“Has Fiction Lost Its Faith?” — Cont.

The novelist Dara Horn followed up on my New York Times Book Review essay about the place of Christian belief in contemporary fiction with a kindred essay (also for the TBR) about Jewish fiction. “There doesn’t seem to be any corresponding dry spell among contemporary Jewish fiction writers,” she declares. “On the contrary, a surprising number can’t seem to avoid engaging with faith, even when they pickle their protagonists.” Horn thinks the reason is that Judaism is centrally about remembering, and that the act of remembering sponsors the art of fiction. She is probably right, but it seems to me that there is plenty of remembering in current fiction by Catholic writers —- so much remembering, so much testimony about the mnemonic claims of the Catholic past, that it all gets in the way of the question of what it means to believe here and now, in North America circa 2013.

• 9 September 2013