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A STAY AGAINST CONFUSION:
Essays on Faith and Fiction
Ron Hansen
HarperCollins, 288 pages, $25

Once upon a time, evangelicals were suspicious of fiction. Novels encouraged lust and violence, corrupted young women, and wasted the time that believers were supposed to be redeeming. Too much novel-reading produced adolescent rebellion, prostitution, homosexuality, and (according to one 18th-century Bishop of London) earthquakes.

Evangelicals seem to have gotten over these misgivings. Most are as immersed in stories as the rest of the culture. We may (possibly) avoid bodice-rippers and Hannibal Lecter, but we consume John Grisham, Tom Clancy, Mary Higgins Clark, Jan Karon, and George Lucas without visible guilt. The only people who still feel obligated to defend storytelling as a viable Christian activity seem to be the storytellers themselves.

When he wrote the essays in A Stay Against Confusion, Catholic novelist Ron Hansen had published four novels, but only the last two dealt directly with matters of faith. In A Stay Against Confusion, Hansen sets out to vindicate himself. These essays reveal Hansen as a devout believer, a well-informed lay theologian, a perceptive critic, and a gifted storyteller who apparently feels a deep ambivalence about his "secular" works.

In the book's introductory essay, "Writing as Sacrament," Hansen explains that his first novel, Desperadoes, didn't really reflect his religious experience. It was just a "boys-will-be-boys adventure full of hijinks and humor and bloodshed." But his second western, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, illustrated "a Christian perspective on sin and redemption and forgiveness."

Unfortunately, readers didn't seem to pick up its Christian themes. This bothered Hansen considerably: "I was frustrated that my fiction did not more fully communicate a belief in Jesus as Lord that was so important, indeed central, to my life."

So Hansen changed topics. His next two novels, Mariette in Ecstasy (a 17-year-old postulant receives the stigmata) and Atticus (a father goes in search of a prodigal son) became more explicitly "religious." According to "Writing as Sacrament," Mariette is the portrait of "a faith that gives an intellectual assent to Catholic orthodoxy, but doesn't forget that the origin of religious feeling is the graced revelation of the Holy Being to us in nature, in the flesh, and in all our faculties." And Atticus is "a parable of God's continuing quest for an intimate relationship with us."

Fiction, Hansen writes, "holds up to the light, fathoms, simplifies, and refines those existential truths that, without such interpretation, seem all too secret, partial, and exclusive." Good writing, even if it doesn't deal explicitly with religious truth, is a "sacrament" because it makes the invisible grace of God visible by placing it in the real world.

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November 12 2001, Vol. 45, No. 14