Katy Carl Reviews Nick Ripatrazone’s Longing for an Absent God

By Katy Carl

Humans are storytelling creatures, blessed and cursed with the drive to narrate. We are also, even when immersed in a culture’s fashionable admiration for skepticism, believing creatures. Our brains have a need to make sense of experience, a need that is not subject to critical judgment about the feasibility of the endeavor. Even the embrace of skepticism can be a reflexive bid in the direction of sense-making—sometimes a desperate bid, lunged at in self-defense against the felt incomprehensibility of experience as received: Ah! See, life is supposed to be bewildering and destabilizing! I am right after all!

The human mind, to retain its health, must manufacture what appears to it to be a coherent and logical worldview. Offered one we find compelling, we are likely to accept it. Lacking that, we tend to build our temples in whatever plot of dust we find convenient. This way of being in the world—obscured by sin and struggle, often circuitous, yet also full of hope and desire for the Divine—makes for a rich history of literature, in which authentic belief and what Henry James called “the sense of felt life” can merge to compelling effect.

In choosing the contemporary era and the Catholic Church as places to pick up his study of literature and belief, Nick Ripatrazone in his recent book, Longing for an Absent God: Faith and Doubt in Great American Fiction, stands in a rocky, yet ultimately fruitful, patch of ground. The rockiness is well understood: Following the Second Vatican Council, seismic changes in liturgy and in the presentation of doctrine—alongside other, more widespread shifts in culture—led many to wonder if the Catholic Church truly did any longer present a coherent, compelling, and logical worldview. The fruitfulness, therefore, may come as a surprise, especially as academic and popular fashions in literature throughout the 1980s and 90s appeared to be all in favor of irreverence or at least of irreverence’s veneer. For writers of serious religious faith, and especially for Catholics, whose integrated vision is hard to bracket or background in the context of artistic perception, this phenomenon led to a certain invisibility, a disappearance. This phenomenon has been noted in Paul Elie’s 2012 essay “Has Fiction Lost Its Faith?” and expanded upon by L.A.-based Catholic critic and poet Dana Gioia in The Catholic Writer Today. Among practicing Catholic believers, Gioia in 2013 identified an “intellectual retreat and creative inertia” that led to Catholics having “almost no positive presence in the American fine arts.” Though the big picture has changed in the intervening decade, Gioia’s claim retains merit: By the time many writers of the millennial generation were entering MFA programs and beginning their first serious works, the mainstream atmosphere in publishing was such that novelist Jonathan Franzen could set down in all seriousness the phrase “Fiction is my only religion”—and the words could have the ring of praise.

In this vein, it’s worth asking whether all fiction, memoir, poetry—all imaginative literature that engages in meaning-making, that creates within itself an intelligible order presented for the reader’s comprehension—can be said to be, to the extent it brings close attention to what is deeply human, “religious.” Such writing considers our life here significant enough to be worth observing, recording, and communicating, and presents this work as the proper business of the human. But this business as practiced in a pluralist milieu frequently takes for itself, and leaves for its readers, a broad latitude in assigning meaning both to the text and to the realities it describes. Much fiction today remains committed to an agnostic position about whether the supernatural exists or, if it does, makes any difference to the material reality we encounter every day.

This widespread practical agnosticism, this choice to prescind from the transcendent and to focus only on the tangible and sensible, has led in many quarters to what Gioia finds a “cultural and social paradox that diminishes the vitality and diversity of the American arts.” In the public square, believers cannot rely on commonly held perceptions when laboring to render their most central experience, that of lived faith, credibly in art. Many believing artists feel pressure either to deny or to minimize belief’s effects on them. But this pressure in turn may tend to diminish the power of their art, to obscure the importance of their struggles with faith and doubt, or both.

In search of “positive presences” that persist despite this pressure, Ripatrazone in Longing for an Absent God lifts up fiction that bears the influence of Catholic teaching and as such achieves or invites reverence toward the human encounter with mystery and transcendence. Longing for an Absent God both expands on and distills the insights of Ripatrazone’s previous work in The Fine Delight: Postconciliar Catholic Literature (2013). An admirable piece of scholarship, that earlier book broadly taxonomizes several varieties of religious experience found among Catholics after the Second Vatican Council, and the types of writing those experiences tended to produce. The Fine Delight generates expansive and worthwhile reading lists, not only of novelists and short-story writers but of essayists, poets, and multipotent and less easily categorized writers like Andre Dubus and Brian Doyle. By contrast, the more popularly accessible Longing performs several deep dives into the work of fictionists who are both currently admired in the literary mainstream and notably shaped by a present or one-time Catholic faith or educational influence, including revered authors Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, and Louise Erdrich.

One important category for Ripatrazone is that of the Catholic “jester”: an artist who, not yet or no longer formally Catholic, has been influenced by Catholic teaching or belief without embracing it and yet also without being able to fully leave its content and themes alone either. In fiction, we might take as a corner case David Foster Wallace, whose on-again, off-again relationship with the Church as an adult catechumen lent a religious coloration to his career-long obsessions with attention and human effort. Wallace’s well-known pronouncement in a 2005 Kenyon College commencement address is downright homiletic: “Everybody worships. All we get to choose is what.” More often, rather than being a deliverer of fervorinos, the jester acts as a satirist, using absurdity as a cover behind which to ambush the reader with deep realism: “The ultimate trick of the literary jester is surprise,” as Ripatrazone defines it; “we expect comedy, which makes sincerity easy to miss.” The jester reveals and resists the distortions and grotesqueries perpetrated by shallow, disingenuous, or self-deceived believers, while continuing to value something deeply real reflected in authentic experiences of faith.

Another great virtue of Longing for an Absent God is its idiosyncratic, perhaps unique, close reading of Black novelist and believer Toni Morrison. Ripatrazone makes a strong case that Morrison’s career, an exemplar of literary excellence, may help to clarify the phenomenon of the “invisible Catholic” in the literary world post–Vatican II. Morrison is hardly a hidden figure in contemporary literature—instead she is justly one of America’s most revered novelists. Yet her relation to the Church remains either broadly unknown or underexplored, though it is comparable in some ways to Graham Greene’s—her faith may as well have been invisible to many of her most devoted readers, despite the clear marks it left on her work and particularly on her portrayals of suffering. As an example, Ripatrazone likens the “tree” of whip marks on former slave Sethe’s back in Morrison’s Beloved to the Cross of Christ. Ripatrazone notes how Our Lord’s Cross is often metonymically described as a tree in traditional devotional poetry and hymnody, particularly in the devotional symbols embraced by Black Catholics, whose experience of slavery and the history of racism in America creates a direct association between Christ’s suffering and that borne by their ancestors. Furthermore Morrison’s literary Christ-figures, Ripatrazone adds, tend overwhelmingly to be Black women, a phenomenon not often noted in academic scholarship on Morrison’s work. The eyes of devotion enable Ripatrazone to see what remains invisible to many of Morrison’s readers in the literary mainstream.

Ripatrazone also attends to what Dana Gioia identifies as a split between “practicing” and “lapsed” Catholic writers—those who retain the wholeness of belief and those who, lacking it, still hold to a “sacramental” or “incarnational” vision of reality. Ripatrazone describes “contemporary Catholic practice and cultural representation” as “fragmented, with the lines between sincerity and parody often blurred.” At the same time, he contends that writers whose relation to the Church is ambiguous or broken still bring important aspects of the Catholic worldview and experience to their work. The pace and structure of their language and syntax, the very furniture and fenestration of their minds, has been carved and colored by their contact with authentic Faith. Their work may not reflect the plenitude of the devout believer’s vision, but, as Ripatrazone suggests, even the traces of liturgy and litany carry a power and a resonance that can make occasion for grace.

The underexplored presence of so many writers who stand, in various ways, at once in and out of the shadow of the Church also raises a question whether the narrative of drought and decline among believing writers isn’t subject to revision. Even in the decades Gioia identifies as marked by relative literary invisibility for Catholics in America, the Catholic novelistic tradition experienced a new flourishing worldwide. Ripatrazone spends significant time discussing the notable fiction of Andre Dubus, Alice McDermott, and Ron Hansen, all of whom fall into the category Gioia labels the “practicing Catholic” writer. Many of these writers’ major works have centered as well on practicing (though often, also, confused or struggling) Catholic characters. Further exponents of the tradition include not only the American authors in whom Ripatrazone specializes but also a notable “variety and diversity” of global writers, too numerous to engage here, yet whose contribution merits mention.

In describing the paths that our narrative and devotional endeavors can wend through the world, Catholic essayist Heather King uses the analogy of the city planning term “desire lines,” or worn paths that show the routes walkers take to arrive where they want to go. In Longing for an Absent God Ripatrazone, too, seems to be seeking out a Catholic “desire line” in late-twentieth-century literature. While mapping out paths for engagement with complex permutations of comedy, tragedy, satire, and polemic, Ripatrazone never forgets that the Deus absconditus feared or missed by many of the writers he covers was never really “absent,” merely hidden. In this, the book itself is an expression of a certain sort of desire line: If for many literary readers and writers—whose pursuit is at once solitary and communal—the need to find companionship on the page is immense, then the path Ripatrazone has walked in this book will save tomorrow’s novelists and believers a great many steps in expanding and developing their literary taste, while simultaneously fulfilling and challenging their perceptions. Its publication confirms a sense that others have walked this path before us: an affirmation that feels like a gift.