A while back – well, ages ago – when I was first getting into the whole “Catholic fiction” thing, the name of Richard Bausch entered my consciousness. I tried reading something – I think it was The Last Good Time – but didn’t get it, and wasn’t entranced. So I put him aside, noted various new publications, but never really tried again.
Until..(you know what’s coming)..I was at the library the other day…(yes)..and was just wandering…no, not in the “new releases” this time..just wandering, and happened upon the “B’s, saw the shelf of Bausch books, remembered the little I knew about him, and grabbed this one.
I’m glad I did – I enjoyed it very much – it was just the sort of read I was looking for at that moment – excellent writing but not too weighty – and, surprise, surprise, it gives me Catholic stuff to write about.
Good Evening Mr. and Mrs. America and All The Ships At Sea is the story of about three weeks in the life of Walter Marshall, 19 years old, living in Washington, D.C., in the fall of 1964. He’s idealistic and thinking he might like to be president someday, although at the moment he’s enrolled in a nighttime radio school along with a bunch of other interesting characters, most movingly, a fellow named Albert, who is almost freakishly tall, gaunt, odd-looking and almost blind.
Near the very beginning of the novel, Walter makes a decision. Well, not really, since it’s giving what he does to much credit to actually call it a “decision.” He gets himself into a situation, foolishly, and that’s where the book grabbed me, as I spent much of the rest of the novel almost holding my breath trying to see if Walter would come to his senses and get out of this mess. I won’t say if he does, and in fact, I don’t want to say much more about the plot except that it involves not only Walter’s personal angst regarding his own life, but also his concerns about his mother (a single woman engaged to a man whom Walter can’t stand), the struggle to come to resolution about his late father, financial shenanigans related to the broadcasting school, the Washington media, the burgeoning Civil Rights movement and, like a puzzling shadow, always present, John F. Kennedy.
Walter is Catholic, and a devout one. He is reading Merton and Fulton Sheen. St. Matthew’s Cathedral figures prominently, functioning not only as a place where Walter stops for prayer, but as a geographical reference point in general.  His struggles with his decisions (and..impulsive choices)  happen in the context of a astute, not-quite-scrupulous spiritual consciousness, very realistically described.
And subtley, as well. One of the most effective aspects of Bausch’s treatment of Walter’s inner turmoil is how he offers us both the bright side and the shadow side of Walter’s spirituality. Walter is modest, pretty innocent and almost prudish, but the down side of this is that it renders him unable to say what he really means when he really needs to just say it, be blunt and not dance around a problem. When Walter contemplates the crucifix, he sees sacrifice and the call to live a sacrificial life, but unfortunately, the way this ends up working in his head is that he feels obliged to go through with obviously bad decisions, decisions that have not reached a point of no return, that could, with a bit of courage, be reconsidered – but no, Walter feels convinced that even if this foolish decision will result in suffering, suffering is what life is all about anyway, so…he really has no choice.
And please believe me when I say that this is all very subtlely and, I think, realistically rendered. It is not “Catholic morals render you socially inept.” Or “sacrificial mindsets lead to masochism.” It’s just a gentle exploration of how our worthy spiritual aspirations can, because we’re human, sometimes get confused.
The only aspect of the novel I didn’t like, unfortunately, was the end. There were a couple of elements that were just forced and, to put it bluntly, lame. Too easy. But they really didn’t dampen my enthusiasm for the book as a whole because there was so much more to appreciate and enjoy – the atmosphere Bausch creates of Washington in that era, the surprising and definitely non-stock characters and the truthfulness with which Walter’s inner life is rendered.
In the end, the book is, as most coming-of-age works are, about shattered illusions. We are discomfited a bit at the end because it seems as if Walter, in his panic, is about to trade in one set of illusions – his faith in JFK, primarily –  for another.  But we’re also moved to contemplate the shifts in our own lives as we cringe at Walter’s missteps and encourage him to look life in the eye, as it is. We’re with you, Walter. Maybe in more ways than we care to admit.
There’s more Bausch on the schedule, and you might be interested in what Matthew Lickona dug up – a review in TIME of Bausch’s first novel, Real Presence, published in 1980. As Matthew said when he sent this to me, “Times have changed,” meaning that in today’s publishing world, a work of literary fiction this explictly religious would have – dare we say it – a devil of a time finding both agent and publisher, not to speak of a reviewer in the secular press who could deal with it knowledgeably and without cynicism:

This is Flannery O’Connor country, where souls are gnarled and agony seems the only common measure of humanity. Even the corpulent landlord, Mr. Wick, who first comes into focus as a Dickensian villain, on closer inspection becomes merely a grownup, terrified boy forever humiliated by a sadistic father.
The doctrine of the Real Presence, in Christian theology, is the belief that Jesus Christ is truly present, body and blood, in the bread and wine of the Eucharist: the living symbol of God among men. For Bausch’s troubled priest, it becomes a metaphor for the world beyond the sanctuary, where the Real Presence must be sought among the lowliest of people and the darkest of hearts.