As magazine-followers know, a couple of years ago, the Atlantic Monthly inexplicably dumped its age-old custom of including a short story in each issue for doing instead, a yearly fiction issue. The reasoning still escapes me.
Anyway, the point of interest this year is that the 2007 fiction issue is heavily weighted with stories with religious themes and settings, most of them unfortunately unsuccessful.
The first story in Updike – The Apparition  – which follows an older couple on a tour of India. As you would expect from Updike, the descriptions of the landscape, the temples and the tourists are specific, lush and evocative. The gist of the tale is involves the impact of a younger female tour member on the older man. Interesting, but mostly atmosphere, and honestly, you can’t help, as you read, but think, “Well, yes, Updike must have gone on a tour of India, and he went to these places, and maybe he even knew this stunning Hispanic trophy wife…”

Tobias Wolff has a tale called Bible, in which a Catholic school teacher is confronted by an irate parent. The twist is that the Catholic school teacher isn’t very spiritual and the irate parent is Muslim, angry that his son (who truly is a pill) has been disciplined for cheating. I found the whole set-up (she is basically abducted by the guy in a parking lot after she’s been out with friends) artificial, her responses to him completely unrealistic and the whole thing to be more of a construct built on interesting notions rather than on imagined doings of real people.
Finally (well, the last one I read), Specific Gravity by Marjorie Kemper attempts to venture into J.F. Powers territory. The story is about a young middle-aged parish priest who has run himself into debt through his excessive handouts to folks in his life who are in need. He falls into a solution by agreeing to write speeches and such for a repulsive right-wing pro-life activist and television personality.  Selling his soul, you know. It’s just not a good story, for, first of all, there is no understanding or knowingess about priests, how they live, how they talk to each other or how they think. (Not that these are monolithic things, but, if you read Powers, you know what I’m talking about.). The talk-show guy is a caricature, and there is no exploration of the tension here.  Why is this business dirty work to this priest? How does what he does and how he thinks connect to him, well, being a priest? A Catholic? What’s the bigger story about human beings, how they come to be how they are? No – it’s another artificial construct.  Generic priest jumps into the muck with the Bad Right Winger and frets a little, perhaps standing in for the rest of us who dirty our hands every single time we turn on Fox News. Or something.
Priests can be powerful fictional characters, but only when used carefully. They are so because a priest is inherently symbolic – he symbolizes, primarily, total comittment to a cause, to the possibility of living an ideal.  The best priest characters stand in tension in the midst of this commitment – the whisky priest of The Power and the Glory, Morte d’Urban, Diary of a Country Priest, the priest in the wonderful Tim Gautreaux story, Good for the Soul,  found, among other places, in this excellent recent collection of American Catholic short fiction. Those priests may be as fallen as can be possible, but it not interesting unless the ideals of which they’ve fallen short are understood, and in some sense, the character is written so that we all, priest or lay, can see ourselves in the struggle to live our commitments, fall short, and find redemption.
Even in Powers’ story, as prosaic as they may seem to be on the surface, as clergy squabble over the most mundane and ungodly matters, there is a sense of this, mostly because it is understood – the context of the time, the expectations of priests, provides the context for understanding his clerical characters, and seeing, not just an expert portrayal, but ourselves and our own smallness, even as our greater possibilities shine tentatively around the rectory corner.
But in this story, there is no such context, either provided or understood. The priest is just a guy who was too nice to some people, then has to do this thing that is distasteful to him to get out of the hole. The irony at the heart – that he sees working for a prolifer as distasteful – isn’t even treated as ironic, so thin is the context, so drained is the priest character of any real identity as a priest – even a liberal priest, of which there are many, who found himself in that position would have more going on in his head about it than this fellow does. Meh.
There’s another story about LDS missionaries which I’ve not read, but I will..when I find the magazine again….