than Christian, but still an interesting update.

A Moment of Silence
The great lit editor Robert Giroux recently died. He published and created literary history with T.S. Eliot and many others. But he also missed on a few classic books...

Rejoice Saints!

Scroll down to the first starred review in the latest Publisher's Weekly!

Or don't. I can't wait to shout this to the heavens! To quote:

Home Marilynne Robinson. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25 (336p) ISBN 978-0-374-29910-1

Robinson's beautiful new novel, a companion piece to her Pulitzer Prize–winning Gilead, is an elegant variation on the parable of the prodigal son's return. The son is Jack Boughton, one of the eight children of Robert Boughton, the former Gilead, Iowa, pastor, who now, in 1957, is a widowed and dying man. Jack returns home shortly after his sister, 38-year-old Glory, moves in to nurse their father, and it is through Glory's eyes that we see Jack's drama unfold. When Glory last laid eyes on Jack, she was 16, and he was leaving Gilead with a reputation as a thief and a scoundrel, having just gotten an underage girl pregnant. By his account, he'd since lived as a vagrant, drunk and jailbird until he fell in with a woman named Della in St. Louis. By degrees, Jack and Glory bond while taking care of their father, but when Jack's letters to Della are returned unopened, Glory has to deal with Jack's relapse into bad habits and the effect it has on their father. In giving an ancient drama of grace and perdition such a strong domestic setup, Robinson stakes a fierce claim to a divine recognition behind the rituals of home. (Sept.)

Do I hear a hallelujah somewhere?

It’s Gotta Be The Atheists!

We can’t whine that the mainstream publishing industry is unreceptive, even hostile, to literature that has Christian characters, themes, and/or metaphors. There’s just too much evidence to the contrary. (And no, I’m not talking about Christian book publishers that, with few exceptions, are by Christians to Christians, and that only Christians know exist.)

Major awards and publicity have been given to overtly Christian literature in the last decade. To name just a few:

• Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, a book about an aging Calvinist minister writing to his young son (how’s that for an exciting concept?), won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005.
• Kent Haruf’s Plainsong was fiction finalist for the National Book Award in 1999.
• Leif Enger’s Peace Like a River (2001) was a Book of the Month choice and featured in an NPR book club discussion.
• Brett Lott’s Jewel (1991) was an Oprah choice in 1999.
• Still one of the most prestigious forums for short fiction, The Atlantic Monthly’s annual Fiction Issue (on newsstands now) features three (of six) short stories that involve religious faith. Last year, there was one—Tim Gautreaux’s “The Safe.”

True, it’s not an overabundance of riches, though once you start including highly-regarded authors who include Christians or characters struggling with God in their works, the list noticeably inflates.

Shooting The Canon

This doesn’t include the Western Canon, where two of the all-time best were Christians:

• Many consider Dante’s Divine Comedy to be a greater poetic accomplishment than anything Shakespeare created.
• Leo Tolstoy created two fascinating prose classics—War and Peace, Anna Karenina—that are too often known for their length instead of their brilliance. He was also a master of short stories (“Master and Man”) and novellas (The Death of Ivan Illych).

Then there’s these Christian slackers:

• Flannery O’Conner’s short stories (“Parker’s Back,” “Revelation,” “A Good Man is Hard to Find”) were powerful enough to power her into the canon.
• Graham Greene (The End of the Affair, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter) is said to have been short-listed for the Nobel Prize for literature.
• C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia are undisputed children’s favorites.
• Fyodor Dostoyevsky is still proclaimed the most psychologically astute novelist who has ever written, penning Crime and Punishment, Notes from the Underground, and The Brothers Karamazov.

Defining their Christianity is not my intent. Showcasing their unflinching portrayal of Christianity, its themes and characters, is.
The Truth We Ignore?
Publishing isn’t nearly as biased against Christian works as it is against inferior works, (though it sometimes seems too eager to publish the inferior). Perhaps the problem isn’t hostile atheists, but Apostolics unwilling to bleed on the page for their calling. Perhaps we’d rather kind of give it a go from the safety of our churches rather than dive into the requirements publishing today demands.

Like Christian musical artists unwilling to move to Nashville to risk their lucky break, we may find ourselves not attending writing conferences (where agents and publishers examine manuscripts), or taking writing courses with experienced professionals (that costs money!), or going the extra mile for our calling, then wonder why we can’t get connected to major publishers. Everything takes work.

Most of the titles mentioned are the current and classic standards of literary excellence. If we’re to continue this tradition we must read them, study them, love them, and then seek to build upon them..

I think we can do it. I know we will do it. Wanna be first?