The British magazine Standpoint has published an article by Piers Paul Read about his recent US book tour promoting his bestselling novel, Death of a Pope. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in here for readers and writers of Catholic fiction, but he starts it all off with a story, which, though relating to a non-fiction project, sheds light on the current situation of Catholic fiction writing and publishing):
Joe Fox, the legendary editor at Random House in New York of Truman Capote and John Irvin, told me back in the late 1980s: “The problem, Piers, is that Catholics who buy books aren’t your kind of Catholic and your kind of Catholics don’t buy books.” He had published two of my novels in New York and we were discussing possible future projects in non-fiction. I no longer remember what it was I had proposed but it must have had something to do with the Catholic Church. He took the view that books by Catholic dissenters such as Hans Küng could become bestsellers but no one was interested in an author taking an orthodox line. We settled instead on a book about the Chernobyl disaster.
“Catholics who buy books aren’t your kind of Catholic and your kind of Catholics don’t buy books.” Yikes, that’s a sad but too true commentary. There is a remnant strain of anti-intellectualism rampant among doctrinally orthodox American Catholics, which continues to knee-cap efforts to develop a healthy base of sophisticated readership for quality Catholic fiction.
Read also shares a number of interesting comments on the quandary Catholic novelists face on writing about sex, and, as a Brit, his perceptive on the (perhaps not entirely salubrious) effect Evangelicals has had on Catholic pro-lifers’ political engagement.
For the rest of Read’s article, click here.
About Debra Murphy
Too bad the lurid and sensational are what mega-sells, fiction or nonfiction, for books with a Christian motif. I can’t believe that there is such a paucity of Ortho-Catholic fiction fans though.