The July 2021 issue of America Magazine contains my review of Michael Farris Smith’s latest novel, Nick. The novel imagines a backstory for Nick Carraway, the narrator of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Though Smith’s Nick bears little outward resemblance to Fitzgerald’s narrator, I argue, in my review, that both Nicks are cut from the same Catholic mold—they straddle the worlds of hope and despair, and are drawn toward, as Fitzgerald puts it, “the secret griefs of wild, unknown, men.”
Nowadays much ado is made in Catholic literary circles about what constitutes “Catholic fiction” and which writers we might consider to be “Catholic novelists.” Nick Ripatrazone has done some of the best writing on this topic (I reviewed his Longing for an Absent God in America last year). Still, this approach has its limitations, and at times the need to claim certain writers and works for the Catholic faith can seem territorial, and even arbitrary. Is it the subject matter of a novel that makes it Catholic? Or the style? Or the literary imagination that it manifests? Or does the author’s own biography determine whether we can call him or her a “Catholic” writer? As Catholicism diminishes as a distinct and separate culture, are contemporary Catholics overzealous in tagging anything that bears a trace of the faith as a “Catholic” work of art? I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I think they are important to think about if we are going to establish some coherence in talking about the relationship of faith to literature.
Regardless of the pitfalls of talking about Catholic writers, I am surprised that F. Scott Fitzgerald is so infrequently mentioned as one. I have written at some length about Fitzgerald’s Catholicism, both in print for Commonweal (here and here) and on this blog. Fitzgerald was raised and educated Catholic, groomed by his literary mentors to be the next great “Catholic novelist” in the manner of Robert Hugh Benson. Fitzgerald even considered the priesthood for a while. Though he fell away from the Church as an adult, he was never completely separated from it, as I mention in the review. Significantly, I would argue, his fictional characters, caught as they are between flesh and spirit, hope and despair, are evidence of the indelible mark Catholicism left on him. From Amory Blaine of This Side of Paradise to the title character of The Great Gatsby to Dick Diver of Tender is the Night, Fitzgerald’s protagonists, like the author himself, were mired in the desires of the flesh but not completely given over to them. Something in them (regret? hope?) pulled them back from their debauchery even as they committed it. It is this “double vision,” I argue in my review of Nick, that is essentially Catholic, because it allows for the possibility of conversion of heart. So long as one possesses this double nature, one has the ability to be “in the world but not of it,” as the saying goes, to live out the demands of an Incarnational faith.
For those interested in reading more about Fitzgerald’s Catholicism, I would highly recommend Joan M. Allen’s Candles and Carnival Lights.
