2 of 3

"I'm a Christian who's a writer," Lott says. "I'm not a Christian writer, so to speak. If people are going to read my books, they're not going to encounter the traditional salvation scene. C.S. Lewis once said that we don't need more books about Christians; we need more books with Christian values built into them. That's what I'm trying to do in my fiction. I'm not trying to write Christian fiction that preaches to the choir. The choir already knows the drill."

The Christianity in his books is somehow both bold and subtle. "I'm writing for a humanity that needs to know about grace and forgiveness," Lott says.

Lott says his favorite people are senior citizens; he'd much rather hang around with them than with folks his own age (he's 46). "I'm intrigued by how people can live their life and have all the sorrow visited on every one of us and still live. How does that happen?"

Sometimes his subtlety has gotten Lott, who now attends a Southern Baptist church in Louisiana, into trouble. Shortly after his first novel, The Man Who Owned Vermont, came out, he got a letter from a woman in Wisconsin. She had picked up The Man Who Owned Vermont because she read a review that described it as a nice book about love and marriage (the novel tells the story of Paige and Rick Wheeler, and how their relationship is transformed by a miscarriage). The Wisconsin woman wasn't happy. Somewhere in the first 100 pages, Lott—or, rather, one of Lott's characters—had taken the Lord's name in vain. "I'm praying for your soul," the woman from Wisconsin wrote to him.

But Lott is going to keep drawing characters who take the Lord's name in vain, and who indulge in a lot of backbiting and hard-heartedness and adultery, and other sinful behavior besides. "If we can't portray sin," he asks, "then how will we know it when we see it? Christ hung with the sinners. He knew what sin was. If we act like the only thing that ought to be portrayed with the written word is the 'gee willikers' type of bad guy, then we're forgetting about the two robbers who died with Jesus. We're forgetting about the adulterous woman. We're forgetting about the tax collector."

And that is what you'll find in Lott's three new books. Before We Get Started: A Practical Memoir of the Writer's Life grew out of Lott's teaching at the Vermont College MFA program. It is a beautiful, humble book, the tone of which is set by this declaration: "The longer I write—and this is the one sure thing I know about writing—the harder it gets, and the more I hold close the truth that I know nothing."

As with his novels, faith infuses, but is not explicit in, this memoir. "I didn't want the book to be a devotional for the Christian crowd," Lott says. "I wanted it to speak to writing at large. But if you can sniff between the lines, you see there's something larger at stake."

New this July is a collection of short stories, The Difference Between Women and Men. The stories are startling in their range—this is not just Lott writing about Southern women in the kitchen and at the Piggly Wiggly. This is Lott at times recalling John Cheever, and at times delving into Southern gothic.

"In these stories," says Bruce Tracy, Lott's editor at Random House, "Bret is flexing his stylistic muscles in a way people have not seen him do before." Not all of the stories tie up with a neat, happy ending. "All stories shouldn't have a happy ending," Lott says. "Some of my books have an ending in which people must reconcile themselves to their lives. An ending is not about resolution, but reconciliation."

next page... |  2 of 3

share this page

June 2005, Vol. 49, No. 6