Critics' choices for Christmas

...Or so it seemed in my reading this year...

...more than that, it is a brilliant act of subversion, for within the thriller plot is found a dramatic account of the ways corporations prey on the poor while the rest of us aren't looking...

...The publisher of Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Vintage, $15, 607 pp...

...In our time, the equivalent of the Dickensian novel is the well-wrought thriller, and it is through such a book that Matthew Lee now seeks to upbraid corporate society...

...The book lacks the clean, elemental structure of the great existentialist fiction: several plot lines are fancifully thin or superfluous...

...and because those earlier pathbreaking writers, while writing out of a Catholic vision of things, also grounded their work in modern literature of all kinds, their literary kin are to be found where one least expects...

...In part it arose because the pattern whereby one generation influences the next the pattern of pilgrimage, I call it is at the heart of my book, and, I would contend, at the heart of the American Catholic story...

...compares the novel to those by Thomas Pynchon and Yukio Mishima, so it was with surprise and delight that I recognized it as a "diagnostic novel" of the kind Walker Percy wrote...

...His novel High Fidelity captured perfectly the predicament of a man more invigorated by rock 'n' roll trivia than by ordinary life...

...Aleksandar Hemon is an inadvertent Bosnian emigre: when the Serbs began bombing his native Sarajevo while he was in Chicago on a cultural exchange in 1992, he stayed in the United States, evidently taught himself English, and began to write short stories of genius, published as The Question of Bruno (Vintage, $12, 240 pp...

...An old lady with a plastic wrap on her bloated gray hair grinned abruptly, as if a shock of pain went through her body at that very instant...

...Yet Hornby is unashamed to say that something like the meaning of his existence is found in his devotion, and so vivid is his account of the emotions the game calls forth in him that the reader winds up believing football might as well be his religion...

...Joseph's House to "homestead" abandoned apartments in the South Bronx for the working poor...

...a natural enthusiast, he was overwhelmed by his passions until he entered the ordered life of a Trappist monastery...

...In our time, it seems to me, the Catholic imagination, such as it is, is expressed in particular works rather than in whole careers...

...In part the question arose because readers of a Catholic bent yearn for new works with the artistry and authority of The Seven Storey Mountain or The Long Loneliness...

...A one-time Catholic Worker in New York, Lee left St...

...Merton felt a surfeit of significance, rather than a lack of it...

...But the narrative trajectory of the novel, in which a thirtyish Japanese salary-man, feeling a lack of significance to his life, quits his job, passes his days wandering his bland Tokyo suburb, and finally descends to the bottom of an abandoned well in the hope that this place of limit and privation may bring him face to face with himself and his life, is perhaps the most striking account of despair since The Moviegoer...

...Here to take an obvious example is Pronek's shadow observing the life surrounding him on Chicago's El train: '"All we ask for,' said a young man, with his hands folded over his crotch, 'is to give your life to Jesus Christ and follow him to the Kingdom of God.' His companion, wide-shouldered, bearded, walked through the train car offering everyone a brown bag of peanuts and salvation...

...There is no clear answer as to where to look for the next great American Catholic writers...

...But as Pronek is pursued through Chicago by a Bosnian doppelganger, the two men's journey comes to have the quality a kind of cartoonish existentialism of O'Connor's Wise Blood, and an echo of that novel can also be detected in Hemon's prose, which defines the world sentence by sentence through non sequiturs and startling imagery...

...Who are the successors to the great American Catholic writers of the last century...

...In Hemon's Bosnian protagonist, Josef Pronek (who appears in most of the stories), there are traces of Saul Bellow's dangling men and Nabokov's brilliantly bewildered emigres...

...in 2003, after years of focusing on the work of the "School of the Holy Ghost," I turned afresh to contemporary writing and found echoes of Merton, Day, O'Connor, and Percy in the work of writers superficially quite unlike them...

...he brings to his passion for football soccer to us an operatic grandeur and eloquence...

...What does it mean, Hornby asks, that he has in effect organized his life around his Saturday afternoons at Arsenal's home ground...

...and in Fever Pitch (Riverhead, $14,256 pp...

...Yet the book is more revealing, and more truthfully so, than most autobiographies, as Hornby's chronicle of his obsession becomes a sideways account of his coming of age or of his failure to do so...

...The book is a memoirishly digressive account of Hornby's obsession with European football in general and the mediocre North London club Arsenal in particular...

...Predatory Bender (self-published by his Inner City Press: www.innercitypress.org) is as vivid an account of life in the Bronx as you are likely to read...

...and later a novel, Nowhere Man (Doubleday, $23.95, 256 pp...

...Unlike many fictional searchers, Murakami's ordinary man seems genuinely ordinary, and his despair is no mere literary device, stocked with allusions and symbolism: it is a real and palpable emptiness...

...Until Dorothy Day founded the Catholic Worker in 1933, she wished to change hearts and minds through a Dickensian "social novel...

...Percy would say that Hornby is "sunk in the everyday," Merton that he is in thrall to fleeting pleasure...

...Although Thomas Merton, in The Seven Storey Mountain, described his anguish in the very terms of despair that Percy would later employ, it seems to me that he in fact suffered from the opposite quandary...

...Now, in his storefront office, he has written a novel featuring a lawyer-agitator much like himself...

...This is a predicament that Nick Hornby gives voice to as well as anybody...

...Nowhere Man inserts Pronek into a meta-Chicago of fictional trickery that especially brings Nabokov to mind...

...he went on to earn a law degree, using it first to defend the rights of the people of the neighborhood, then to file lawsuits charging Citigroup and other banks with "predatory lending...

...That question arose often this past year as I spoke to various groups about my first book, a group portrait of Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day...

...Like many readers, I found in Hemon's stories a robustness of sensibility and a deep and uncommon sense of what is at stake in fiction...