A primordial angel makes one hell of a narrator. Or, it should. In On the Road with the Archangel by Frederick Buechner, the heavenly POV Buechner uses could have delivered an enthralling narrative but does not.
Buechner is a prolific Christian theologian and writer, famed in Christian circles and in the secular institutions (the New York Times, USA Today, the usual suspects) that laud literature. He has written novels, but also poetry, sermons, and books of Christian nonfiction, with translations in 27 languages. Honestly, I’m thrilled to see him lending his mind and his faith to readers worldwide. Buechner has been given a tremendous witness, and, thank God, he has not squandered it.
I was primed to adore On the Road with the Archangel, as a believer. I was dismayed to find so little inspiration in the novel, as a writer.
I almost feel guilty for the discrepancy. Guilty for disliking this book whose author shares my faith; guilty because another recent read—by an atheist author, no less—stirred me to greater wonder.
It’s a jumbled bundle to tease out.
Abdicating Invention
On the Road with the Archangel, published in 1997, adapts the apocryphal Book of Tobit through the titular archangel, Raphael, who tells the story in the first person. Raphael is, by turns, wry, unbothered, affectionate, and pedagogical. The story of Tobit and his family, Jews prospering in Nineveh despite the captivity of their people, is, by turns, curious, lighthearted, sweeping, and nose-puff funny. The eternally inhuman Raphael, who carries the prayers of man to the throne of God, who claims that raging flame can’t adequately compare to his true form, holds so much potential for exploring the transcendent character of God, and the place of man before Him.
But in every aspect, Archangel, and the archangel himself, remain deeply human. That’s why the novel fails its potential.
Raphael speaks in only one register: mundanely, quaintly human. In Buechner’s hands, the archangel sounds like your long-winded uncle who has just accosted you after the Thanksgiving meal. His human-ness feels swollen in the text, especially when he casually comments on the different weights of human prayers in his hands. God Himself—always referenced with a “blessed be He” refrain—is not portrayed as satirically pedestrian, and so Buechner is not teasingly knocking all of heaven down to our level. He just simplifies his narrator, who speaks only like a somewhat smug man of no great note.
And all Raphael’s potential for stylistic and thematic invention goes unused.
The Divine and the Novel, Simplified
Just as invention is sidestepped in Archangel, simplicity is pervasive—in the language itself, and also in the character of God and His implications.
Archangel evades complexity in its prose. At a sentence-to-sentence level, the novel is a series of long, light sentences that skim forward in qualifying clauses, rather than commas. Not that a lack of commas means linguistic or thematic simplicity (just follow any sentence from Blood Meridian wherever it drags you). But the sentences skim, rather than dig. Their language has a bedtime-story texture that can’t match the subterranean connotations of Old Testament histories, and it thins Archangel in a way I hope Buechner didn’t intend. The novel feels shorn of the thorniness that makes ancient texts worth grappling with.
Speaking of grappling—for a theologian, Buechner loves to simplify the implications of God in the world of the story. For one thing, Raphael slips in enough fun-sized profundities to make sure the reader, comfortably cuddled upon a couch, could never be troubled by the multifaceted, unsettling character of a divine and holy being.
For another, God, as Raphael witnesses Him, does not notice sin where His people commit it. Throughout the novel, Raphael teases the man Tobit for praying as though God is ready to punish him for his failures as a Jew. Never mind that the Jews usually suffered captivity for their generations of unbelief, if you take half the Old Testament at face value.
Raphael seemingly does not take half the Old Testament at face value. In his telling, YHWH, so holy that His people drop the very vowels from his name, is as wry and skimming, as unbothered, as Raphael himself. This simplification dulls the whole divine character, for one thing. It also dims the novel and its narrative implications, for another.
What if Tobit, blinded by pidgeons, persecuted by Assyrians, was commended for praying to the God whom he knew allowed those troubles? It would’ve complicated their relationship, if Tobit wasn’t portrayed as misguided for fearing God. It would’ve portrayed the perspective that just about any believer struggles with: the perspective that seeks God even—especially—when He doesn’t care for our comforts. It would’ve showcased an untamed God who dispenses hardship the same way He dispenses blessing. The complication could’ve been compelling, by illustrating what it is to trust in God when you don’t understand or like Him. That is, by illustrating faith itself.
Buechner sidesteps this inherent complication of faith. The novel suffers for it.
Enter V.S. Naipaul, an Atheist Inspiration
The novel The Enigma of Arrival does all that I’d hoped Archangel could have.
I had read Naipaul’s Among the Believers before, a nonfiction travel account where he goes everywhere, observes everyone, and mistrusts everything. His wariness partly came from moving among Islamic fundamentalists in that book, but likely also from the lifelong atheism he chose in the wake of his Hindu upbringing. The Nobel laureate was no friend of faith. But his work is a flowing fount of creative inspiration.
In the autobiographical Enigma of Arrival, Naipaul creates an incisive narrator and recursive structure that both reveal, and simultaneously obscure, the 1980s English setting and its characters. It is a novel of a rural valley but also of industrialized displacement; a novel concerned by the present but also the past; a novel of narrative skepticism but also equalizing empathy; a novel of unfurling digressions but also of minute detail. In short, it’s a doozie and a pleasure.
Tilling Fiction, Finding Inspiration
Everything in the novel—diction, structure, voice, details, implications—is under Naipaul’s absolute control. His narrator’s eye is a shovel for digging into class, colonialism, suit-wearing gardeners, nature, industrialization, anti-monarchist taxi drivers, rootlessness, and overripe bananas for air travel. With his keen observation, they’re all the same tilled soil.
Each character appears first as a neighbor in the distance, and later, surprisingly, as a narrative subject in his or her own right. If anything feels topical at first, it’s because the narrator will later return to it and fill in every detail, to portray and then complicate it. Every character receives enough microscopic attention to reveal their bundled, frayed personality, often filled with shaggy contradictions.
This complexity, shared and serious and seared into every character, is what inspires me to read, reread, and write. We tend to live despite the defective, crossed purposes within ourselves, and we somehow connect with one another despite those defects. Naipaul renders these dire human facts in the rural England of the mid-eighties—his novel chimes, and beautifully, because at no point does he raise a finger, declare it all a truncated lesson, and recommend that I take notes for the quiz in his pocket.
Is there a response?
Honestly, I don’t know what to make of getting more inspiration from an atheist than from a theologian.
Great Christian thinkers, however, have already replied to this unruly reality of spotting the things of God in the men and world that reject Him. Augustine, for one, said in On Christian Doctrine, “Let every true and good Christian understand that wherever truth may be found, it belongs to his Master.” John Calvin, for another, expanded this perspective in Institutes of the Christian Religion:
“[T]he admirable light of truth displayed in [secular thinkers] should remind us that the human mind, however much fallen and perverted, is still adorned and invested with admirable gifts from its Creator. If we reflect that the Spirit of God is the only fountain of truth, we will be careful…not to reject or condemn truth wherever it appears.”
Allow Me to Unsettle Myself
These proofs encourage me. There’s no guilt, then, in seeing beauty in Naipaul when I couldn’t in Buechner.
But they’re a little pat, aren’t they? As explanations for bundled jumbles, they’re tidier than the marital end of a Shakespearean comedy. Maybe it’s uncomfortable, even self-confounding, but I’d rather abide in the uncertainties of aesthetic inspiration than put them to bed with one fell principle. Augustine and Calvin wrote with the wisdom of divine insight, no doubt. But a touch of unknowability also seems a fine, divine trait.
Like God Himself, works of art are accessible to our sensation, and in some instances we can understand their relationship to us. But, also like God, their depths remain unfathomable. They evade our full articulation. They confound us, at times, and they charm us in our confusion, not just in our comprehension. They can sometimes exist as pure non-cerebral sensation, like mist or music.
Allowing for this elusive element of inspiration seems like respect for it. God created first. As His tool, then, creative inspiration holds some of His unknowable character. I can’t set an “absolute” boundary for inspiration if any part of its process would be left, even accidentally, beyond the border I would choose. I can’t know it to its utmost length.
It feels like a dodge to defer definition, I’ll admit. But the Greeks didn’t deify the aesthetic impulse as nine fickle goddesses for nothing—artistic creation is often above me, as a human being. It feels like a fitting humility to leave my imperfect categories off its back.
That was the inaugural review here at “A Stylist Submits,” and since you’re the inaugural readers here to see it, I’ll make a few promises.
Generally, I’ll anchor “Stylist” with exploratory essays that meld literature and faith into one meandering path. You’ll receive them the third Thursday of every month (if only for the alliteration of that phrase).
Meanwhile, these book reviews will arrive on some of the Sundays between them. Think of them as Sunday drives through the country on your newfangled automobile at the same time. That makes me your back-firing, belching Panhard et Lavassor.
The first essay will arrive on November 18, 2021. That essay, for now, has no title. But it does have a backbone: how I loved but ultimately failed my time in Dublin, Ireland; how I grieved my way into writing seriously; how God and I came to a truce, even as I had to accept opacities in my circumstances. In short, it’ll be a nice, light read that won’t sadden you even a wink.
I make these promises publicly so that y’all have the chance to give me feedback. This newsletter is in the exploration business, and exploration requires a team of people who know where the natives, rocks, and oases are. Talk to me publicly in the comments, or talk to me discreetly via email.
Very excited to read more of this kind of thing! Thanks muchly! Your Augustine quote sums up my own attitude towards art of all sorts. Some of the most spiritually honest works are not from the Christian camp.