The Novel as Church: Preaching to Readers in Contemporary Fiction

4. Keeping Faith: The Troubled Preacher in Updike and Lodge

65 s The Troubled Preacher in Updike and Lodge keepiNg faiTh 4 The troubled “man of God”1 struggling with faith issues and wrestling with spiritual, vocational, or intellectual doubt appears in many guises in contemporary novels. he appears as Father Angwin in hilary Mantel’s Fludd,2 Barney Hardstaff in Catherine Fox’s The Benefits of Passion,3 edmond Music in Alan Isler’s Clerical Errors,4 Colley in William Golding’s Rites of Passage,5 and in other recently published fiction such as Margaret Forster’s Is There Anything You Want?,6 stephanie Johnson’s Belief,7 Geraldine brooks’ March,8 and Peter hobbs’ The Short Day Dying.9 so ubiquitous is this character that, in a review of Jonathan Tulloch’s Give UsThis Day, a recent novel about a roman Catholic priest transferred to a run-down parish in northeast england after falling victim to sexual scandals, the reviewer invented a new genre—“the ‘loss of faith’ novel [that] despite its unfashionable subject-matter . . . is . . . entirely contemporary.”10 There is little doubt that this is fiction reflecting real life, in that each year clergy leave parish ministry for various reasons, yet the frequent occurrence of the character is also because he is a convenient novelistic invention enabling authors to explore the life/faith dichotomy and the dissonance of faithless men in positions requiring faith. As a result, this character has significantly influenced the imagined world of novelists and readers, where there are two common causes of trouble for preachers. One is the struggle with issues of personal morality or belief. In these cases, the tormented soul, wrestling either with doubts about the Christian faith or with 66 The Novel as Church s inconsistencies between personal behavior and Christian profession, is tortured on a rack when proclaiming Christianity from the pulpit, and there are likely to be external manifestations of the internal processes. The other challenge to faith is caused by natural or human-made disaster , most notoriously, in the twentieth century, the Jewish shoah and, in the first few years of the twenty-first, the terrorist attack of 9/11 and the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004. Neither art nor theology should divert their gaze from these or whatever else challenges them, for the enormity of such atrocities demands serious artistic, theological, and philosophical reflection, despite Theodor Adorno’s frequently cited and often misquoted comment that “writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”11 Doing theology is more difficult than it was before 9/11, and preachers certainly have to be more circumspect than they were before 2001, yet the religious undertones of many natural and human-made disasters make theological reflection even more imperative. Two novels with troubled preachers—one troubled although he makes no pretense of keeping faith, the other wrestling with faith in the face of private and public adversity—arise for discussion. The first is Thomas Marshfield in John Updike’s A Month of Sundays;12 the other is Austin brierley in David Lodge’s How Far Can You Go?13 Although Lodge’s novel was published in America under the title Souls and Bodies , its original british title is preferred in this chapter because it foregrounds the issue of troubled faith. A Month of Sundays, the journal of a priest forced to take a month’s sabbatical in a clinic for reprobate clerics, is in many respects a problem novel. Updike declared it to be his favorite, yet it received a muted reception and has proved to many readers to be objectionable and unlikeable; its interiorized pornography often assumes gratuitousness, and its objectification of women, the gentle readers to whom the book is addressed, becomes all the more difficult by their silence throughout . Updike, or his narrator, if a distinction can indeed be made between them, gives no unmediated voice to the women remembered or lusted after. Jane, with whom Marshfield remembers losing his virginity , is spread naked across the novel’s page with her hands tucked behind her head like a centerfold, voicelessly but bodily inviting attention . The novel frequently violates sacred and semisacred texts with immature sexual innuendoes: for instance, when he writes about his s Keeping Faith 67 mother, Marshfield’s memory of the Bunyan verse “he who is down need fear no fall” and the Psalmist’s comment that “All they that go down to the dust shall bow before him” leads to a paragraph in his...