Longing for an Absent God: Faith and Doubt in Great American Fiction by Nick Ripatrazone (review)

Longing for an Absent God presents a satisfying survey of several major fiction writers of the contemporary period, bound together by their diverse relationships to Roman Catholicism. It suggests as a loose thesis that a sincerity of belief strikingly present to Catholicism in the early twentieth century has given way to a more complicated literary dynamic and aesthetic, to the “tension and interplay between lapsed and practicing Catholic writers” and their powerful articulations of the relationship between faith and doubt (33). Perhaps the greatest benefit of this book is to place writers not always featured as Catholic (such as Toni Morrison) in the company of some usual suspects (Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy), and in doing so to suggest the richness of a Catholic tradition that has navigated currents of faith and doubt in complicated ways.

In the introduction to the book, Ripatrazone sets up the terms of his argument using brief and exemplary readings of Don Delillo and Ron Hansen. Here Ripatrazone shows that a longing for faith is common to both lapsed and practicing Catholics in the secular frame of contemporary America. This is one of the book’s strongest chapters, and rightly so, since it sets the important terms of its survey: that the desire for God persists, whether writers remain in the church or have left it.

Following the introduction, the book operates in three general movements. The first reviews authors taken as faithful to Roman Catholicism, and who use their literary work to explore the challenges of faith without significantly undermining it: Graham Greene, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and Andre Dubus. The second movement, which comprises the great portion of the book, reviews those authors who most clearly exemplify the rising doubt and lingering desire Ripatrazone aims to unearth and explain. This is the book’s most interesting portion, with readings of Don Delillo, Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, and an especially compelling chapter on Louise Erdrich. The final chapter reviews two recent fiction writers uncompromisingly committed to Catholic faith: Alice McDermott and Phil Klay. The implication here is that a period of ambivalent faith in Catholic literary culture may have given way in the twenty-first century to a newly committed set of religious voices.

Those readers interested in the intersection between theology and contemporary fiction will find Longing for an Absent God engaging and clear. Academics may find the readings and references thin in places, but I don’t take scholars to be the book’s primary audience, so this is not a significant critique. I do, however, want to register two concerns, one with the book’s assumptions and another with its scope. First, from the opening page Catholic faith is quite uncritically likened by Ripatrazone to belief—that is, to cognitive assent. When writers are read as ambivalent about their Catholicism in this book, their ambivalence usually has to do with their uncertainties around belief, with their complicated relationships to doctrine. But the notion that faithfulness is simply and directly synonymous with cognitive doctrinal assent is a particularly European, modern, even Protestant, assumption (though Luther himself described New Testament pistis as trust rather than belief). The book implies that what makes one unambivalently Catholic is unambivalent belief, but religion is surely more complicated than that. Relatedly, I wonder if the book inherits this limiting frame from the assumptions of the authors who undergird its beginning. For figures such as O’Connor, Percy, and Delillo, belief (or the lack of it) is what matters. But for figures such as Morrison and Erdrich, there is more to Catholic religion than the conceptual inheritance (and colonialist context) of the Counter-Reformation. For this reason, I was sorry to see the Chicana novelist Ana Castillo not included in the volume. In a book about American fiction, it is odd to see the English writer Graham Greene included and the Chicagoan Ana Castillo left aside. Be that as...