The Life You Save May Be Your Own by Elie
The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage (2003)
by Paul Elie
555 pages - Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
This is a well-written, deep, searching, and fascinating look at four American Catholic writers who gained prominence after WWII. In her short life, Flannery O'Connor wrote two novels and many short stories of unsurpassed artistic quality. Walker Percy, whose father and grandfather had committed suicide, was a doctor who came down with tuberculosis, and became a novelist and self-taught philosopher. Dorothy Day was the founder of The Catholic Worker, which started as a newspaper and grew into a family of missions for the poor and destitute, as well as a nonviolent peace movement. Thomas Merton gained a wide audience for his writing after he became a Trappist monk and wrote material rooted in autobiography. Though they never formed any kind of formal movement, as they grew in prominence they either met and corresponded, or at least read and were affected by each other's work.
Except for the introduction and epilogue, the book mostly flows chronologically. This means that O'Connor, because of her late birth and early death, is the last to arrive and the first to leave. However, it also gives the book the feeling of a sort of novel with four distinct, fascinating characters, and the story emerges like the exciting action of a novel, and you feel cheered by successes and heartbroken by defeats. O'Connor is the only one born and raised a Catholic, believing from the beginning to the end; all the others being converts from a sort of vague popular secularism they previously swam in.
It's a book I read deeply and reflected on much. Four very different people, each finding their own way, sometimes coming together to find understanding, while sometimes seeing the sparks of conflict fly. A very different and unique look at the development of four writers, far from the usual popular psychology and worn-out cliches. Much of that is likely due to the author Elie, who writes with impressive literary clarity (this is his first book) and seems to have read an amazing amount of primary, secondary, and tertiary material. These were all people that were very gifted, and one of the themes of the book is how their early reading of great books of fiction and non-fiction, and then, in their later life, their writing and the reading of each other's work, helped them along the way to discover their own selves, and helped them along the pilgrimage of the subtitle.
But, this is certainly not hagiography (though the process toward canonization is underway for Dorothy Day). Each person is presented with their flaws, sometimes glaring. Merton, to me personally, came across as extremely flakey, unstable, and it cast doubt on just how much basis there was for anything he wrote. Percy is the one I identify with most, but he's unfortunately the least present (or so it seemed to me) as he did not have a lot of dramatic correspondence or public presence, living a very everyday life and working at things slowly, never displaying bold strokes of genius. As I've said, certainly a book I've read deeply, though, perhaps ironically, somewhere near the end I felt a sort of ease in my heart that I, who was brought up 'nominally' Catholic, should probably stop trying so hard to believe in things that have never meant much to me, like the liturgy or holy communion or the suffering and death of Christ as atonement for our individual sins, but instead trust in the inclinations of my own soul, 'crypto-religious' (to use a term used by Czeslaw Milosz, who corresponded with Merton) as it may be. Though I don't really keep track of such things, so I couldn't say for certain, this certainly feels like the best book I have read all year.
by Paul Elie
555 pages - Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
This is a well-written, deep, searching, and fascinating look at four American Catholic writers who gained prominence after WWII. In her short life, Flannery O'Connor wrote two novels and many short stories of unsurpassed artistic quality. Walker Percy, whose father and grandfather had committed suicide, was a doctor who came down with tuberculosis, and became a novelist and self-taught philosopher. Dorothy Day was the founder of The Catholic Worker, which started as a newspaper and grew into a family of missions for the poor and destitute, as well as a nonviolent peace movement. Thomas Merton gained a wide audience for his writing after he became a Trappist monk and wrote material rooted in autobiography. Though they never formed any kind of formal movement, as they grew in prominence they either met and corresponded, or at least read and were affected by each other's work.
Except for the introduction and epilogue, the book mostly flows chronologically. This means that O'Connor, because of her late birth and early death, is the last to arrive and the first to leave. However, it also gives the book the feeling of a sort of novel with four distinct, fascinating characters, and the story emerges like the exciting action of a novel, and you feel cheered by successes and heartbroken by defeats. O'Connor is the only one born and raised a Catholic, believing from the beginning to the end; all the others being converts from a sort of vague popular secularism they previously swam in.
It's a book I read deeply and reflected on much. Four very different people, each finding their own way, sometimes coming together to find understanding, while sometimes seeing the sparks of conflict fly. A very different and unique look at the development of four writers, far from the usual popular psychology and worn-out cliches. Much of that is likely due to the author Elie, who writes with impressive literary clarity (this is his first book) and seems to have read an amazing amount of primary, secondary, and tertiary material. These were all people that were very gifted, and one of the themes of the book is how their early reading of great books of fiction and non-fiction, and then, in their later life, their writing and the reading of each other's work, helped them along the way to discover their own selves, and helped them along the pilgrimage of the subtitle.
But, this is certainly not hagiography (though the process toward canonization is underway for Dorothy Day). Each person is presented with their flaws, sometimes glaring. Merton, to me personally, came across as extremely flakey, unstable, and it cast doubt on just how much basis there was for anything he wrote. Percy is the one I identify with most, but he's unfortunately the least present (or so it seemed to me) as he did not have a lot of dramatic correspondence or public presence, living a very everyday life and working at things slowly, never displaying bold strokes of genius. As I've said, certainly a book I've read deeply, though, perhaps ironically, somewhere near the end I felt a sort of ease in my heart that I, who was brought up 'nominally' Catholic, should probably stop trying so hard to believe in things that have never meant much to me, like the liturgy or holy communion or the suffering and death of Christ as atonement for our individual sins, but instead trust in the inclinations of my own soul, 'crypto-religious' (to use a term used by Czeslaw Milosz, who corresponded with Merton) as it may be. Though I don't really keep track of such things, so I couldn't say for certain, this certainly feels like the best book I have read all year.