When, last year, the Modern Library announced its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the twentieth century, the resulting controversy centered on issues of representation: why so few books by women and racial minorities—and why was the panel of judges composed almost entirely of Old, Nearly Dead White Males? Naturally this would be the burning issue; first things first.

More or less ignored in the brouhaha was a much more fundamental question, one that in many circles would be considered too gauche to ask: Why read novels at all?

In the Christian tradition, that question has been asked repeatedly over the centuries, going all the way back to the early church and the heyday of the Hellenistic romances that scholars describe as the earliest novels. Often, the church's answer has been Don't! Don't read novels. Novels, after all, are elaborate lies, blurring the distinction between reality and make-believe. Instead of the plain and simple truth, fiction offers lessons that are indirect and often deeply ambiguous. Novels are often brazenly immoral besides, encouraging sexual license. And even the less reprehensible stories distract us from what really matters. Today many Christians are embarrassed by such responses. But they shouldn't be embarrassed by the question, which remains an important one. Why should we read novels?

To begin sketching an answer, I turned not to the notorious Modern Library list but to the product of another, more modest promotional scheme. Two or three years before the Modern Library episode, the revived Everyman Library—which leaned heavily toward the classics—announced its first contemporary titles, nine books said to represent the best of world fiction in the postwar period: Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe; The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow; One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez; Catch-22, by Joseph Heller; Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison; A House for Mr. Biswas, by V. S. Naipaul; Midnight's Children, by Salman Rushdie; One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn; and Rabbit Angstrom (a tetralogy comprising Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; and Rabbit at Rest), by John Updike.

These works certainly represent the dominant traditions of the novel today. If anyone wants to ask "Why read fiction?" this is an excellent laboratory. And so in good scientific fashion I commenced my investigation. (You'll have to take my word for it that I read—or, in some cases, re-read—all nine books, even though here I report only on six.)

The single most influential book on this list may well be Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. When it appeared (in 1967 in Spanish, 1970 in English translation), the hip trend was a highly mannered gamesmanship, a la John Barth: "metafiction," the critics called it, fiction gazing raptly at its own navel. And then, boom! in the middle of this crockery landed a book by a Colombian writer who unhesitatingly accepted the novelist's traditional obligation to invent a world with a savvy and ambitious literalism. He wrote with supreme confidence, as if he had just created the art of the novel from scratch. So the omniscient narrator of Solitude remembers the time when Macondo, the story's setting, was "a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point."

But if Garcia Marquez spoiled the metafictionists' tea party, he was just as dismissive of the sturdy boilerplate realists and their positivist assumptions. Within a folkloric framework, a Genesislike tale, Garcia Marquez chronicles the lives of generations of the Buendia family, variously shaped by superstitions of all kinds, Catholicism, utopian humanism, and a fascination with Western science. The assumptions of each way of looking at the world are equally realized—or nearly so. This lack of philosophic privilege makes possible the "magic realism" for which Garcia Marquezand his followers have become famous, their escape from the dead ends of metafiction and kitchen-sink realism. When Remedios the Beauty is assumed into heaven and the sky rains flowers, the novel as a genre changes.

Garcia Marquez's characters stand outside the main current of the Western tradition, in a cultural backwater, the swamp of Macondo, where news of science's advances, capitalist exploitation, the experience of Marxist terror, and the death of the gods arrives late. Solitude suggests that the cultural standing of South America, its history as the inheritor and victim of many foreign cultural influences, opens the possibility of eluding the traps of modernism. Modernists like Pound, Joyce, and Eliot sought to reinvent a Western culture "gone bad in the teeth." This required drilling, an excavation that might enable us to shore fragments against our ruin. In contrast, Garcia Marquezcan still see his New World as a place of grand synthesis. Macondo is perfectly free to edit what it receives and create its own pastiche—an opportunity that allows for the retention of mystery.

And yet, Garcia Marquez's vision, however alluring and hopeful, departs little from an old-fashioned Romanticism. As Aureliano Babilonia reads the sorcerer gypsy Melquiades's prophetic and godlike rendering of Macondo's history and his family's, a "biblical hurricane" obliterates Aureliano and his fictional civilization, "because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth." The author's alter ego has prophesied Macondo into being, and the author reclaims it. Is that biblical whirlwind a prophetic warning to seize the day, to accept responsibility for South America's historical moment, or is it rather the conjurer making a dramatic exit? Revolution yes, but each to his own.

V. S. Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas represents a perfect assimilation of the novel conceived along the lines of E. M. Forster. (Naipaul was born and raised in Trinidad and educated in England, where he has lived for many years when not traveling around the world.) Before reading this novel I knew Naipaul only through his essays and reportage. I had missed his true genius. A House for Mr. Biswas stands out in this collection for its extraordinary mastery of fiction's traditional elements: narrative drive, the creation of character, exposition of ways of life, and through these the evocation of moral behavior and the physical world's disposition toward it.

Here Naipaul performs that greatest of theatrical tricks: giving the game away and nevertheless providing absolute surprise. "Ten weeks before he died," the novel begins, "Mr. Mohun Biswas, a journalist of Sikkim Street, St. James, Port of Spain, was sacked." The novel digresses from there into a rendering of Mr. Biswas's life that progresses only at the very last through those ten weeks to his pointedly inevitable death. This framing of a Dickensian variant of the picaresque—the child as hero as he grows up through his adventures—brackets human possibility within an attractive if moody fatalism. Mr. Biswas, although famous for his castigation of superstition, speaks to his own children of the sovereignty and benign love of God. Yet his story can be accounted for by every point of view advanced in the course of the story, including the most skeptical.

Naipaul manages to make the life of Hindu Indian emigres to Trinidad as understandable as the one we take for granted, even though Mr. Biswas's mother-in-law's household, in which he spends the greater portion of his life, is governed by a host of unwritten codes bewildering even to him. Born under a curse, with an extra finger on one hand, Mohun Biswas is a dreamy boy whose absent-mindedness results in the drowning of his own father. The young Mohun becomes first a Brahmin priest in training, then an urban sign painter, then (as a married man) a farm manager and shopkeeper, and finally, a journalist.

During one interval, Mr. Biswas leaves journalism for a post-World War II stint as a government bureaucrat, while the times sweep in reform and a new prosperity to Trinidad. History makes a difference to individual fate, just as it has in removing this Hindu community from its native India, just as this community itself was once so profoundly affected by English colonialism. Mr. Biswas lives as a twice-removed cousin to the dominant Western culture. His peculiarity, his lack of a natural place within society, his habit of moving ever on to something else, and his lifelong ambition to own his own home—all can be attributed to seismic cultural dislocations.

But Naipaul has no time to curse fate. He is too interested in it. Nor, in contrast with Garcia Marquez, does the author invite us to come to terms with culture in order to forge a new and braver future. Rather, like Forster, Naipaul concerns himself with depiction and eschews judgment; the dramatic action remains tightlipped on the novel's issues. What the reader gains is a vicarious experience of life with all of its mysterious options intact.

Things Fall Apart, by the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, is a staple of high school and college reading lists; no other African novel is so well-known in the United States. Achebe describes how African cultures received the West's inheritance and found themselves doubly dispossessed: from their own traditions and those traditions the West was discarding. His tale begins in a folkloric style, almost stubbornly refusing to generate dramatic conflict, in order to show us the world of his hero Okonkwo and his Ibo culture. Such practices as the killing of twins in infancy come into the narrative with as little comment as the seasonal rhythms of the agriculture-based economy. We are thus allowed to experience Ibo culture from the inside, with its own assumptions and imperatives.

Then Ibo culture comes into relief through the arrival of Western missionaries. The first missionary to Okonkwo's village, Mr. Brown, seeks to understand the Ibo even as he proclaims his gospel message. The next, Mr. Smith, is so anxious to uphold truth against error that he pays no attention to the reasons behind the Ibos' growing hostility. When an overly enthusiastic Christian convert tears off a ritual mask—in the villagers' minds, killing one of their gods—Mr. Smith has no sympathy for their fear of divine reprisal or their pain in losing treasured beliefs.

The village elders know they must act against such a provocation. Without harming Mr. Smith, they burn down the missionary church. In reprisal, Mr. Smith recruits the colonial powers into disciplining the village. The magistrate invites a group of six to bargain out the grievance and then arrests and humiliates them—a brutal act of cultural imperialism that spurs Okonkwo to kill a court messenger. When his village fails to rise up with him, he despairs and hangs himself.

Achebe takes his title from William Butler Yeats's poem "The Second Coming," which prophesies anarchy as the old Christian order comes to an end and another phase of history—"some rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem"—struggles to be born. This choice of title hints at the novel's prophetic dimension, beyond its scrupulous handling of colonialism. Because the colonizers themselves are in flux, Mr. Smith will soon be followed by that symbol of our contemporary alienation, Mr. Jones. The new world order arrives at a time when rootlessness and anomie afflict the triumphant West; had Okonkwo sought to reconcile himself to the invaders, the choice would have quickly become one between dead African traditions and dead Western ones. Achebe's novel is a moving dirge, its protest muted by the oppressor's own troubles.

The inexplicable malaise of a prosperous, conquering people is a leitmotif that runs through the four novels of John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom series, wherein we witness the strange transformation of our home ground into a Recreation Vehicle Wasteland. Updike himself supplies the introduction to the Everyman Library volume, using the occasion to state his credo as a novelist:

The religious faith that a useful truth will be imprinted by a perfect artistic submission underlies these Rabbit novels. The first one, especially, strives to convey the quality of existence itself that hovers beneath the quotidian details, what the scholastic philosophers called the ens. Rather than arrive at a verdict and a directive, I sought to present sides of an unresolvable tension intrinsic to being human. Readers who expect novelists to reward and punish and satirize their characters from a superior standpoint will be disappointed.

Updike's unresolvable tension might be described as the conflict between appetite and care, the joys of the flesh versus its mortal weakness. Updike's credo leaves out, as expressed here, the role of the observer in choosing what to express. There's a person performing this submission, and in the performance he cannot help but reveal himself.

Elsewhere in his introduction, Updike frankly confesses that Rabbit has served as an alter ego, a conduit to that America happening all around. In several ways distinct from Updike himself, a natural athlete, naively self-confident, attractive on first sight to women, Rabbit nevertheless is more a vehicle of Updike's personal viewpoint than anything else. Surely no one but Updike has ever endowed an ex-jock Toyota salesman with thoughts subtle and poetic enough to capture that ens of existence.

Through the four books, what we find in Rabbit is a tremendous joy in the physical world, an appreciation of human company, and a willful resistance to obligation. The last would devastate the lives of the people closest to him but for their surprising and even maddening buoyancy. When Rabbit finally checks out via a heart attack, his wife, Janice, is beginning to sell real estate and rebuild the Springer fortune. The wasteland may stretch out in all directions, but there are enough gas stations to keep driving.

Updike's artistic submission is hard to distinguish from subjugation, except when the writer's honesty makes him explore the consequences of Rabbit's selfishness. Here the experience of being suggests its divine formation. There does seem to be a created order with an in-built morality. But Updike quickly surfaces from this deeper level in order to return to the aesthetic. He cannot let go of his own pleasure in Rabbit as a loose cannon even when his materials demand it. As much as I love Updike's work, I think his aestheticism remains at war with his religious intuitions. He's unwilling to cross the magnificent bridge he has built into that far country.

Finally, we have two novels with settings that militate against philosophical balancing acts. Joseph Heller's Catch-22 sees the world from the vantage of World War II's last days; Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, from a frozen stretch of Stalin's gulag.

In each book, the world conspires, consistently and unapologetically, to destroy the novel's protagonist. Heller's Yossarian knows the enemy is out to kill him. They're shooting at him, after all, as he flies bombing raids over fascist-occupied Italy. His own victimization reflects what he sees everywhere: "she reminded him of the barefoot boy in the thin shirt and thin, tattered trousers and of all the shivering, stupefying misery in a world that never yet had provided enough heat and food and justice for all but an ingenious and unscrupulous handful. What a lousy earth!"

The novel's great strength, besides its shattering black humor, is to include the modern corporate war machine in its critique of inhumanity. Heller shows how greed can be institutionalized. Confronted by the world's misery and society's rapacity, Yossarian finds morality to consist in self-preservation. At novel's end, he takes off for Sweden (not in a rowboat, as in the movie, but through catching a ride to Rome). "To be!" Yossarian cries, and hotfoots it off the stage.

Catch-22 lives by virtue of its humor and its prophetic resonance with the mood of postwar America (especially the spirit of the sixties). Not nearly as well written as Heller's later works (or the other novels considered here), Catch-22 packs a youthful author's energy and commitment and a manic indignation that overcomes his prolix ramblings.

Self-preservation occupies Solzhenitsyn's Shukhov every waking moment in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The spirit of the narrative is almost optimistic, though Shukhov's circumstances as a zek or prisoner in the gulag are arguably much worse than Yossarian's. From the moment he wakes, the conditions of his existence conspire to end it: the hostility of the guards, the starvation rations, the brutal cold of the Siberian winter, and long hours of slave labor make this day nearly unbearable. While Yossarian kvetches, Shukhov employs a desperate industry and the cunning of a longtime camp survivor to steal extra food, hide tools for his own use, and do favors that are rewarded with bites of sausage and money for tobacco. Shukhov lives by his own code that honors his fellow prisoners while paying no attention to camp regulations. He believes in God but finds the teachings of the Orthodox Church irrelevant to his situation.

Shukhov's determination and his small successes finally make the novel endurable as they make his own life possible. His status as an Everyman, his acceptance of the unacceptable, and his hardened will to survive allow the reader to identify with him and thus enter fully into this hell. Once we have finished rooting for him, the horror of his experience comes crashing down. Solzhenitsyn renders Shukhov's humanity so clearly and simply that the inhumanity of the camps becomes imaginable and therefore as repugnant as it should be. The author hardly speaks a word of judgment, thus enlarging immeasurably the reader's will to supply it.

Shukhov's cunning contrasts not only with the inept mistakes made by new arrivals but also with the transcendence of Alyoshka, the Baptist. Although Alyoshka and his group employ none of the tricks Shukhov has mastered, except to hide their Bibles skillfully, these believers bear their imprisonment more successfully than anyone else. They have renounced any material ambitions, even to the point of their desire for an extra serving of gruel. Alyoshka feels that peace which passes understanding. He is free in the midst of the gulag.

Shukhov points out that Alyoshka benefits from having willingly sacrificed his civil freedom for his beliefs. He has done this "for Christ." Shukhov feels ambushed by historical accident. He battles a despairing confusion about whether he even desires to be released. He wishes God would let him return home, but his bitter knowledge of Stalin's will to keep released prisoners in exile trumps his sense of God's power. So in this, his greatest work, Solzhenitsyn, one of the greatest Christians of our century, chooses not to argue directly for his own beliefs. Instead, he presents them through a secondary character, in counterpoint.

Indeed, when it comes to ultimate concerns, even the most Christian of these novels do no more than suggest options—options easily relativized to an individual character's point of view. In these modern classics, the dramatic action—the writer's greatest means of indicating his or her own values—is calculatedly neutral. Where a dominant mode of thought tends to emerge, as in Garcia Marquez's postmodern Romanticism, we are disappointed because such ideas seem inadequate to the total experience of the novels in which they are embedded. To make one's beliefs coincident with one's dramatic sense remains the greatest of all challenges for the novelist.

So, after all, why read fiction? The little quotation that serves as the motto for the Everyman Library, taken from the medieval Christian drama that gives the series its name, is a promise: "Everyman, I will go with thee, and be thy guide, in thy most need to go by thy side." Judged by such a criterion, these novels fail to deliver. They mean not to serve as guides—still less as infallible guides—but rather as evocations of the world's mystery, depicting the range of humanity's responses. If the authors play god, they do so as gods who respect their readers' freedom to choose among this age's competing points of view.

Is this wise? Is this important?

The novel in our time, it seems to me, has not entirely abandoned its traditional roles of teaching and giving pleasure. Reading A House for Mr. Biswas — which, to my surprise, ended up my favorite—taught me many things and was tremendously pleasurable. As to ultimate concerns, as to kerygma, the novel of the past 50 years has altered its understanding of how it should teach. These novels are heuristic. Their pedagogy spurs the reader's own decisions.

The heuristic novel is not "what we make of it." Each writer has an exacting end in view. This end might best be expressed as immersion in experience. If the novel's literary baptism is deep, true, and satisfying enough, the author's faith runs, the work will compel us to ask those basic questions that every man or woman must answer alone. We will not so much "decide what to make of it" as we will decide what to make of the human experience itself. The novel provides painstakingly rendered data for these reflections.

Is this enough? I'm not sure. Certainly in the past, narratives have been structured along completely different lines. At the end of Chaucer's Troilus and Cressida, for example, the poet urges young people to forsake this world's vanities and look to God. These comments are completely earned and do not, to my way of thinking, flaw the narrative. The dramatic action renders an experience of this meaning before Chaucer voices it.

As Chaucer's work belongs to a Christian civilization, the novels under consideration belong to a civilization philosophically adrift. It's as presumptuous to claim that the novel must operate along philosophically neutral lines as it is arrogant and corrupting to demand certainties.

For the person who believes he understands life's mysteries and is only interested in having his beliefs confirmed or enriched, the heuristic novel may well be a waste of time, or worse. For the person with a strong sense of God's immanence—his presence in all things—and also his transcendence—the way God escapes our best understandings—the heuristic novel offers a meditative experience nearly as deep as the groaning within us that the Spirit voices. Is this what life is like? becomes an inescapable question.

Harold Fickett is the author of many books, including a fair number of novels. Most recently he commissioned and edited the essays collected in Things in Heaven and Earth: Exploring the Supernatural (Paraclete Press).

Copyright © 1999 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@BooksAndCulture.com.