Why Is Christian Literature So Bad?

Every once and a while I read something total out of my normal fare. A recent example was "Anything but Normal" by Melody Carlson (2010), which is a consciously Christian fiction (I believe they call it "inspirational") take on a teen "issues" novel.

Imagine a version of the movie "Juno" (to which its characters refer disparagingly) where all of the characters sound like something out of a "Left Behind" novels of Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins (a consciously Christian science fiction series about the Biblical Apocalypse of Revelations actually happening), and you have this book.

Apparently, there is a market for it. Carlson's biography claims that she has written more than a hundred novels.

Both Carlson's book and the Left Behind series, like most of the fiction and music in the inspirational Christian fiction genre (although there are some emerging bright lights in the white Christian music scene a few decades after it really took off), are simply dreadful.

It could be, I'm not close enough to the Evangelical Christian world personally to know, that these books are dreadful simply because people in real life who are part of the culture really do think and act the way that the people in the fictional accounts do, and I don't get them.  I've seen people act like that in isolation, but it has always come across to me as false.  It seems so two dimensional, driven by empty mantras, shallow, emotionally stunted, and brain dead. 

It could also be that this is simply a genre convention in inspirational literature. There is a rich tradition of secular Southern and Appalachian fiction with real human beings in it, so I suspect it is mostly the latter, a conscious attempt to be didactic and follow Christian doctrine, verisimilitude be damned.  Then again, the quality secular fiction tends to be about less pious individuals.

But, when you do encounter someone who really does to the outside world seem to act that way, you wonder.  People buy this stuff, so maybe they relate to it.  I sincerely hope that isn't true.  That would undermine my faith in humanity a little.  But it is hard to know.

Travels in the Scriptorium

I picked up "Travels in the Scriptorium" by existentialist writer Paul Auster at my local library's new acquisitions shelf. It is short, 145 pages, it is new (2006), and it has pretty cover art. If you thought that the play "No Exit" by Jean-Paul Sartre was way too straight forward for you, and loved post-modernism in college, you will love this book. If you prefer straight forward narratives (a spirited defense of which can be found here), you'll hate it. I was disappointed.

Bookslut explains why this particular book is even more obscure than Auster's usual fare:

Everyone hates clip shows -- those TV shows that feature clips of old episodes . . . So what are we to make of Paul Auster? His 13th novel, Travels in the Scriptorium, sounds suspiciously like a literary clip show: an abbreviated frame tale populated with characters from his previous books. . . .

So Travels in the Scriptorium is really two books: one for Auster fans and one for everybody else. If you fall into the first group, you’re in luck. You now have a treasure hunt on your hands. You might as well grab a pen, as Mr. Blank does, and start writing down names as if you were reading Encyclopedia Brown. Here, I did some work for you:

Page 28: Mr. Blank is asked to wear white clothes at the request of Peter Stillman, Jr. (City of Glass).
Page 79: Mr. Blank receives a phone call from his doctor, Samuel Farr (The Country of Last Things).
Page 88: Dr. Farr tells Mr. Blank that the manuscript he has been reading was written by John Trause (Oracle Night). . .

There is also Auster’s distracting over-description (“He savors the bulk and softness of Sophie’s somewhat pendulous but noble mammaries”) and questionable slang (“two shakes of a cat”). Careful reading is necessary to acquit some phrases; a tautology like “the word all is an absolute term” becomes acceptable only if one remembers its pair, “the word old is a flexible term,” 23 pages back. . . .

for fans only.

In short, this book, already containing literal masturbation, also has plenty of the intellectual kind.