Yes, they are holy in their own way, and Powers gives them worthy dénouements that befit a Gospel parable, but at heart they are Midwestern American men who want a promotion in the corporation. Father Urban and Father Joe (the protagonists of Powers’s novels) are not saints or mystics neither is even a pious man. What Wood and more than a few other critics over the years missed is that Powers’s chosen subjects-in cassocks or nay-are inevitably all-American, and both his novels as well as many of the short stories are careful (and yes, ironically pessimistic) studies of American mid-century life and ambition. Note how James Wood began his The New Yorker essay on Powers in 2000 after the author’s works were republished (they had all gone out of print) by The New York Review of Books: “Does anyone, really, like priests?” Wood noted that “it seems sadly likely that the combination of Powers’s refined style, ironic pessimism, and chosen subject-priests and more priests-will eventually deal his work a second death.” Powers didn’t write about something more compelling. But you wouldn’t bury a writer with “Hemingway: Wrote About Drunks,” nor “Melville: Wrote About a Whale.” There’s a sneer behind the headline, the passing regret that J. I suppose it’s not entirely wrong: Both of his novels ( Morte D’Urban in 1962, Wheat That Springeth Green in 1988) and many of his short stories had priests as protagonists, and surely no American writer has ever captured the quotidian existence of parish priests better than Powers. This finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction for 1957, the winner of that award in 1963, a writer hailed as a literary lion by everyone from Flannery O’Connor to Philip Roth to Mary Gordon to Frank O’Connor, was dispatched upon his death in 1999 with “J. ![]() You wouldn’t bury a writer with “Hemingway: Wrote About Drunks,” nor “Melville: Wrote About a Whale.” ![]() With what words would you bury Evelyn Waugh? The Times chose “Evelyn Waugh, Satirical Novelist, Is Dead at 62.” His greatest triumph, Brideshead Revisited, is described as (not kidding) “a tragic recounting of the decline of a great English family.” ![]() Any survey of the accounts of lives of religious novelists is all the evidence you need. What is worse, a sin of commission or one of omission? In the case of the obituary writers of The New York Times over the decades, the latter failings call out more loudly for repentance.
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