Longing for an Absent God: Faith and Doubt in Great American Fiction

by Nick Ripatrazone

Overview

Longing for an Absent God unveils the powerful role of faith and doubt in the American literary tradition. Nick Ripatrazone explores how two major strands of Catholic writers--practicing and cultural--intertwine and sustain each other.

Ripatrazone explores the writings of devout American Catholic writers in the years before the Second Vatican Council through the work of Flannery O'Connor, J. F. Powers, and Walker Percy; those who were raised Catholic but drifted from the church, such as the Catholic-educated Don DeLillo and Cormac McCarthy, the convert Toni Morrison, the Mass-going Thomas Pynchon, and the ritual-driven Louise Erdrich; and a new crop of faithful American Catholic writers, including Ron Hansen, Phil Klay, and Alice McDermott, who write Catholic stories for our contemporary world. These critically acclaimed and award-winning voices illustrate that Catholic storytelling is innately powerful and appealing to both secular and religious audiences.

Longing for an Absent God demonstrates the profound differences in the storytelling styles and results of these two groups of major writers--but ultimately shows how, taken together, they offer a rich and unique American literary tradition that spans the full spectrum of doubt and faith.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781506451961
Publisher:	Augsburg Fortress, Publishers
Publication date:	03/03/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	300
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Nick Ripatrazone is the culture editor for Image Journal, a contributing editor at The Millions, and a columnist for Literary Hub. He has written for Rolling Stone, GQ, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and Esquire. He is also the author of Longing for an Absent God and Wild Belief. He lives in Andover Township, New Jersey, with his wife and twin daughters.

Editorial Reviews

12/23/2019

Ripatrazone (Ember Days), culture editor at Image Journal, argues in this piquant analysis that the interplay between lapsed and practicing Catholic authors sustains “a unique and significant literary culture.” For Ripatrazone, both groups engage in similar forms of storytelling—“corporal, messy, strange, and steeped in the sins of real people”—though he argues they do so to different ends. While the book’s analysis of well-known 20th-century authors who were Catholic, such as Flannery O’Connor and Andre Dubus, feels thin, chapters on Toni Morrison and Louise Erdrich are strong, exploring the ways that black and Chippewa cultures and ways of storytelling have differed or responded to Catholic writing. Though Ripatrazone builds his analysis around the differences and shared tensions between lapsed and practicing Catholics—where practicing Catholics used their faith to ground their fiction, lapsed Catholics approached religion through themes of identity and redemption—he leaves uninterrogated another tension that pervades the book: that between Catholics from birth and converts, whose ideas of storytelling were shaped outside of the Catholic tradition. His uneven analysis leaves this and many other tantalizing angles unexplored, but its articulation of a Catholic literature inclusive of—and more importantly defined by—practicing and lapsed Catholics is a valuable one. Scholars of modern American Catholicism will find much food for thought here. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

"A talented storyteller in his own right, Nick Ripatrazone brings to life the movements, the people, and the thoughts that have put the Catholic imagination on full display over the last century." —Matt Malone, S.J., editor in chief, America magazine

"The cultural Catholic, the agnostic Catholic, the dissident Catholic, and the disaffected Catholic; the pagan Catholic, the sincere Catholic, and the Catholic jester; the heretical Catholic, the defrocked Catholic, and—yes—the devout Catholic: they're all here, and Nick Ripatrazone's achievement in this exploration of the varieties of Catholic literary experience is to make it seem that they all belong together." —Paul Elie, Georgetown University, author of The Life You Save May Be Your Own and Reinventing Bach

"In Longing for An Absent God, Nick Ripatrazone demonstrates the impressive range of writers whose imaginations have been shaped by a Catholic formation. This book is a welcome and necessary addition to the unfolding account of the central role the Catholic imagination has played in contemporary American art and culture." —Angela Alaimo O'Donnell, author of Flannery O'Connor: Fiction Fired by Faith and Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O'Connor

"Not only is Ripatrazone a lively guide, but like the Catholic storytellers he writes about, he has a rare capacity to make visible hidden patterns of cultural and intellectual tradition. Never pedantic, and always attuned to the humanity of writers ranging from Cormac McCarthy to Louise Erdrich, Ripatrazone is indeed a Catholic critic for our time." —Bryan Giemza, Associate Professor of Humanities and Literature, Texas Tech University; author of Irish Catholic Writers and the Invention of the American South

"In his far-reaching study, Nick Ripatrazone discusses how secularism in the modern era has influenced Catholic novelists. The breadth of his coverage is impressive and deserves serious attention." —Jean W. Cash, Professor Emerita of English at James Madison University; author of Larry Brown: A Writer's Life

From the Publisher