Anything But Nothing: Does Faith Matter?

My latest book review at Book and Film Globe just popped up: Miracles and Wonder by Elaine Pagels. This is the author of the famous book The Gnostic Gospels, which in 1979 was the first impression for many of what these Christian gospels—which were uncovered in Egypt in 1945—contained. When I told BFG editor Neal Pollack that I wanted to review Miracles and Wonder, he quipped, “Sounds like a BANGER yo.”

That’s me. BANGER.

It’s true that, as the years have passed, I’ve only grown more interested in exploring the divine. I trace this interest back to 2006 when I found myself outside a 10’x10’ vinyl booth at the Boston Mills ArtFest in the Cleveland area. At these art fairs, jury-selected artists from around the country set up their tents, display their work, and sell it to interested locals. In this booth, a potter was talking to another potter. It was at the end of a fair day, and the potters were recalling a conversation that had happened during a dinner with a group of other potters earlier that year. At the dinner, one potter said of another potter that her pots had “no faith.”

It's hard to break down the many feelings I had at the time about this overheard, second-hand comment. First, I found a table of potters sitting around and one of them taking “pot-shots” at another a little funny. Who knew that ceramicists had catty opinions about the competition? In my experience, that was emotional territory associated with painters, people who often came to the art world hoping to become the next Picasso and were lucky to survive selling work to suburbanites in Des Moines. Potters created things like ceramic bowls they drove across the country and sold for $20 apiece. I was amazed how so many of them were happy to do it.

What struck me even more about the comment was how this specific critique was mysterious to me. What could a potter mean by describing another potter’s work as lacking faith? What would such a faithless pot look like? Would its faithlessness be reflected in its design? Material? Glaze? I would never see the pots to which the artist was referring, but I doubted my untrained eye would’ve seen this characteristic if I had. If I wanted to know what it was for a piece of art to lack faith, I would have to figure it out on my own.

But I didn’t at the time. I thought about it, then all but forgot about it.

All but.

Maybe if I didn’t know what faith looked like in a ceramic pot, I also didn’t know what it looked like in my writing. By that time, I’d completed and self-published a novel and was well into its sequel, which I would self-publish in 2008. Did my work have faith? I didn’t know. I’d spent about a decade writing every work day morning, hoping to publish novels and gain a readership. Isn’t that a kind of faith?

In a sense, but was there a faith reflected in the novels themselves? In the characters as they work their way through their dramas? In a roundabout way, yes. Faith, in the end, is what they’re practicing as they move through the story, which at the time of writing them I might’ve simply described as the characters having something to believe in. They’re at crisis points in their lives, when something they thought was fundamental to them is either relinquished or stripped away, and it’s up to them to rebuild the basic faith that allows them to get out of bed in the morning. Yes, my novels had faith. Faith was, in fact, central to both of them and would continue to be in my future work.

But I’ll admit I find that explanation thin. I suspected, for some reason, that my work, like the work of that potter, lacked faith. Why? Maybe because I grew up barely religious. I have a Bible given to me by my paternal grandpa when I was young. I also vaguely remember, around the same time, attending Sunday School more than once in the basement of the Gospel Temple in my hometown of Moline, Illinois. In adolescence, there were trips to churches for weddings, but never again on a Sunday morning. I spent subsequent decades avoiding, dismissing, and at times being hostile to the idea of religious faith. If my work lacked faith, it might be because I lacked faith in any traditional religious sense.

Is faith important in a work of fiction? I suspected it was, at least to me. It struck me as the elusive ingredient that made the reading process most rewarding. I know I’m a bit of an outlier this way. Most people roughly my age who love fiction came to it during their youth through the reading of genre work. King, Steele, Tolkien, Rowling, and others ushered them into the reading process, and these folks often continue to read throughout their lives.

I didn’t pick up the fiction reading habit until I was in college, when I came to know novels such as Tess of the D’Urbervilles, 1984, A Clockwork Orange, and Slaughterhouse-Five. These stories all had plots and were entertaining in their ways, but that’s not why they helped make me a lifelong reader and writer. I felt these works offered snapshots of being human that you couldn’t get anywhere else, and I approached them with a certain reverence. I was grateful to get to read them. I wanted a life in which I read and understood why they were so magical and important. It struck me as my work in the world, though perhaps not for pay, and I’ve been doing it ever since.

So, I had a surplus of faith in literature from the time I discovered it, and I can’t help but believe it’s some kind of reaction to having so little religious faith in my upbringing. I didn’t go to books for entertainment. The TV and stereo were great for entertainment. I went to books for the same stuff that I suspect others went to conventional religion for: life lessons, ways to understand being human, a reach for the divine.

I didn’t believe my devotion to fiction translated to a sense of faith in my novels. Why was I so certain? For one, there was nothing divinely inspired about them. At 27, I wanted to write a novel, and after six or so years of daily writing, I finished and self-published it. During that six-year process, I lacked any real sense of what I was doing. I’d heard repeatedly that good writing came from revision, so I came up with a plan to create a novel draft to be revised. Five-hundred words a day led to a complete draft in a matter of months. Once that goal was met, I was encouraged by a mentor to forget the draft and the start the novel over with a blank page. All of the assumptions you could make about the quality of my draft were probably true.

I took his advice, but I changed my novel writing process. I could no longer dedicate so much time to something that in the end would need to be torn down. I started every writing week by deleting anything I found unsatisfactory from the previous week. I’d write five pages one week and delete three when I came back to the computer on Monday. I’d write five more the next week and delete four. I’d write five more and delete all but a few lines.

As Sisyphean as this sounds, I loved it. I came from working-class people, and I loved the sense that I was working hard for the accomplishment of a strong novel draft. After a while, I started keeping more words than I deleted, and in the end, I had a finished 43,000-word novel (okay, novella) ready for the world.

This felt like an accomplishment. There was no denying, though, that during the novel-writing process I had no real sense of what I might like to say with my novel. I felt like I had some general talent as an artist in the more-or-less common way that I had something in me that wanted to get out and would perhaps lead to good art. I wanted to channel that something into novels because I loved novels more than any other art form. I wanted my finished novel to say, this book is special, like the earlier-mentioned great fiction from my college days, and I wanted to sell it to a publishing company and start a career as a novelist. I don’t think this is an uncommon dream amongst people who, for whatever reason, decide they’re writers.

The resulting novel is a success in many ways. It tells a good story, and over the decades, many of its 700 purchasers have said they love it and complimented me on the book. It was even made into a micro-budget film. The story works, and after all that effort, I’m glad it does.

While I’m proud of the work, I also sense that it’s not an inspired work. How could a work that has been written in such a way be inspired? It seems the opposite. It was built through will, brick by brick, taking bricks way, putting new ones down, then knocking the wall down and building it again even more slowly. The result isn’t a work of faith in the sense that I was divinely inspired and followed that inspiration to a more or less reasonably timed conclusion. It’s a work of the will prevailing over doubt, which, while perhaps impressive, from my vantage is far different from the result being inspired. The bricklayer who makes a cathedral might have faith in his work, but that doesn’t necessarily make the finished cathedral inspiring to others. I’d nailed the former type of faith—I was a bricklayer making a cathedral—but I didn’t see that inspiration in my finished product. My novels were merely competent.

In the subsequent years, I’ve self-published two more novels, each written in more or less the same tedious way as the first, and each succeeds as a competent work that isn’t inspired. I also wrote a fourth novel that took this tedium to an extreme, but I abandoned it before publication. Twenty years was long enough to dedicate to the approach I’d cultivated, and it wasn’t getting me closer to my goal of being a novelist like the ones I admired. I wrote competent novels—like those by dozens of novelists I’d read and all but forgotten about—not inspired ones.

I’ve come to think that, for a novel to resonate with faith, it must on some level be inspired. I have to sense that the writer was counting on something beyond themselves to guide and dictate their efforts. I’ve come to doubt a writer like me who has little or no traditional faith can create characters and works of faith, in the sense that the works speak to something beyond what I or anyone can fully understand. Can such a writer’s work as mine be imbued with faith? Is it even possible?

I have to believe that a writer who’s never known faith in the religious sense is at a disadvantage when trying to create characters with faith. Sure, I can research faith in the same way I might research plumbing to flesh out a character who’s a plumber, but I think it’s, at minimum, more effective to have faith baked into the characters and story in a way that feels natural and not researched. I tend to believe that such faith-imbued work is most likely to come from a writer of faith, and I’d even go so far as to say I prefer this sense of faith in fictional characters and fiction in general.

One of my favorite characters grappling with faith is Tommy Wilhelm from Saul Bellow’s novella Seize the Day. The story is set in New York City in the 1950s. At the end of the story, Wilhelm, 43, has lost everything. His financial life has been careening toward failure for decades, and his latest blunder was trusting his friend Tampkin to invest the last of his money for him. Wilhelm’s wife and two kids have had enough of him, and during the story, he asked his well-off father for money and was denied. He doesn’t so much as know where he will sleep that night, and his fraught wandering of the city leads him to a chapel where a funeral is in progress. With nowhere else to go, Wilhelm goes in and gets in line to look into the coffin. He doesn’t know the deceased or anyone in the room, but seeing the old face in the coffin brings strikingly acute feelings.

Standing a little apart, Wilhelm began to cry. He cried at first softly and from sentiment, but soon from deeper feeling. He sobbed loudly and his face grew distorted and hot, and the tears stung his skin. A man—another human creature, was what first went through his thoughts, but other and different things were torn from him. What’ll I do? I’m stripped and kicked out … Oh, Father, what do I ask of you? What’ll I do about the kids—Tommy, Paul? My children. And Olive? My dear! Why, why, why—you must protect me against the devil who wants my life. If you want it, then kill me. Take it, take it, take it from me.

If I read this passage through a faith lens, I notice a couple of things. That “devil” has some overtones of the Christian concept of the Devil. I suspect we’re supposed to notice that the devil shows up at such an important moment in the story. That said, I have to believe that Bellow—who was a secular Jew—would’ve capitalized it if he meant the Devil as strictly believed in the Judeo-Christian sense.

More interesting to me is that “Father.” It’s tempting to want this to be a reference to the father who earlier in the story denied Wilhelm money, but in the setting of a chapel, it’s more likely we’re dealing with the Judeo-Christian “Father”—the one who can take his life away from him. This is a broken man who, like Job from the Bible, is finally asking God why he has been forsaken. Seize the Day is about getting to this point of brokenness and finally asking God, hey, what’s the deal? What do you have against me? What did I do wrong?

That said, Seize the Day is not a story dominated by concerns with God. It’s a story about the downward financial and emotional trajectory of Wilhelm. But here is this “Father” at the story’s climax, skillfully woven in by the author to offer a new, cosmological dimension to the pain suffered by the character. The story instantly gets bigger than Wilhelm. Yes, we’ve followed his downward trajectory with little to no hint of his religious concerns, but in the end, it’s about how God can forsake us when we need him most.

Beyond Bellow, the number of American classics that rely on religion as a pillar of their milieux is almost uncountable. Moby-Dick, The Scarlet Letter, Light in August, A Farewell to Arms. These qualities in classic American novels are mirrored by many fiction classics from other countries— Madame Bovary, One-Hundred Years of Solitude, anything by Herman Hesse. Revered fictional works from the past that rely on religion to help tell their stories are not hard to come by. It would be much harder to find a literary classic that has little or nothing to do with religion.

Remembering all of these stories, it becomes even more apparent to me that the fiction I’ve loved for decades, the stuff that made me want to be a fiction writer, has faith dyed into the fabric of the work. I’m reminded that many of my favorite writers were deeply tied to their faith. Updike and Morrison both went to church regularly. Bellow rejected the orthodox Judaism he was born into, but no one ever doubted whether or not he was defined by it. Other 20^th century writers who rejected the religion of their youth—James Joyce, Philip Roth—spent much of their lives writing about it. It’s something I’ve noticed for years about people raised in religion. On one level, it doesn’t much matter if you follow that path in an orthodox way or not. It’s there anyway. To say, “I renounce [x]” is to admit that x is important enough to the person to renounce.

Of course, one can, like me, write perfectly competent fiction with no faith whatsoever. It’s just hard for me not to notice that my favorites tend to be people with deep ties to religion, and I wonder if that’s part of why their writing affects me so. They also tend to be from the previous century, one in which following a religion was more typically practiced. According to the Pew Research Center, in the early 1990s—when Updike, Morrison, and Bellow were all writing—about 90 percent of U.S. adults identified as Christians. As of 2021, the same institution reported that Christians made up 63 percent of the U.S. population, and the group claiming no religion was up from 16 to 29 percent during that span. If I detect a lack of faith in contemporary fiction—if I am, in effect, a potter being critical about other potters’ work at the dinner table—it might simply reflect the contemporary trend away from religion in general. That’s just how things are now.

I think there’s something to having a sense in your fiction that there is a god in the world who might have an opinion about what’s going on, and I think readers take on this sense of the godhead more naturally when they read fiction from earlier eras. In past eras, when religions were more prominent, readers take for granted that the characters are acting in a world with a god or two, or even that the characters might believe in the presence and maybe importance of supernatural beings. I can’t help but think of Homer, whose characters don’t so much as cook dinner without first checking with the gods. If Homer’s stories—the Iliad and the Odyssey—are cornerstones of our narrative tradition, then I’d venture that since his time, we’ve only gotten further away from the sense that gods occupy the worlds we read about in stories. Whether we like that or not is up to the individual reader, but I suspect it changes the overall complexity of story.

There is some evidence that a story is required to have a spiritual realm in order to move me at the deepest level. When I think of one that impacted me at this level and also seems a-religious, I immediately come to “The Yellow Wall-Paper.” This story riveted me the first time I read it in my teens, and it continues to dazzle with repeated readings. It’s a story that chronicles with substantial insight the psychological trajectory of a woman who loses touch with reality. The first-person story is a series of diary entries by the woman after she’s been locked in a room by her husband, and her entries become more and more unhinged as the narrative moves forward. The author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, uniquely uses language to show the deep psychological issues at work in the narrator. The diary entries become a chronicling of how a person might lose their mind.

The word “God” appears exactly once in the story, specifically in the dialog “’For God’s sake, what are you doing!’” This line is spoken by the husband at the end of the story upon finding his wife in her broken state. The story also mentions “faith” exactly once, at the very beginning, as the wife describes in her diary that her husband “has no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures.” Similar to the Bellow story, and despite my earlier sense that “The Yellow Wall-Paper” is a-religious, those two allusions to a world beyond our own seem to set up the story with a certain spiritual aspect. The husband, a staunch non-believer, finds himself alluding to God at the story’s climax. I think Gilman wanted faith to play a role in her story, maybe even an important one. Despite my sense that “The Yellow Wall-Paper” is an a-religious story, it is on some level quite otherwise.

Another book that strikes me as distinctly a-religious on its surface is 1984. Orwell was a known rejector of the Christian faith in which he was raised, and the totalitarianism of his fictional land Oceania rests on atheism. Big Brother doesn’t allow “the Party,” or the bureaucrats, of his world to participate in religion, while “the proles,” or the workers, are allowed religious worship to keep them in line. Orwell seems to underscore his own awareness of—if not the importance of faith—the need to have it in some form to create a fully realized fictional world, so much so that he found a way to include it in his masterwork.

How about Lolita? Surely, Nabokov’s novel is a masterpiece of a-religion, right? Nabokov himself rejected the idea that his work must have some moral or religious purpose other than aesthetic pleasure. In the novel, Humbert eschews religious schemes, especially the idea that he might be forgiven for his sins against Lolita. There’s a section late in the book where Humbert remembers a conversation with a priest and rejects the comforts those conversations brought him since they can never give back the childhood of Dolores Haze, which he had taken. Just like it is in the earlier-mentioned works, the rejection of religion is right there in Lolita. The presence of faith—at least as something to reject—in the story suggests its importance to the world it portrays, and I think it adds to the overall conflict in a way that makes it feel about more than simply its respective drama. With God involved, the stakes are always higher, and higher stakes are typically more compelling to the reader.

After these analyses, I realize there are clear examples where I at least allude to something bigger in my own fiction, which adds to the sense of faith in the work. In my first novel, the protagonist’s favorite swear is “Good Christ.” While religious-themed epithets might not exude faith, they help emphasize the sense that there is a concept of God in the character’s mind and world. Later, the protagonist mentions things that he likes—the idle of his car, the curve of a woman, the sound of a certain song—and wonders “if they’re simply things that I like or if they’re more important than that. Is there something out there that wants me to like them, that likes that I like them?” That’s a pretty clear allusion to God, which helps inject the concept of faith into the narrative.

My second and third novels also have such concerns running through them. All of my novels deal with the concepts of physical or aesthetic pleasure and what that pleasure might mean on a cosmic level. I seemed to have intuited from the 20^th century writers I loved that at least the presence of God in my fictional world is necessary to grant my stories more gravitas. I wanted my novels to be about everything good novels are about. In that sense, the inclusion of faith was necessary, conscious or otherwise.

As a-religious as I was—or at least thought I was—when I wrote and published all three of my novels, I seemed to be looking for an answer to the question “If we like the way things make us feel, does that make them good?” The protagonist of my third novel is an alcoholic who repeatedly ruins his life through addiction and bad behavior, but he eventually gets on the right side of himself. By the end of my trilogy of novels, I found my answer, though I wouldn’t have noted it as one at the time. “Just because it makes you feel good doesn’t necessarily make it right” might not sound like much, but it was a clear allusion to something bigger cosmologically running through my work. If pressed, sure, my novels have something coursing through them that might resemble faith.

But I admit that, when compared to my literary heroes, the faith in my fiction seems faint, and I consider this weakness a detriment to the achievement of my work. Even if it alludes to faith like the “secular” fictional works I mention above, something was missing. Why did it seem that their work achieved so much more artistically than mine? They’re geniuses, of course, but what could I have done to make my work better?

One clue came to me from reading Memesis by Erich Auerbach. Memesis is a 500-page work of literary criticism written in the 1940s in Budapest. The book made me understand more clearly the ways a literary work might have faith. Memesis deeply explores the representation of realism in literature from Homer to the author’s contemporary time. I found the work enlightening for what it had to say about the role or roles faith might play in literature. That’s not the point of Auerbach’s book, but it’s one of the reasons why I found it fulfilling.

The first chapter of Memesis, “Odysseus’s Scar,” deals with the role of Odysseus’s well-known thigh wound in the Odyssey. In short, it’s the tool Homer uses in his story to reveal to his audience that the word “Odysseus” means “one who suffers.” While the Auerbach chapter is interesting in its own right, what I found most interesting is Auerbach’s discussion of two specific types of stories: one that mostly follows a linear pattern, such as the Iliad, and one that’s less linear, such as the Bible.

Homer is a master at showing how causal relations lead to further story development. In other words, this happened, and because this happened, this new thing happened, and because that new thing happened, this new new thing happened. Homer never lets anything occur in either of his works that can’t be traced back to a cause. This characteristic serves the purpose of making every plot turn in the Iliad feel earned, which is a central way a writer makes their work satisfying to the reader.

Auerbach contrasts this type of story with the stories told in the Old Testament. In these stories, the events are not necessarily causally related. We know little about the surrounding events of, say, God’s command that Abraham sacrifice his son Isaac. Auerbach writes:

Where are the two speakers [God and Abraham]? We are not told. The reader, however, knows that they are not normally to be found together in one place on earth, that one of them, God, in order to speak to Abraham, must come from somewhere, must enter the earthly realm from some untold heights or depths. Whence did he come, whence does he call Abraham? We are not told. He does not come, as Zeus or Poseidon, from the Aethiopians, where he has been enjoying a sacrificial feast. Nor are we told anything of his reasons for tempting Abraham so terribly. He has not, like Zeus, discussed them in set speeches with other gods gathered in council; nor have the deliberations in his own heart been presented to us; unexpected and mysterious, he enters the scene from some unknown height or depth and calls: Abraham!

Auerbach goes on to clarify that we know almost nothing about these characters such as where they are, what they look like, and why both God and Abraham do the things they do. Homer would never omit such details, and you can understand why. How can you not tell your reader these basic facts about your story? Why wouldn’t you want to? The Old Testament skips much of this connective tissue. Why do we as readers allow it? How are these many stories connected, if not in the linear way associated with Homer?

Auerbach reveals the answer later in the chapter:

The claim of the Old Testament stories to represent universal history, their insistent relation—a relation constantly redefined by conflicts—to a single hidden God, who yet shows himself and who guides universal history by promise and exaction, gives these stories an entirely different perspective from any the Homeric poems can possess. As a composition, the Old Testament is incomparably less unified than the Homeric poems, it is more obviously pieced together—but the various components all belong to the one concept of universal history and its interpretation…. The greater the separateness and horizontal disconnection of the stories and groups of stories in relation to one another, compared with the Iliad and the Odyssey, the stronger is their vertical connection, which holds them all together and which is entirely lacking in Homer.

The idea here is that the Bible can frequently skip these types of details because it doesn’t rely on the horizontal connections of Homer to make the story resonate. Instead, the Bible relies on the vertical connection of the different stories.

What is the essence of this vertical connection? How are we as readers able to navigate the story of the Old Testament without being pulled out by the missing details such as who these people are, where they are, etc.?

Auerbach explains that the unifying element of the Old Testament is the concept that God is telling through the Bible the history of the world as believed deeply by its writers. “…their religious intent involves an absolute claim to historical truth.” That aspect we know or somehow intuit as a reader, and it allows us to ignore any gaps in linear or horizontal storytelling and instead focus on the fact that this is what the inspired authors—and from their perception, what God—wants us to know about the history of the Judeo-Christian world. With authority like that, you barely need any details, as Auerbach points out. Go back and re-read the story of Abraham’s near filicide of Isaac. It is very sparse. We don’t need the details because that’s not what we care about when we read the Bible. We care about what the God the writers believe wants us to know. That takes precedence over every little thing being spelled out.

All of a sudden, I realized the reasons I’ve loved the literary works I’ve loved. I think again of “The Yellow Wallpaper.” The woman at one point sees herself as some kind of small creature that runs along a crevice in the wall, outlining what I picture as the trim of the room with a kind of racetrack that goes up and around the door. This is a huge leap for Gilman the writer to take and, somewhat miraculously, I as the reader am right there with her. Gilman is merely leaving the horizontal story of the woman’s travails and conveying the vertical story of what goes on in a person’s mind when they lose grip on reality. The story’s effectiveness with readers is a testament to the power of fiction to transcend the horizontal plot and teach us something deeper about life. Gilman had faith in it, and it shows.

From this perspective, 1984 isn’t an important book because the proles are allowed religion. It’s an important book because it uses the horizontal story of the decay of a fantasy world as a mirror to show the vertical one of the decay of our own. Moreso than anything that happens in the plot, we as readers are pulled into Orwell’s amazing conceit. This is what our world could become, we think. In a way, Orwell’s masterpiece is similar to the Old Testament in that it flaunts a kind of certainty about the world. The Old Testament says, this is where we’re from, and 1984 says, this is where we’re going, if we don’t watch it. Both represent miraculous acts of faith by their authors in their eventual readers.

From this vertical vantage, Lolita isn’t a book about a pedophile who acts on his passion and destroys the life of a girl. That’s there, of course, but it’s merely the horizontal story. In a vertical sense, Lolita is a book about a character who is so gifted with words he somehow makes the reader ignore the fact that he’s a pedophile. That might be the greatest feat in the history of literature. We as readers are of course accustomed to letting really bad folks into our hearts. We empathize with murderers such as Raskolnikov, for example, but someone like Humbert? Any writer in their right mind wouldn’t even attempt it, but Nabokov somehow knocks it out of the park. What faith he has in his work and in us! Imagine if he’d missed the mark, even by a little.

From this point of view, these are books held together not by their plots—although all of their plots are entirely intact—but by the vertical feat of taking the reader beyond the plot to some transcendent place that makes us not really care much about the plot. At that point, the writer is doing something miraculous that no one could’ve predicted. They’re playing chess with our souls where most writers are playing checkers with our minds. In the same sense that God is speaking through the Old Testament writers, some cosmic force greater than us is speaking through these more contemporary writers in the sense that all of these stories take us vertically to another plane of empathy and understanding through nothing but words. Granted, each of the stories mentioned above relies on more plot connections than the Old Testament—not every book can be the Bible—but there is no confusion to me about what makes them special. The ways they free themselves from the horizontal story of what happens next to the vertical story of what makes them singular and essential is what makes them important works, at least to me.

I would now describe each of these stories as a work of faith in the sense that the work of our unfortunate potter, and my unfortunate novels, lack. These authors place huge faith in their fiction. “The Yellow Wallpaper” relies on the reader to understand that the protagonist and point of view character is losing her mind, and we somehow catch on and go along with it. 1984 relies on the reader to see the pre-cancer of our way of life and how it might grow into the full-blown disease if we’re not careful. Lolita might represent the most faithful book in history in that it asks the reader to empathize with a pedophile. These books all tell compelling stories in the horizontal way, but their real successes are vertical in that they render difficult—but apparently not impossible—literary tasks, and our inner worlds become larger as a result of reading them. Why would we care about the plot?

As I embark on a new fictional work, what will hopefully be my next published novel, I’m going to keep this aspect of these stories in mind. How much am I counting on the reader to have faith in my work? How can I make my story not just horizontal but vertical? I wish that I could plan this aspect of the project, but I suspect that’s not going to get me where I want to go. In fact, I bet it’s a guaranteed way to miss the most important part of my novel-in-progress. In the end, you have to have faith in yourself, in your work, and in your eventual reader, and if you do, it will eventually show.