I am doing a blog series on Novels Every Christian Should Consider Reading.
John Wilson is editor of Books & Culture and editor at large for Christianity Today magazine.
Wilson received a B.A. from Westmont College in Santa Barbara, Calif., in 1970 and an M.A. from California State University, Los Angeles, in 1975.
His reviews and essays appear in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, First Things, National Review, Commonweal, and other publications.
He and his wife, Wendy, are members of Faith Evangelical Covenant Church in Wheaton; they have four children.
“Why don’t these writers just say what they mean?”
The speaker, clearly exasperated, was a distinguished theologian. The setting was a discussion among roughly eighteen people from various walks of life (two-thirds of them academics) who had read some interesting texts together, more or less equally divided between theology and literature. The theologian, as you might guess, was reacting to the literary texts on the table (works by Dostoevsky and Flannery O’Connor, for instance): shifty, hard to pin down.
Fiction is often like that, and some fiction in particular—the fiction of Muriel Spark, for instance. Spark (1918-2006) did not publish her first novel until she was thirty-nine years old, three years after her conversion to Catholicism. But having made this late debut, she never stopped writing superb novels; her last, The Finishing School, appeared when she was eighty-six. She may be best known for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which was made into a movie starring Maggie Smith. My own favorite among her books is Memento Mori, but you could close your eyes and pick one of her novels from the shelf at random and not go wrong.
Your hand might fall on The Only Problem, which was published in 1984. Here is the first paragraph:
He was driving along the road in France from St Dié to Nancy in the district of Meurthe; it was straight and almost white, through thick woods of fir and birch. He came to the grass track on the right that he was looking for. It wasn’t what he had expected. Nothing ever is, he thought. Not that Edward Jansen could now recall exactly what he had expected; he tried, but the image he had formed faded before the reality like a dream on waking. He pulled off at the track, forked left and stopped. He would have found it interesting to remember exactly how he had imagined the little house before he saw it, but that, too, had gone.
Notice how the book begins with the confident precision we associate with a kind of fiction that gets called (with a straight face) “realistic,” and yet by the third sentence the ground has already begun to shift under our feet. “It wasn’t what he had expected. Nothing ever is, he thought.” The often shifty quality of fiction turns out (in one respect) to be truer to our experience than any “just the facts” chronicle.
This novel has an epigraph from the Book of Job: “Surely I would speak to the Almighty; and I desire to reason with God.” Edward, whom we met in the first paragraph (formerly a vicar, now an actor), has come to France to see his wealthy friend Harvey, who has been working for some time on a book about Job “and the problem it deals with. For he could not face that a benevolent Creator, one whose charming and delicious light descended and spread over the world, and being powerful everywhere, could condone the unspeakable sufferings of the world. . . . ‘It’s the only problem,’ Harvey had always said.”
How the unfolding events of the novel—quite a short one, as was typical of Spark, without a word wasted—shed light on this “problem” is for you to discover. (Certainly, you will say at the end, “it was not what I expected.”) Are Harvey’s nagging questions answered? Do they admit to a human answer?
If you find The Only Problem to your taste, you have a lot more Spark to savor. But even if you stop after this book, I don’t think you will have wasted your time.
