Christian fiction

Jen Hinst-White 9-28-2020

Illustration by Anita Rundles

RETIREES RICHARD AND LISA Starling are Georgia natives turned Cornell academics; their son Michael and his wife, Diane, are barely getting by in Texas; their son Thad and his boyfriend, Jake, live comfortably in Brooklyn. These family members voted for different candidates. Their experiences of religion range from solace to trauma, they have an unwritten list of topics they don’t discuss, and it takes tragedy and close confines to break open their surface-level peace and push them into the conversations they’ve been avoiding.

These characters appear in David James Poissant’s latest novel Lake Life, which is set in 2018 but explores family dynamics that feel especially relevant in 2020. Jen Hinst-White spoke with Poissant in late July, five months into COVID-19 social distancing, two months after George Floyd’s death and the resulting groundswell of protest, and three months before the national election. 

Jen Hinst-White: You could have written a straightforward family drama, but your characters’ personal struggles also pull in big questions of theology, culture, and politics. Why?

David James Poissant: Those things grew important to me in my writing life because they’re important to me in my real life. I’m bad at acquaintanceships. As soon as I meet someone, I want to talk to them about God and their childhood and “Do you go to therapy?” I can’t write about family without writing about place, and I can’t help considering the politics and environment of the places I’m writing. Do these people believe in God, and in what way? And how do their beliefs affect their worldview? In an alternate universe, I’m probably a sociologist.

Mark Sandlin 9-19-2013

Every so often a fiction book makes a splash in the swamp of Christian literature, which is predominately ruled by non-fiction reads. The Shack by Wm. Paul Young would be one modern example and, reaching back just a bit more, In His Steps by Charles M. Sheldon would be another.

It's happened again.

Frank Schaeffer's And God Said, “Billy!” is a work of Christian fiction that just barely fits into the “Christian” sub-category of fiction. That's not to say it doesn't come with a heavy dose of Christian characters and culture (it does) as much as it is to say, unlike the other must-read fictions of the past that I just mentioned, this book could and should have a much broader appeal. So much so, I almost titled this review, “The Book Everyone Needs to Read ...”.

(Michael G McKinne / Shutterstock)

ONE SUNDAY EVENING during high school, friends from my Mennonite church and I drove around Lancaster County, Pa., stealing mattresses. Bored by too many evenings of roller skating and Truth or Dare, we, like teenagers everywhere, landed on thievery as the solution to adolescent ennui. Having found out which of our friends were away from home, we showed up at their houses, told their parents about our prank, and swore them to secrecy. Then we clomped up narrow staircases to their sons’ and daughters’ bedrooms and wrestled mattresses back downstairs and onto the bed of a pickup truck. Just before our getaways, we left notes on our friends’ dressers, signed with what we thought was a most clever alias: “The Mennonite Mafia.”

We had no idea that 25 years later, Amish Mafia would be a blockbuster reality show, its first episode attracting 10 times more viewers than there are Amish people. Had you told us then that a bunch of Amish and Mennonite kids growing up a few miles away would someday parlay boredom-induced shenanigans into a hit cable TV series, I don’t know whether we would have been flattered or jealous. Kate Stoltzfus? Rebecca Byler? Lebanon Levi? People with names like these—our “plain-dressing” Amish neighbors and the more conservative Mennonite kids we went to school with—were the butt of our jokes, not the cynosures of popular culture.

Only a few decades after we and our families exited the conspicuous conservatism of plain Anabaptism, mass culture is flocking toward it. From Amish-themed reality TV shows to Christian romance novels with Amish characters and settings, the media have finally landed the lucrative Amish account, although the furniture industry and “Weird Al” Yankovic’s “Amish Paradise” got there first. Americans’ enthrallment with the Amish—and schadenfreude about their sometimes wayward youth—has rarely been more intense.