Dana Gioia: belief

Transcript context

…In fiction, has America outsourced its Catholicism to other nations such as Elena Ferrante, Houellebecq. Knausgård is Lutheran, not Catholic, but it’s still quite a confessional memoir. We have a tremendous Catholic culture in American fiction that was largely done by converts, or people that were sympathetic. Willa Cather, who was not Catholic wrote Death Comes for the Archbishop, maybe the best Catholic novel in American literature. You have Flannery O’Connor, you have Walker Percy, you have John Kennedy Toole. You have these people that are largely southerners. They were the part of Catholicism that was in some ways a discriminated minority against the South, or you have converts. We have several really fine Catholic novelists right now. Tobias Wolff, Ron Hansen, Alice McDermott are the three best ones, I think. There’s a re-invention of this, but we are not a mainstream cultural voice yet. Astonishingly, we even have a revival of the Protestant novel, which I thought had died with Updike and Cheever with Marilynne Robinson. Who would have thought you’d have a series of Calvinist masterpieces? How did Catholicism shape the work of Sigrid Undset?…

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