One of the real finds of the Loyola Classics series was Things as They Are by Paul Horgan. I can take absolutely no credit for "finding" it, though, since the title was suggested to me by George Weigel.

It’s really a marvelous book – the first part of a trilogy, written by the remarkable Paul Horgan, who never graduated from college, but managed to win two Pulitzer Prizes for history anyway. Many of you might know him as one of the preeminent historians of the Southwest, but he did write fiction, as well. The "Richard Trilogy" follows a character called, of course, Richard, from boyhood on. Set in upstate New York in the early 20th century, this novel is a beautiful story of boyhood, most particularly the loss of innocence, told through a prism of Catholicism that is unmistakable, yet subtle. I am really hoping that this re-issue gets reviewed in some larger press venues, because it certainly deserves to be rediscovered by a broad audience.

Weigel’s introduction is now online at the marvelous Catholic Educator’s Resource website.

Paul Horgan did not wear his faith on his literary sleeve, so to speak. But it is impossible to read Things As They Are without quickly recognizing the Catholic sensibility that permeates the book. At the most obvious level, Richard (the protagonist whose experiences mirror the young Horgan’s) and his parents are manifestly Catholic in their belief and practice. Structurally, the book resembles Death Comes for the Archbishop, another "collection" of medieval-type vignettes that still holds together as a coherent novel (call those vignettes "miracle stories," if you’ve a broad understanding of the miraculous). But the Catholicity of Horgan’s creation in this exquisitely crafted book is more than a matter of certain characteristics with which he invests his principal characters, or the literary structure of the work. It’s a matter of a sensibility, an angle of vision, a way of seeing things — of seeing "things as they are," because that is the only way to see the extraordinary things that lie just on the far side of the ordinary. Seeing "things as they are" is, in other words, the way to detect the divine at work in the human and the mundane.

Horgan’s literary style is about as far away from Flannery O’Connor’s as can be imagined. Yet much of Horgan’s fiction, and especially Things As They Are, is an expression of O’Connor’s "habit of being:" that spiritual intuition that allows us to see life, not simply as one damn thing after another, but as a dramatic arena of temptation and fortitude, creation and redemption, sinfulness and grace — a cosmic drama being played out here and now, a drama in which God is producer, scriptwriter, director, and, ultimately, protagonist. Like O’Connor (and despite the fact that he grew up in a time of saccharine devotional piety), Paul Horgan knew that there is nothing less sentimental than Catholicism, because Catholicism is realism. And he knew the reason why Catholicism is realism: because it is through the Incarnation, a real event at a real time in a real place, that God’s unsentimental, cleansing, and all-powerful love is decisively revealed — the divine mercy that is, according to the parable of the Prodigal Son, the defining characteristic of God’s interaction with the world. Catholic realism doesn’t deny "things as they are." Catholic realism doesn’t deny the temptations of what an older generation called "the world, the flesh, and the devil." Catholic realism confronts the world, the flesh, and the devil in the confidence that, as Christ has conquered, so, by the divine mercy and grace, may the people who are Christ’s Body in history.

Order Things as They Are here – and the CERC gets a tiny cut.

(By the way, I’m no longer general editor of Loyola Classics, by my own choice. 2 1/2 years of reading mostly mediocre Catholic fiction of the mid-20th century was enough for me! The series continues though…more in upcoming weeks.)