As a young adult, I marked the new year by sending out a list of some of the best things I’d read over the past twelve months. The following isn’t exactly a resurgence of that tradition—but might qualify as a new variation on it.
Frank H. Nowell. Public domain image courtesy University of Washington Libraries and Wikmedia Commons.
When the pandemic shut things down over here in March, I jumped right into the huge books that had been lingering on my shelves, giving me the stink-eye: why are you letting us just sit here? We were meant to be read, damn it, not just displayed. And so, with nowhere to go and nothing else to do, I dove in, fully committed.
Before too long, I’d devoured Edoardo Albinati’s The Catholic School, followed by Thomas Piketty’s Capital, volume five of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, and a sizable biography of Diane Arbus, finally slogging through James Michener’s The Floating World. The tomes grew smaller as I moved along—and as it became clear that we were in for a massive catastrophe the likes of which the country hadn’t seen for at least a generation, I was back to reading works of more average size.
It’s not that I blew through all the big books on my to-be-read shelf; Knausgaard’s volume 6 awaits me, as does a door-stopper dedicated to the work of Raymond Pettibon. Maybe I was just slowed by the same sort of disillusionment that set in among the crowd that had thrown itself into full-time pandemic baking: at a certain point, you couldn’t deny that thousands of pages of reading (or cups of flour turned into Bundt cakes) would in no way get you through the end of this infestation. No matter how great the fictional universe you immerse yourself in, or how long it takes to get through it, you still won’t have waded through enough words to let you look up from the page and realize you’re back in a COVID-free world.
It’s strange, though, that I started the whole endeavor with Albinati’s novel, the writing of which was sparked by the memory of a horrific crime that occurred in 1975—and was carried out by students at the school Albinati attended as a teen. It’s a coming-of-age story that takes place in a society entangled in political violence, during Italy’s Years of Lead, filled with bombings, assassinations, protests, strikes, street scuffles, and general unease. And all that destruction is wrapped up, especially in the narrator’s case, in religion, particularly the way in which religious education seems to lend itself to, even encourage, the sort of masculine violence that produced multiple levels of often misogynist and homophobic mayhem.
I say it was strange to have started off with this novel because of the historical connection, or at least nod, it would give to what was on our own horizon. Not to the BLM movement, which was only a surprise to people able until then to wear blinders—but the way in which politics, especially as the November elections approached, carried with it the threat of, or at least rhetoric akin to, twentieth-century forms of extremism. Just as Albinati the author makes us realize the past is never really a settled thing, the US of A has been served up with a reminder that it’s not immune to the sorts of discord or dangers suffered elsewhere: police brutality, right-wing militias, attempts to overturn an election and the system of law upon which it depends, and (witness Nashville), even a bombing to go along with it all.
And just as the Catholic Church of Albinati’s time and place was threaded in all sorts of complicated ways with Italy’s own conflict-ridden twentieth century, some varieties of so-called Christian religion are making plain in the contemporary US to just what degree they’re willing to cozy up to some pretty awful players.
In what Cornel West would call its Constantinian mode, religion (specifically Christianity) basically acts as a means of upholding the status quo. Unsurprisingly, it serves the powerful just fine, and offers everyone else a rule-ridden consolation prize. Albinati gives us a long (1200-plus page!) look at the way in which the religion of his youth was used to inculcate and maintain social roles and expectations, and to limit a person’s or population’s possibilities, whether emotionally or in more concrete ways. Over here, we’re being treated to the spectacle of some branches of Christianity hitching their wagons to ugly supremacist dreams of a white, or at least “traditional American” world that never really existed as the pure thing its proponents would like to believe it was. And as a bonus, those very same manifestations of religion are filled with conflicted approaches to sex and gender that would probably look familiar to Albinati’s hormone-infused schoolboys. Holding up religion as a means of justifying your own preferences or practices isn’t remotely new, nor is it limited to Christians. But it’s horribly fascinating how so many traditions keep proving themselves eager to part with founding spirits that stood against the very things they now embrace.(1)
We haven’t even reached the end of this disastrous presidency, not to mention the pandemic, and I can’t help but be slightly paranoid about risking a too-early sigh of relief at the prospect of Joe Biden seamlessly taking office in January. I’m under no illusion that the former VP will swoop in and fix all our problems, from the pandemic itself, to the economic crisis that was brewing even before COVID hit, to the continuing reality of racism or environmental destruction or political and cultural divides that have no apparent desire to be overcome. Albinati’s narrator kept having to confront the past out of which he’d emerged, to deal with the realities that past had created and allowed to survive. I’m not sure what that process will look like for us, once the events we’re currently trying to deal with become a thing of the technical past. The only wager I’ll dare to make is that none of our trials will allow itself to be neatly boxed up or forgotten.(2)
On their own, books certainly won’t solve any of our particular problems. But as Albinati’s novel has done for me, and probably for so many others, they might serve as effective reminders to tread cautiously, to look as squarely as we’re able at the truth of what came before us. As admonitions never to be hasty about declaring anything over and done—and always, always to remain vigilant about what hasn’t been—what may never be—put to rest.
(1) Although dated, that linked opinion piece on the prosperity gospel remains pretty relevant—especially when considering one of its prime examples, Joel Osteen.
(2) Regarding US evangelicals in particular, this Atlantic article offers an interesting look at what that version(s) of Christianity is already struggling with, and surely will continue to do in the future.