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I am in minor literary mourning. Light from Heaven, the final Mitford novel, has just been released. I stayed up all night reading it, and when I had finished, I remembered a story my mother used to tell me. As a girl, she was a devoted reader of Hugh Lofting's Dr. Dolittle series. When she came to the last page of the last installment—Dr. Dolittle's Puddleby Adventures—she bawled. She hated knowing that she would never again encounter new Dolittle tales.
Light From |
For those who do not number themselves among Jan Karon's millions of fans, here's a quick summary: The Mitford novels, set in small-town western North Carolina (think Lake Wobegon with less irony), follow the quaint adventures of an Episcopal priest named Father Tim and his next-door-neighbor-turned-significant-other-turned-wife Cynthia. I use the term "adventures" loosely, because the most adventurous thing Father Tim ever does is take an airplane ride. Most of the time he's making hospital calls, drafting sermons, packing picnic lunches, reading Wordsworth, walking his remarkable dog Barnabas (who responds not to the usual canine commands, but to the recitation of Scripture), and writing a lot of letters (and, increasingly, emails).
Light from Heaven finds Father Tim and Cynthia just outside Mitford, looking after Meadowgate Farm, while Meadowgate's owners, the Owenses, spend a year in France. As ever, Father Tim wrestles with that Protestant demon, Usefulness. Especially now that he has retired, he is deeply concerned that he not Waste Time, but find a way of going about the business of being useful to someone. Fortunately, his bishop calls with a charge: go revive a small mission church whose doors have been closed for decades. Of course, Father Tim and Cynthia are just the ones for the job. Along the way, they take in not one but two stray children. Meanwhile, a few Mitfordians die, a few more get married, a lost sibling gets found, a million orange marmalade cakes get baked … just a typical year in Karon-land.
People either love these novels or hate them. Some readers treasure their sojourns in Mitford because real life lacks the certain warm community feeling that Mitford has in spades. Others dismiss this very sensibility as a tad too twee. (An aside: I learned the word twee from a Milford novel. Cynthia drops it into a letter to Father Tim in A Light in The Window, a fact that itself might inspire naysayers to rest their case, screeching "Who on earth uses the adjective twee?").
I'm obviously in the first camp, but nonetheless I must repeat a disclaimer I issue every time I ruminate about Jan Karon's Mitford novels: I realize that they are not Great Literature. I realize that they are not comparable to the very novels I will, in a few paragraphs, compare them to. But they are excellent specimens of what they are. I have read just about every Mitford knockoff published in recent years, and Karon's stylistic sensibility, humor, and local color beat the copy-cats by a country mile. Not to mention the fact that the first two novels in the series were hugely significant in my own conversion to Christianity. This, it seems to me, is one of God's little jokes: other people get to tell about how Dostoyevsky or Karl Barth drew them to Christianity, while intellectually prideful me will spend the rest of my life explaining that I was converted in part through the ministrations of fictional Father Tim.
Still, Great Literature or no, the Mitford novels do participate in a venerable literary tradition: clerical fiction, a capacious category which would include everyone from Trollope and Hawthorne to Susan Howatch and Marilynne Robinson (whose Gilead is, among other things, a superbly unconventional clerical novel). F. Scott Fitzgerald could even squeeze in there if you count his short story "Absolution."
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