At First Things. Jody Bottum offers a lovely appreciation of J.F. Powers:
The question is why these books have faded away. Oh, they ought to be in print somewhere, and the literary critics Peter Parker and Frank Kermode were blind when they left Powers entirely out of their otherwise encyclopedic 1996 Reader’s Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers. But it’s not some residual anti-Catholic bias that has caused the gradual forgetting of the man. The finest Catholic writer of the twentieth century was also, in some very important way, a failure. Who now reads J.F. Powers?
John Updike, in the anthology he edited of The Best American Short Stories of the Century, rightly included Powers’ “The Presence of Grace.” Another, less-often-reprinted story by Powers, “Lions, Harts, Leaping Does,” can stand beside anything by Flannery O’Connor. And for the rest, a few others still have real and important life: “Zeal,” for instance, about a worldly bishop trapped into joining a vulgar priest escorting a Catholic tourist group to Rome, together with “Prince of Darkness” and “Defection of a Favorite,” two of Powers’ stories about a middle-aged assistant pastor named Fr. Burner. But if we were able to figure out why a writer with Powers’ enormous talents and sensitivity could produce only such a small body of now mostly faded work, we might have some insight into the problems, and the promises, of Catholic fiction at the end of the twentieth century.
Powers is in print - the two novels and a short story collection from the New York Review of Books publishing arm. They don't sell very well, and we at Loyola Classics were convinced we could sell more in any edition we might publish, but alas, the contract for the rights with the NYRB was tight for the foreseeable future...
But they are there, and should be on your list. (I have to admit that his last novel, Wheat that Springeth Green, didn't strike my fancy much. It was a little crass, not as subtle as the other works.). The gift of telling us about a world by showing us a tiny slice of that world - a conversation or two, a few gestures - is on display in Powers' fiction, and he gets it just right, just about every time.
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