Further Thoughts on My Review of Nick Ripatrazone's Longing for an Absent God

My review of Nick Ripatrazone’s Longing for an Absent God was published in America Magazine’s Spring 2020 Literary Review. I have a few more thoughts on the book that I’d like to post here.

Firstly—and I wish I had made this more obvious in the review—Nick is a tremendously generous writer. By that I mean his primary goal in writing about literature is to share his excitement about the great books he has read and to help people encounter great writers, both familiar and undiscovered. From reading his articles regularly I have come to discover and love writers such as André Dubus and, from this book, Phil Klay. I think Nick would consider his book a success if it leads his readers to latch onto a new favorite or two, and it has certainly done that with me. I read all of Klay’s Redeployment in preparing for the review, and I’m eagerly anticipating the release of his debut novel.

Nick’s emphasis on paradox resonates with me, as fiction’s proximity to mystery—especially the mysteries of faith—has long driven my interest in literature and my desire to teach. (For more on this topic, see my article on William Giraldi’s fiction in Dappled Things from a few years ago). Though I’ve been schooled in Catholic dogma since I was very young, I’ve always felt a little cheated by the certainty it carried (or maybe by the certainty its apologists carried), and though I have a great respect for theologians and their craft, I’ve never quite felt satisfied by it. I admire my friends who are high school Theology teachers—they have a much harder job than I do when it comes to making their subject accessible to students.

One of the most interesting aspects of the book for me is the tension between Catholicism as a specific set of cultural practices (holy water, novenas, crucifixes) and the interior (and thereby more universal) implications of our faith. If Catholicism is only a kind of inculturation, well, then in writing a book about Catholic fiction one might as well write a book about Midwestern fiction or blue-collar fiction or boarding-school fiction. The unifying elements are largely external—the habits and practices that a certain group of people share. Though the Catholic faith is transmitted through specific cultural practices, it also purports to be universal in its embrace, that wide-open loveable mess that James Joyce famously called “Here Comes Everybody.” Christ called not just Jews but Gentiles too, and Catholics believe that he died for everyone, not just us. So while Catholic practices bind a certain segment of the population together, our faith itself has its arms open to the world—and we believe that those who suffer, regardless of their faith, are especially close to Christ.

It is in this spirit that I wrote, in the review, that the Black experience, “defined at every turn by bodily suffering and social degradation, is a kind of American passion play.” I didn’t mean, of course, that most African Americans were Catholic (though many are, including Toni Morrison), but that their larger story in America echoes that of the sacrifice of Christ, and the Mass. (And there’s a real connection between the joyful sorrow of the Blues and the Catholic experience…perhaps an article to be written!) Ripatrazone connects the viciously corporal suffering that populates Toni Morrison’s fiction with the passion of Christ, and for good reason. In this case, Morrison’s Catholic faith gave her a framework in which to depict Black suffering. Yet it’s not the Catholic ritual that gives meaning to suffering, but the other way around. Rituals are conduits in which the meaning of our quotidian experience is made clear, rather than stamps upon the raw material of our lives.

Noted Catholic poet and critic James Matthew Wilson makes the latter mistake, I would argue, in his review of Ripatrazone’s book in the National Review. He thinks Ripatrazone erred in calling Morrison’s fiction necessarily Catholic:

On one hand, the Nobel Prize–winner frequently referred to herself as “a Catholic,” and sometimes, regretfully, as “lapsed.” On the other, it is not obvious that it is the disfigured body of Christ on the crucifix that informs her concern with the human body, in beauty, ugliness, and suffering, nor is it clear that the elements of haunting and superstition in her books come from maturing in a Church that spends its days in communion with the saints, living and dead. Traditional African-American culture and the historical experience of slavery seem more promising sources for understanding Morrison’s themes.

If we understand Catholic only to mean the first definition I mentioned at the beginning of this post, we might see Wilson’s point. Who’s to say that her depictions of Sethe’s suffering in Beloved are necessarily influenced by anything more than the African-American experience itself? But to think about it this way would turn Catholicism into a kind of cultural tradition only, one ethnicity among many others and alien to their experience. And that’s not what Catholicism is. Wilson readily accepts that Cormac McCarthy’s depiction of “gruesome, absolute evil” is an expression of his lapsed Catholic faith, but why so more than Morrison’s? McCarthy seems just about as lapsed, if not more so, than Morrison. His tropes are those of the Western tradition, embodied in hard-scrabble White American existence; Morrison works with similar tropes but embodies them in a historically non-Western culture. Is hers less Catholic for being so? I think Wilson here makes the error of equating Catholic identity only with the rituals of Western Catholicism, and ignores its universal embrace and its refusal to distinguish between the spiritual merit of specific cultural histories.

I think on Ripatrazone’s part he could have clarified (or at least explored further) this tension between Catholic culture and Catholic identity at the outset of the book, as well as the tension between biographical criticism and literary criticism, which I mention in the review.

All things aside, go get the book. It’s a joy to read, and has (obviously!) sparked my thinking on the matter of faith and fiction.