The Substance of Things Hoped For
Toolan, David
IN BRIEF The Substance of Things Hoped For: Short Fiction by Modern Catholic AUTHORS, selected with an introduction by John B. Breslin, S.J., Doubleday, $17.95, 314 pp. Are there writers...
...Breslin's answer is yes, and for demonstration, he has collected a movable feast of talent...
...Morley Callaghan and Josephine Jacobsen surprising us before death...
...Are there writers around today who record what could be called a specifically "Catholic sensibility" in their fiction...
...But the mix is enriched by Bernard MacLaverty, Mary Gordon, Tobias Wolff, and Muriel Spark exploring the loss of innocence...
...it involves celebrating the smells of flowers and horses, what Josephine Jacobsen refers to as "a belief in the physical, a conviction of the open-ended mystery of matter.'' But if this mystery is open-ended, the authors collected here have acute noses for failure, entropy, despair, the deceitfulness of the human heart, and the great hazard of existence...
...300: Commonweal...
...John Breslin's good gathering reminds you that fine writers of this stamp who bring you to attention, are fierce and playful allies of the Holy Spirit...
...Powers — several of which were quite new to me...
...Stuart Dybek, Elizabeth Cullinan, and Breece D'J...
...What unites these disparate authors...
...It includes some old familiars, splendid stores by Francois Mauriac, Ignazio Silone, Flannery O'Connor, Heinrich Boll, Walker Percy, Graham Greene, and J.F...
...Andre Dubus, Shusaku Endo, Walter M. Miller, Jr., and John L'Heureux plumbing the trials of adult responsibility...
...no cheap grace...
...D.T...
...They know the way is steep and narrow (and full of comic pratfalls...
...The expansive pole is anything but disincarnate...
...Pancake recalling rites of adolescence...
...In his admirable introduction, Breslin argues that it has something to do with the art of maintaining a polar tension between a sweeping inclusiveness (only a hair's breadth away from amorphous pantheism) and an austere discipline of life associated with rituals and restraint...
...By the time you are finished, you have had a tour of the Catholic imagination surveying the entire life cycle, no one exactly like the other...
Vol. 114 • May 1987 • No. 9
