Why Christians Should Read More Modern Fiction

Yesterday, RELEVANT Magazine published an article on its website titled, "Why Christians Should Read More Fiction." In this article, author Paul Anderson makes the fine point that Christians should, well, read more fiction. He begins by sharing the very real frustration of how narrow the Christian conversation about literature can be. According to Anderson (and I will vouch for this, too), Christian discussions about books begin by hitting the "evangelical heavyweights" of Lewis, Chesterton, Tolkien, and Piper before breaking into theological arguments about The Shack and finally affirmations of Narnia's brilliance. So true. But then Anderson says this:

"And that’s when I start wailing on the bullhorn. 'But guys, what about fiction?! What about Faulkner? Melville! Does the name Steinbeck ring any bells?!' I cry, as the crowd trickles away, whispering about the guy with crazy eyes and a copy of East of Eden in his hand."

And as much as I applaud the overall sentiment (yes, Christians most definitely should read more fiction!) the first thing I thought was, "But Paul, what about modern fiction?! What about Jonathan Franzen? Vonnegut! Does the name Tony Morrison ring any bells?!" Alright, I guess I might have waved around a bullhorn and clutched a copy of Swamplandia!, too.

My point is, look at the names Anderson drops. John Steinbeck, the most recent of the bunch, died in 1968. Herman Melville didn't even make it to the 20th century. William Faulkner lived until 1962. You know what happened between 1962 and 2013? The collapse of the USSR. The Beatles. Post modernism. A lot of the Civil Rights movement. Two whole waves of feminism. Watergate. Hip hop. 9/11. The rise of the personal computer. I could go on.

And, okay, I'm being a little glib. Anderson has a BA in English Literature, so he has no doubt read plenty of modern authors. This is no slight against his reading habits. Maybe it's a coincidence that he only names authors who haven't published new work in fifty years. Maybe if he had gone on with his bullhorning, he would have mentioned Gabriel García Márquez next. But, intentional or not, the authors Anderson names speak to another kind of narrowness in Christian literacy, which is that many Christians do not read contemporary secular literature*.

I got my undergraduate degree at a private Christian university where I majored in English and therefore had oodles of time to talk with other Christians about the books they read. What I noticed is that there are two basic literary canons that many Christians (and I should probably specify "Evangelicals," since that was the primary inclination of my alma mater) seem to adhere to. The first Anderson identifies as the "evangelical heavyweights:" Tolkien, Lewis, and other explicitly doctrinal authors. These are authors whom most Evangelicals have read or at least been familiarized with through quotes or summaries. Then there's the second canon, which is what Anderson appeals to. This consists of "classic" literature, which I know is a broad and ambiguous classification but that I mean to signify works published within the period of time that spans from Homer's writings to the first half of the 20th century. William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, and yes, Faulkner, Steinbeck, and Melville tend to fall into this camp. These are authors whom Evangelicals with a deeper interest in literature tend to latch onto. Other authors from the time period who (tellingly) are often omitted from this canon: James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Voltaire.

We Christians can sometimes be classicists. And there is plenty of great stuff in the classics. But by only reading classic literature, we not only miss out on great literary works, but also feed that other uncomfortable Christian tendency, that of looking back a little too often at the "good ol' days" when there is so much going on around us today.

I love what Anderson has to say about art: "One thing that unifies its many forms is the desire to distill the chaos of existence, in all its wonder and tragedy, into a single, unified image of beauty." The thing is, the "chaos of existence" is just that: chaotic. It isn't static. The turbulent, existence-defining forces we experience today are not identical to the ones that we experienced yesterday or the ones we experienced ten years ago or the ones people Victorians experienced over a century ago. I mean, I said I was being glib earlier, but I wasn't being that glib when I mentioned all the monumental things that had changed over the past fifty years. Of course the art of fiction taps into universal questions of what it means to be human (that's why we still read Herman Melville one hundred and fifty years down the line), but it's also very specific. Every piece of fiction is a unique distillation of the specific chaos of the cultural moment in which it was written. To kind of cross media for a second, a friend of mine once remarked that Seinfeld would never have worked in the 21st century, since so many of its episodes hinge on problems of miscommunication (or lack of communication) that today's internet and cell-phone conveniences could easily solve. Seinfeld's "The Bubble Boy" is universal in its depiction of human frustration in the face of chaos (those moops, man), but it is also specific to that cultural instant when Jerry couldn't just look up directions on his iPhone. Getting back to fiction, we can read a comedy of manners centered on the social mores of Victorian England and enjoy the universal ideas of class and joy and otherness, but we only see how these universals apply to the chaos of that Victorian moment. When we read classic literature, we are looking back at what the chaos used to be. Modern literature distills beauty for us out of the specific chaos we live in today, iPhones and all.

Now, just to be absolutely clear: this is not an indictment of older literature. My favorite novel of all time is Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which is about to enter its fourteenth decade of existence. That's pretty "classic." Steinbeck, Faulkner, Melville, and many other older writers have given us a plethora of literary masterpieces, and you are not wasting your time by reading any of them. Reading older literature is just as important as reading recent works. We can learn from the past, finding beauty in the present world from the way the past authors found beauty in their own chaotic worlds. In fact, all literature is, in a sense, "older" literature, since it all applies to moments in the past. Even if Jonathan Franzen were to write a novel today and I read it tomorrow, it would still be a novel about the past, since I will always have to read something after it's written. But the closer something is written to the present, the more directly it can find beauty in the chaos of the present world we experience. There's something to be said for directness.

One more point I want to be clear on: I like the RELEVANT article. It has a lot of great things to say about why Christians should read fiction in general. This post is not a refutation of what Paul Anderson writes, just an addition to it, a "yes, and..."

Speaking of which, feel free to add your own "yes, and..." in the comments. Or if you think I'm completely out-of-line, contribute some buts and howevers. I'd be happy to discuss any of this post (or related issues) with anyone. Again, I owe you all my most enthusiastic gratitude for reading my ramblings. I know it can't be all that pleasant.

Until next time.

*There's a certain self-defeating irony in the fact that I'm writing this on a blog whose only other literature-themed post is about Beowulf. Okay, yeah, touché.