“Where has the novel of belief gone?” Paul Elie asks, spotting yet another of the dubious literary trends the New York Times Book Review is notorious for. Author of The Life You Save May Be Your Own—an appealing study of four Catholic writers in postwar America—Elie is a critic who should know what he is talking about. Where Flannery O’Connor called upon Christian novelists to shout if necessary to “make belief believable,” Elie worries that more recent novelists “with Christian preoccupations have taken the opposite tack, writing fiction in which belief acts obscurely and inconclusively.”
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