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July 13, 2006
Eight Hail Marys
A list for Sky Cow Books
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
You don't have to watch The O.C. or listen to Death Cab For Cutie to see that the pervasive emotion of the new generation is what Walker Percy would call ennui: an empty dissatisfaction with the way things are without knowing exactly why. Cynicism and postmodernism go together like peanut butter and marshmallow fluff, but they make a rather unhealthy sandwich. The thing is, while Emo has only come into its own in the past decade or so, Generation Y-ers are not the first to experience ennui. The first epidemic seemed to sweep the intellectuals of the early 20th century. T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" (among other works) captured the spirit of modernism: shiny and new on the outside, but full of rotting hollow men on the inside.
But, as Joseph Pearce has observed in Literary Converts, out of this malaise, Grace saved a host of brilliant writers and poets. The grandfather of them all was G.K. Chesterton, whose irrepressible wit and Innocent Smith-like joy dumbfounded those modern artists who could think only in monochrome. His influence brought some of the 20th century's greatest novelists to the faith, mostly the Catholic faith (although men like C.S. Lewis and Eliot were content in high church Anglicanism).
For about forty years after Chesterton's death in 1936, there was a flood of incisive and brilliant novel-making. Even those novelists who resisted the Faith often had covert (and not so covert) struggles with God and His Church evidenced in their writings.
The following list is eight of my personal favorites out of this literary movement. They span almost one hundred years, two continents, but all are concerned with the same question: Is God the answer to the spiritual ennui we are all facing in this post-Christian world? Some give an exuberant Yes!; some can't find the hope to say so; some make you feel ridiculous for even asking such an obvious question. But they all see what the unbelieving world is missing, and they all point the way to the narrow and rocky road to salvation.
* * * * *
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
Arguably Waugh's most accomplished novel, Brideshead Revisited masquerades as a parable of upper-class vice and pre-war nostalgia. In the end, all the comforts are stripped away, and the reader is confronted with what Waugh saw as the center of the story: "the operation of divine grace" in the midst of a lackluster modern world. Plenty of fancy and humor of the driest sort. (#80 on the Modern Library list of top novels of the 20th century)
The Moviegoer - Walker Percy
Walker Percy indentifies many of the same symptoms of modernism in the American South that Waugh saw in post-war England: once the Faith is taken away, "ennui" sets in. Satirizing modern apathy, Percy shapes a surprisingly moving account of one young man who cannot find the faith or motivation to live in the modern world except in the nostalgia and pristine beauty of the silver screen. (#60 on the Modern Library list)
Brighton Rock - Graham Greene
The first of Graham Greene's novels dealing with the Catholic faith, Brighton Rock gives away Greene's silent shame of his own flirtation with apostasy. The antihero, Pinkie Brown, is an unstable teenage gangster whose hatred of the Church pushes him toward violent crime after violent crime, in the end leading to a final reckoning of faith and judgment. Greene seems to be drawing parallels throughout to Dostoevsky's Notes From the Underground.
A Handful of Dust - Evelyn Waugh
One of the more chilling satires of modernism. The story of a secular couple's apathetic response to a family tragedy and the emptiness of modern life. No one forgets the ending, which is simultaneously hilarious and chilling. (#34 on the Modern library List)
The Man Who Was Thursday - G.K. Chesterton
Chesterton's dizzying account of one poet's encounter with the chameleon-like figure, Sunday, who seems a little too wise and untamed for the modern world. Part mystery, part thriller, part fantasy, part comedy -- the reader won't quite have it figured out until the end. Which is just how Chesterton must have wanted it.
Wise Blood - Flannery O'Connor
O'Connor gives us an antihero, Hazel Motes, who founds the Church Without Christ. The grotesque at its most redemptive.
Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World - Walker Percy
Many years after The Moviegoer, Percy wrote about a protagonist (a descendant of Saint Thomas More) who feels suffocated by modernism, but can't quite figure out why. Set in the not-so-distant future, when the apocalypse is right around the corner, but no one seems to care.
The Picture of Dorian Grey - Oscar Wilde
Considering his reputation, including Oscar Wilde on this list might seem ironic. But God loves the prodigal. Wilde had an eleventh hour conversion to Catholicism after living almost five decades of debauchery. In The Picture of Dorian Grey - Wilde's only novel - it's impossible to miss the clues of Wilde's doomed fight against embracing the Faith.
Posted by Davey at July 13, 2006 03:26 PM