In our latest addition to our online Books & Culture section, Rev. Robert E. Lauder places Alice McDermott in the great pantheon of great Catholic writers. Father Lauder, a professor of philosophy at St. John's University in New York, compares McDemott's fiction to giants of the 20th century like Graham Greene and Flannery O'Connor and finds a notable difference in her approach to the role of God in the world:
To read [Graham Greene's] The Power and the Glory and The End of the Affair in tandem with McDermott’s Charming Billy and After This is to be struck not only by how profoundly Catholic each novel is, but also by the different lenses through which each author presents the mystery of God. In McDermott’s world God could never be described as an outsider or an intruder. If poet Francis Thompson’s “The Hound of Heaven” illuminates Greene’s work then poet Gerard Manley Hopkins’ insight “The world is charged with the grandeur of God” illuminates McDermott’s. She sees creation as sacramental, and within this sacramental world grace works ever so subtly.
For more read "After Alice."
Tim Reidy
