JF Powers’ only novel, Morte d’Urban, won the 1963 National Book Award for Fiction.
It was mentioned in a recent comment by George in Washington DC and now I’ve read it. JFP, who incidentally lived in Ireland for thirteen years, draws his inspiration from the Catholic Church in the Midwest – often in Minnesota. I enjoyed it and will read some of his short stories. Don’t take my word.
“This is the book for which his many admirers have long been waiting” (Evelyn Waugh)
”The writing is superbly deadpan and the dialogue pure perfection” (Anthony Burgess)
So he was known over here but now largely neglected. Here is a sample that sets the scene in Morte d’Urban. It reminds me of Evelyn Waugh writing about the Crouchbacks in Men at Arms or the Flytes in Brideshead – putting their Catholicism in context.
“It seemed to him that the Order of St Clement labored under the curse of mediocrity, and had done so almost from the beginning. In Europe, the Clementines hadn’t (it was always said) recovered from the French Revolution. It was certain that they hadn’t ever really got going in the New World. Their history revealed little to brag about – one saint (the Holy Founder) and a few bishops of missionary sees, no theologians worthy of the name, no original thinkers, not even a scientist. The Clementines were unique in that they were noted for nothing at all. They were in bad shape all over the world. The Chicago province was probably better off than the others, but that wasn’t saying much. Their college was failing, their high schools were a breakeven proposition at best, and their parishes, except for a few, were in unsettled parts of Texas and New Mexico where no order in its right mind would go. The latest white elephant was an abandoned sanitarium in rural Minnesota! But that was typical of Father Boniface and the rest of them. They just didn’t know a bad thing when they saw it – or a good one.” (Morte d’Urban)
Thank you for the acknowledgment! Let me remark that Powers wrote a second novel, Wheat That Springeth Green. Again, the protagonist is a priest, this time a secular priest. This novel is set in the late 1960s, and the Church shows the effects of the Vatican II, not to say everything else that has happened in America.
Let me add that Powers published Wheat That Springeth Green in 1988, so there must have been many thousands of copies of Morte d’Urban printed stating correctly that it was his only novel.