Daniel McInerny’s novel is a fine effort and an absorbing and satisfying read. But does he meet the challenges facing the writer of modern Catholic fiction: to somehow tiptoe around the masters, but still stand on their shoulders; to avoid the story being pastiche or preachy, while still allowing the tabernacle lamp to glow in the darkness?
The Good Death of Kate Montclair, by Daniel McInerny (288 pages, Chrism Press, 2023)
Elsewhere in these pages I have been sampling a range of contemporary Catholic fiction, and the books seem to fall into four categories: pulp fiction, fantasy fiction, airport fiction, and literary fiction.
I hasten to add that these are my own categories, and can be defined thusly: Pulp Catholic fiction is simple, page-turning, over-the-top, manly adventures. The Saint Tommy NYPD series by Declan Finn features a wisecracking, miracle-working New York cop. Jeff Putnam has produced a series of Indiana Jones-type adventures, with his hero Cole Harper operating in a Catholic cosmos.
The Catholic fantasy books are usually uploaded with spiritual warfare themes and include the horror sub-genre. Declan Finn and Eleanor Bourg Nicholson have created Catholic horror with tales of vampires and werewolves, while other Catholic fantasy writers include John C. Wright, Karina Fabian, Tim Powers, Gene Wolfe, and R.A. Lafferty.
Catholic airport novels are stories that are plot-driven but are more tame than the boisterous derring- do of Saint Tommy and Cole Harper and less sensational than the tales of exorcists, vampire slayers, and space-traveling nuns. I’m thinking a Catholic John Grisham or the ever-abundant romance or murder-mystery stories. Ellen Gable and Carolyn Astfalk are writing “clean Catholic romance,” while Fiorella de Maria’s Father Gabriel mysteries vie with crime novels by Barbara Golder, Emily Hanlon, Ann Margaret Lewis and (now dated) Andrew Greeley and Ralph McInerny’s Father Dowling mysteries.
In addition to his writing mystery stories, Ralph McInerny was a philosophy professor at Notre Dame. His son Daniel has picked up the philosopher’s robe and the novelist’s pen and serves as a philosophy professor at Christendom College. Daniel has written a series of whimsical children’s books, and his novel, The Good Death of Kate Montclair, is my entry here for the “literary fiction” category.
McInerny’s novel is about a middle-aged English teacher diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor who reconnects with old friends through a “Death Symposium” and is led to confront a past love affair and tragedy from her youth in Rome. In the process she grapples with unresolved guilt, her abandoned faith, and tempted by an easy escape through assisted suicide, confronts the big mysteries of mortality and meaning.
McInerny’s cast of characters are well-off, well-educated, East Coast intellectuals. Dwelling in London, Rome, Washington, and New York, they inhabit an elite world of private education, privilege, and prestige. They also dwell on the edge of sanity with addiction problems, schizophrenia, hysteria, and self-delusions. All this is handled with an American country-club-set sophistication. Nothing grubby or gritty here, as in Saint Tommy’s NYPD underworld.
The novel is framed as Kate Montclair’s cancer memoir, and after her demise is “edited” by her old friend, Benedict, who fills in the missing information and completes the tale with an elegiac farewell reminiscent of Charles’ Ryder’s final scene in Brideshead Re-visited. Indeed, I see from other reviewers than I was not the only one to sense a whiff of the heady perfume that is Brideshead.
The glamor of Rome, London, and New York replaces Oxford, Paris, and Venice. The charm of drama and literature glitters instead of art and poetry. The same sin and see indulgence tempts the young people before circling back in guilt, shame, and regret. In the end, as in Brideshead, there is justice, acceptance, and a tentative return to forgiveness and faith.
I enjoyed The Good Death of Kate Montclair, but must confess that I didn’t at first warm to the eponymous heroine. I know she was dying, and I should have sympathized, but a privileged English teacher in a private girl’s school who sips wine, keeps a journal, and agonizes over her past love affairs felt at first too much like one of those novels in which a divorced woman is walking on the beach at sunset with her labradoodle named Poppy, when she happens to meet her old high-school flame, who is also emerging from a nasty divorce.
I liked Miranda better: a mixed-up, young addict living on the streets, struggling with mental illness and haunted by the past and the power of the green scapular. I liked the nuns too—who appeared at the end of the book. Like the best nuns, they were snappy, down-to- earth, and holy. I even liked Adele—the villain of the piece—better than the heroine.
I am perfectly prepared to accept that my preferences are due to my own imperfections, but perhaps they do reveal what I felt were some other weaknesses in the book.
Why did I not sympathize more with Kate Montclair? She was feisty, smart, and well-educated, but she struck me as too… well, serious… too prim. I realize she was dying and felt bad about her shady past, but when her so-called friend was pushing her to quaff her hemlock, I wanted Kate to snap out of i, and tell her friend where to go. At that point the story was dragging its feet and pistol-packing Miranda was the light relief—but that too was desperately serious.
I have written elsewhere that the contemporary efforts at the literary novel too often stumble. Are the writers trying too hard to do a Dostoevsky, a Flannery O’Connor, a Walker Percy, or a Waugh? Certainly my own efforts at writing, when I go back to re-read, are most embarrassing when I am imitating a master, and this is where it gets tough, really tough, as a Catholic writer.
Somehow or other, one has to tiptoe around the masters, but still stand on their shoulders; one has to avoid the story being pastiche, preachy, theme-driven, or “on the nose,” while still allowing the tabernacle lamp to glow in the darkness—to create characters that are fully human and yet yearning for the divine. How to do this and really carry it off with aplomb and panache? I don’t know.
I don’t mean to trash McInerny’s novel at all. It is a fine effort and an absorbing and satisfying read. The language is refined without being stylish or over-written. The plot moves along at a good pace, and the characters are well-drawn.
While it didn’t make it to my all-time favorite reads this year, I’m certainly looking forward to McInerny’s next foray into fiction.
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Fr. Longenecker’s latest book Bloodshed and Blessing is published by Sophia Institute Press in August.
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