May

American Novel

We who love old books can sometimes become quite the Anglophiles. So every year I try to balance that out by assigning at least one classic American novel. So this year we are going to read Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather.

This was another of the books we voted on earlier in the year. It tied with the Flannery novel, but we had done some Flannery short stories and non-fiction back in October 2021 so I decided it was time to read some Cather. I have only read a few of her books and don’t consider myself an expert, but this is my favorite so far. Close Reads HQ did a podcast series on it a few years back andI enjoyed it immensely. Their guidance through the book helped me see Cather’s genius and beautiful prose.

As opposed to Flannery (who is a Catholic writing about Protestants), here we have a non-Catholic author with Catholic characters. I actually had to look up if she was Catholic when I read it because I thought she handled the Catholic aspects of the story so well. This is a beautiful, fictional portrayal of the first Catholic bishop of the Western U.S., which I appreciate being a Catholic myself, but even if you aren’t I think you will find beauty in the people and places that Cather introduces us to. I think this will be a fun and important novel to read together!

Also, as a side note, I am somehow distantly related to Willa Cather. So that is a fun tidbit!

But again, I am not a Cather expert so I will pass you on to a Cather lover,

Dixie Dillon Lane

from

The Hollow

. Dixie writes beautiful pieces that seem to be shared all over the internet. She is a historian by trade, but also a homeschool mother, an excellent writer, and an avid reader. I really can’t stop reading and sharing her work. Also, her husband is a professor at Christendom (I know we have a few grads in this group)! Here's what she has to say about Death Comes for the Archbishop…

Willa Cather was the first author I ever read who really understood local cultures and the people and landscapes that shape them. She has worked her way so deeply into my bones that one of the first things my husband and I did as a married couple was read her masterpiece, Death Comes for the Archbishop, aloud to each other over the course of several long, cold winter evenings. My husband had never read Cather, and I wanted him to experience being swept away to the mesa by her almost painfully beautiful language. He fell in love with her writing from the first page of the book! I knew he would like it, as we also both enjoy Wallace Stegner, Elizabeth Goudge, and Sigrid Undset, and these are Cather's kindred spirits; if you, too, enjoy any of these authors, you will enjoy Cather, for sure, though you will find her writing tighter and more strikingly simple at times than theirs.

To Cather, landscapes are characters, but people are characters, too. In Death Comes for the Archbishop, Cather's deep understanding and narrative portrayal of both the 19^th-century American Southwest and the interior virtues and struggles of her Catholic priest-protagonist, Jean Marie Latour, is absolutely masterful. The novel displays a deeply purposeful  balance of grit and collapse, suffering and overcoming, ugliness and transcendent beauty. I have never known anyone to regret reading it.  

And when you have done, I encourage you to explore Cather’s other settings – Nebraska in My Antonia, early French Canada in Shadows on the Rock, and beautiful and ugly antebellum Virginia in Sapphira and the Slave Girl – or take on the truly wide-ranging American and European contexts and characters in Cather’s short stories. I wish you much joy in the reading ahead!

If you missed April, here it is!

Stay tuned for June and one of our summer modern novels…

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