ArteFact

As a child, I walked the streets of Rochester barefoot, my shirt torn and my face covered in soot. If I had read them, which I hadn’t, I could have echoed the words of Pip at the beginning of Great Expectations: “Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, twenty miles of the sea.” However, unlike Pip, I didn’t know true poverty. When I paced the streets of Rochester without any shoes on, I was merely acting in the annual Dickens Festival...

It is the fall of 1947 on the ruggedly picturesque Cornwall coast, and Reverend Bott must write a sermon. A normal part of the job, yes, but the minister is struggling with this one, for the occasion is particularly challenging. People were dead, others had survived, but he could not exactly deliver a funeral sermon. The bodies in question were already irretrievably buried under a massive, collapsed cliff. All had been guests or employees at the ramshackle seaside hotel at the base when, not without (unheeded) warning, the cliff had fallen, engulfing the inn and all who were inside. What could anyone say in the face of such a tragedy? Thus opens Margaret Kennedy's clever novel, The Feast, originally published in 1950 and re-published recently by Faber & Faber.

Modernity has flattened and fractured our cultural understanding of the human person. Dr. Holly Ordway, Word on Fire’s Cardinal Francis George Professor of Faith and Culture, offers a refreshing counterpoint to this decline in her recent book, Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography. Laying out meticulously researched evidence, she presents J.R.R. Tolkien as a whole man, a man whose faith enlightened his mind and his relations, a man fully alive.

Will Arbery’s 2019 play Heroes of the Fourth Turning received significant critical attention after its release, with both left- and right-leaning media seeing it as a hermeneutic for understanding the role played by American Catholic conservatism in the election of Donald Trump. However, the play has received little recognition for its more incisive anthropological and ecclesiological insights.

Ruth Ozeki’s novel, The Book of Form and Emptiness, is a conundrum—at turns enraging, confusing, impenetrable, intriguing, luminous, and beautiful. Its protagonist, Benny Oh, is the precocious child of an American mother and an Asian father. His mother, Annabelle, though insecure and unassertive, has found happiness in the cocoon of her family. His father, Kenji, is a jazz-clarinetist and is a loving but free-spirited and somewhat irresponsible husband and father. Benny is kept safe and is content in the closed circle of his family group. This happy domesticity is destroyed, however, when Kenji, drunkenly returning home from a gig, lies down in the alley behind their house and is killed by a truck hauling live chickens.

The short story “Leaf by Niggle” is Tolkien’s most sustained autobiographical work reflecting on his relationship with his art. It provides unique insight into how Tolkien conceived of the proper relation between one’s “creations” and the rest of one’s life. The story portrays an artist named Niggle, a painter whose main flaws are his kind heart, which makes him “uncomfortable” in front of other people’s problems, and his perfectionism, which leaves him consistently dissatisfied with his own work.

The Fourteenth Station: Jesus Is Laid in the Tomb

The Word

has weight

pondered unbroken

carefully carried

quietly placed

solemnly sealed...

A claim to familiarity with what is known as “the India novels” of Rumer Godden is like a rare badge of honor for those who consider themselves to be serious readers. Godden, a prolific author of more than sixty works of fiction and non-fiction, is known for the exhilarating way she wields a pen to carve space between the darkness of life’s cruelties and the often blinding light of its sweetness. An Englishwoman, Godden spent her childhood and adult life vacillating between the United Kingdom and South Asia...

A review of Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun (Knopf, 2021).

A review of Thom Satterlee's God's Liar.