Startling Figures

This is a book about Catholic fiction in a secular age and the rhetorical strategies Catholic writers employ to reach a sceptical, indifferent, or even hostile audience. Although characters in contemporary Catholic fiction frequently struggle with doubt and fear, these works retain a belief in the possibility for transcendent meaning and value beyond the limits of the purely secular. Individual chapters include close readings of some of the best works of contemporary American Catholic fiction and shed light on the narrative techniques that Catholic writers use to point their characters, and their readers, beyond the horizon of secularity and toward an idea of transcendence. This book is focused both on the aspects of craft that Catholic writers employ to shape the reader’s experience of the story and also the effect the story has on the reader, and one recurring theme is how often Catholic writers use narrative violence and other, similar, disorienting techniques in order to unsettle the reader. These moments can leave both characters within the stories and the readers themselves shaken and unmoored, and this, this book argues, is often a first step toward the recognition, and even possibly the acceptance, of grace. Individual chapters look at these themes in the works of Flannery O’Connor, J. F. Powers, Walker Percy, Tim Gautreaux, Alice McDermott, George Saunders, Phil Klay, and Kirstin Valdez Quade.