Why is it so hard to write well about religion in fiction these days? I confess I don't see a lot of good examples out there. Everyone talks about Marilynne Robinson, and I really enjoy her but does she talk about religious belief? She talks about religious believers, to be sure, sometimes; but not, I think, much about the phenomenology of religious belief. Maybe I need to read more there. There are a couple good books about unbelievers struggling with God that I've read--especially Graham Greene's The End of the Affair and Albert Camus's The Fall, and Flannery O'Connor's always good for a shock. I suppose I should read Frederick Buechner's Godric, so maybe I'll do that this year; but I confess, before reading that, I can't think of a book I've read recently about a religious believer that isn't a bit treacly. (There is one book I read a while ago, which I'll talk about at the end of this post.)
I'm thinking about this because of this review of a new novel, which makes the case that "Wall’s book is more satisfying as a novel of marriage than of religion." Now to be clear, I've not read this book yet--but I think I will, as it looks to be a sort of echo of Wallace Stegner's Crossing to Safety, which is about human relationships from youth to at least middle age, and I'm really interested in these sorts of works, when I find them. (Another one is Laurie Colwin's Happy all the Time, which is one of my favorites.) But what the novel is supposed to do, I gather, among other things, is represent religious belief, and it seems (to the reviewer anyway) not to do that. I'm not surprised. It seems that, in an age of "representation" as a fundamental act of fiction writing, that religious belief is absent.
Surely this is partially to do with the demographics of fiction writers, and the american publishing industry. But I wonder if it is also not about the difficulty of using language and religion. Interestingly, film has had some pretty gripping depictions: Michael Tolkin's The Rapture, Roland Joffé's The Mission, Paul Schrader (esp his recent First Reformed), famously Terrence Malik. (Not a lot of religion in music, though--again, is it because of the centrality of words?) In other words, I don't think the central problem is that religion in literature is absent--I think the central problem is that religion in literature is hard.
And this is where the exception I mentioned above comes in. I actually think Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brody may be the most successful book on religious belief that I've read. Why do I think that? Well, because it takes very seriously the conversionist energy that I suspect may need to be (or that may strongly be recommended to be) at the heart of a novel about religious belief, and uses that conversionist energy to shatter the novel's narrative form. (Mark Salzman's Lying Awake may be the only novel I know that successfully narrates an achieved religious faith, though it does so by putting it in crisis.) If you've read Brody, you know that the "present" of the novel is a bit obscure. It seems to be the present of the end of the novel, the "achieved" position of resolved belief. (In that way it's not unlike Augustine's Confessions.) But it's not fully achieved throughout the novel, so in a way you're genuinely seeing from a God's eye point of view. Which means that Spark may think there needs to be a formal answer to my material question: religious belief cannot be represented without a transformation in the structures of experience that we take for granted.
Maybe, especially for Christian religious belief, the apocalyptic energy of faith contests the immanent narratological structure of the novel, its fundamentally bourgeois character. (I say that with no sneer intended.) Maybe that's the problem.
Why is this important? I can think of a couple reasons: first, as we grow into a real pluralism of the social order (and I think it's likely that we will), being able to understand the different experiences of reality that individuals possess will be increasingly necessary, even urgent. (We're not fully in a pluralistic society yet, I think, and good social theorists will tell you there are good reasons to be suspicious of anyone who tells you that we are, or that entering any such condition will be straightforward, or that living in it will be easy.) Second, part of the potential benefit of that potential pluralism is that we can learn from each other, that our sense of the range of human experiences may be amplified, enriched. I can say this in a kind of evangelical way, suggesting a determinate telos to that enrichment; but I can also (at least) say this in a William Jamesian Varieties of Religious Experience way, gesturing at a horizon of encounter that may need to remain somewhat indeterminate until we get there. For the purposes of this blog post, I can leave your reading of my words open to either construal.
As an aside: this would gain support from some consideration of Lionel Trilling's brilliant essay "Wordsworth and the Rabbis," where he suggests--well, much more than I can say here. Sometime I will dedicate a blog post to that brilliant piece. But not today.
As a postscript: Here's a piece on religion as represented in TV, with a brief bibliography that may be useful. And here's a piece by Paul Elie expanding in a more responsible way on my comments above about the odd absence of religious belief in contemporary literature.