In “Art & Money” (September 2013), Gerald J. Russello reviewed Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life: The Letters of J.F. Powers, a compilation of the Catholic novelist’s personal letters edited by his daughter Katherine A. Powers. The letters offer a look into Powers’s everyday life and the conflict between his desire to provide “suitable accommodations” for his family and his unwavering dedication to writing, which proved to be an unprofitable career.
Raised in a devoutly Catholic family, Powers (1917-1999) wrote “mostly about Midwestern priests as they managed the secular demands on their time and vocation.” Russello claims that the novelist “always hovers just beyond the first- and second-class ranks of American novelists,” in part because he published so few works, but also because interest in Catholic writing has recently declined. “What attracts the attention of literary arbiters has changed. Who could imagine now The New Yorker publishing stories about observant if wayward clergy?”
In a similar vein, last December The New York Times published a piece by Paul Elie, titled “Has Fiction Lost Its Faith?” In his essay, Elie argues that Christian belief in today’s literature exists as “something between a dead language and a hangover.” Christianity is currently perceived as “a social matter rather than an individual one,” and the true believer remains unexplored in literature.
To help make the accommodations a little more suitable for the next Powers, the Catholic literary journal Dappled Things has announced a J.F. Powers Prize for Short Fiction, a contest seeking fiction that has “one foot in this world and one in the next,” as Powers once wrote. In order to recognize the quality of faith-based fiction, the journal is seeking “carefully crafted short stories with vivid characters who encounter grace in everyday settings.” The editors of Dappled Things seem confident that Catholic writers such as J.F. Powers not only still exist, but deserve a voice in today’s literary world.