Moral fiction in the Imperfect Tense, Part 1

"She was completely reliable in any Internet-based crisis." 

My mom sent me an Amazon gift card for my birthday, so I bought some books I'd been thinking about for a while. Bishop Barron's To Light a Fire on Earth, The Power of Silence by Cardinal Sarah (I'd been reading this in French on the Kindle, but I forget about Kindle books, and translating the text took up the mental energy I would otherwise have used to meditate on it). Everyman's Library editions of Persuasion and Sense and Sensibility, to round out my set. And Eve Tushnet's novel Amends, which has been on my list for a while.

The Amends of the title is a rehab reality show, where six down-and-out alcoholics of varying cuts are trying to discover if they're capable of change, or if they even want it. Tushnet writes of what she knows -- there's nothing cute or airbrushed about her collection of drunks (or their epic hangovers), only sharply observed scenes with an eye for the telling detail. The prose sparks like a high tension wire, and the sparks leave scars. You can make some interesting comparisons here to the writing of Florence King, though I'd say that King was more unrelentingly savage. Tushnet likes her characters a lot more than King liked any of hers, and so is able to allow even the most outré actors in her story the possibility of redemption.

The novel isn't flawless. Several characters are underutilized or underexplained, and others are perhaps too eloquent for their state in life. (I questioned whether an 18-year-old hockey jock would have conjured up a snowclone from an H.P. Lovecraft quote, even as I nodded at the reference.) I would have liked a two-part structure to give equal weight to events after the end of the reality show, as chapter stacked on chapter gave the impression of a lot of falling action.

But this is nitpicking, because the book itself is a fine example of moral fiction: fiction set within a framework of objective truth, a world where there is right and wrong, and characters can reach for the good or fall short of it. It's a world where even small choices have weight, and grace breaks through. It is a Catholic world if you believe that the Church isn't just making up strictures but describing what is true about reality.

This leads to an interesting point. Amends is a novel with a Catholic sensibility, but it wasn't published by a Catholic press. It wasn't published by a press at all -- it's self-published. In a sense, I don't know how it could have been otherwise: the Catholic sensibility, particularly in sexual matters, is too pronounced to make it likely that a mainstream press would publish it, and the particular profane foibles, flaws, and inclinations of these characters make it almost inconceivable that a Catholic press, even one that had a fiction imprint, would touch it. (There's no sex in the book, if you're keeping tabs at home, and yet the characters have profane, messy lives that don't fit neatly into easy categories.)

I'm giving myself permission to write several short posts based around this idea, instead of putting off writing one long one, so tomorrow I want to reflect about Catholic publishing and fiction.