Look Homeward, Angel

For the last five years, at the rate of one a year, Jan Karon has been publishing books about the imaginary town of Mitford, N.C. For the last five years, millions of Americans have been avidly reading about the lives of Father Tim Kavanagh, the Episcopal rector of the Lord’s Chapel who struggles with diabetes and the endless supply of baked goods his parishioners bring to his door; Cynthia Coppersmith, his charming neighbor who pens children’s books and who becomes his wife after many trials and tribulations; Dooley, the angry, alienated boy from a broken home who is taken in by Father Tim and grows to become an educated young man; the old spinster Sadie Baxter, whose fortune endows a retirement home whose construction spans three books; and more than a dozen other characters, as well as one dog, Barnabas, who has the unique trait of responding to commands only when they come from the Bible.

If you follow literary fiction and read book reviews, chances are you’ve never heard of Jan Karon. Search the Los Angeles Times Book Review or New York Times Book Review Web sites and you’ll come up with not one reference. Although her most recent novel, “A New Song,” was on various national bestseller lists for weeks, she has received none of the attention that other mass-market fiction writers such as John Grisham, Anne Rice, Stephen King, Nelson DeMille, Patricia Cornwell or even Danielle Steel have, despite having sold 4 million books, according to her publisher, Viking Press.

What accounts for the utter invisibility of Karon in that world that thinks of itself as making culture? Is there a wall that separates the literati from the rest of America, a wall so high that it prevents people from seeing Karon for what she is: a writer who reflects contemporary culture more fully than almost any other living novelist.

Karon spins a fantasy of a town full of lovable yet decent people who struggle with love and marriage, with domestic disputes and unpredictable weather, with ghosts of their past and, most of all, with faith and God. The novels are suffused with God and with the efforts of Father Tim to live a godly life while ministering to the needs of his friends and his flock. At regular intervals of perhaps 50 pages, some episode occurs in which God, prayer, the Bible and repentance make appearances. The contractor in charge of building the nursing home rails drunkenly at the rector as he confesses his dark guilt over being partly responsible for the death of his brother; Father Tim prays with a severely burned woman; Father Tim teaches young Dooley the meaning of prayer; Father Tim and his wife Cynthia get lost in a cave, and there they each have a vision of God that transforms their lives and their love.

The fact that Father Tim is an Episcopalian makes it easy for his faith to appeal across denominations. Episcopalians, after all, are one of the least dogmatic Christian denominations. In the first two books, he interacts with a Baptist preacher named Absalom from a neighboring town who preaches about sin and repentance, but Timothy talks primarily of letting God into your heart and giving yourself up to him. In “At Home in Mitford,” he counsels a stranger who wanders into the chapel. “ ‘Let me ask you something,’ said the rector. ‘Would you like to ask Christ into your life?’ The stranger stared into the darkened sanctuary. ‘I can’t do it. I’ve tried.’ ‘It isn’t a test you have to pass. It doesn’t require discipline and intelligence . . . not even strength and perseverance. It requires only faith.’ ” Religion suffuses the books and is woven into the fabric of these peoples’ lives as surely as the weather, food and the various daily habits and chores that occupy them. Karon isn’t preachy, but she reflects a small-town sensibility that rarely manifests itself in the daily life of the coastal metropolises of the United States. And at several points, she makes subtle but purposeful digs at city folk. In “A Light in the Window,” Cynthia goes to New York to stay at her editor’s apartment in order to finish her book for a tight deadline, and she asks Tim to come and visit her. He tells her that he can’t. “Large cities are another of my rustic phobias,” he writes her. “They literally make me sick.” Eventually, as an act of love, he puts aside his dislike and flies to see her, but that gesture is portrayed as a herculean effort. A journey to the city becomes a journey through the fire that vulcanizes their love.

In Karon’s world, all that is good and pure about American culture and human nature resides in Mitford. To be sure, there are dramas and human failings, but the small town is nonetheless defined by its sanctity and its community. It’s like Peyton Place, only the characters are nicer. Father Tim, a 60-year-old bachelor, wrestles with his “closed heart” as he tries to make a commitment to Cynthia; Dooley must learn to release his hurt and anger at his absent parents before he can grow into the fine young man he becomes. But not one of the main characters is petty, selfish, mean-spirited or hostile. Even more striking, they are not greedy, ambitious, dissatisfied with their lot or desirous of doing anything other than what they are doing now.

That complacency directly contrasts with the rumbling unrest of contemporary culture. In “These High, Green Hills,” the rector gets a computer, and he is totally at sea trying to make sense of Microsoft Windows. As urban culture bustles with noise, ambition and striving, Mitford exists in a bucolic twilight zone. The modern world exists, insofar as it threatens Mitford, but in this rural North Carolina township, there are no malls, no restaurant chains, no cineplexes, no tourists. The mayor of Mitford actually wants to keep tourists out, and in a bitterly contested mayoral contest in “Out to Canaan,” one of the undercurrents is the old, traditional order being challenged by the new. This being Mitford, the old wins. There is the local diner, which is threatened by an unpleasant absentee landlady who not only wants to lease the property for a profit but who also makes explicit passes at Father Tim (thereby committing the dual sins of lust and greed). But of course, the diner is saved and the landlady humbled.

Even when Karon shakes things up a bit and has the two main protagonists leave Mitford in the fifth installment, “A New Song,” they end up in a parallel universe on an imaginary island named Whitecap somewhere near the Outer Banks, where they will presumably stay for subsequent books. As her world expands, she introduces a new young waif, this time a teenage girl, who replaces Dooley as the “project” to be saved from a broken home. And there are even some literary references in the later books to C.S. Lewis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, G.K. Chesterton, Louis L’Amour, Wordsworth and St. Paul’s letters to Timothy. Her world of the printed word reaffirms the moral framework of the universe she has created.

None of this is to suggest that Karon’s books meet high literary standards. The writing is simplistic. So simplistic that the first two novels were self-published and distributed to towns and church groups before Viking / Penguin realized how lucrative a Karon franchise might be. Her prose is unadorned, with few flourishes, basic verbs and high school grammar. The effect is both perfect and dull, in that though there’s nothing interesting or remarkable about the writing, it does manage to evoke a small-town sensibility of thrift, modesty and directness, and it does allow you to gallop along unaware that you’re reading.

What sustains the books is the underlying framework. Karon offers the solace that, somewhere, an America exists that conforms to the picture of small towns, white picket fences, homemade pies, the kind-hearted country doctor, the innocence of childhood even when surrounded by the darkness of adults, men finding women and women finding men, family-owned businesses, the church, prayer, the travails of unpredictable weather, life and death, community and home.

There may be a few corners of the United States that resemble Mitford, and Karon depicts what may be the most complete rendering of the American myth. It’s comforting to read on a New York subway, or to listen to on tape while stuck in freeway traffic, because it reaffirms one version of an ideal world. Karon distills a vision of a pure America without political divisions, full of religious tolerance and focused on basic values and living the good life. It is easy to sink into and easy to be lulled by the gentle waves of her utopia.

Unlike potboilers, Karon’s books offer an escape that is explicitly moral. You would think that critics and “culturati” would at least have taken the time to dismiss Karon, but she poses a challenge to the high-brow because she offers a moral vision that is deeply anchored in American culture. Twenty or 30 years ago, she might have received enthusiastic scorn, but now that America is becoming more religious and the wave of 1960s activism has passed, even the guardians of culture in the big cities are unsure. How should Karon be criticized? What would the template be? She isn’t trying to write that self-conscious thing called “literature,” and yet she also isn’t trying to be an entertainer. Her purpose is serious, and millions take it seriously.

She has become a popular choice for book groups, largely composed of women. Reading her books, people end up discussing issues of family, community, the modern world and God. They end in passionate conversation about the struggle of living well. Those conversations may not be historically informed or intellectual, but they cut to the core of everyday concerns in much the same way that populist politics do, and because Karon is so nonjudgmental, she facilitates discussion rather than argument. Karon does in print what Oprah does on television: She gives us the illusion that people can confess their doubts and guilts without retribution or castigation, that family wounds can be healed and that tired friendships can be renewed.

It may be easy to look at Karon as part of the dumbing down of culture. But that’s unfair and untrue. She and, I’d guess, many of her readers are making choices about culture, about what they want and what troubles them. As Cynthia Coppersmith says, she likes many things but not “exhaust fumes, made-for-TV movies and cakes baked from mix.” Karon has a particular sensibility about what is best in our culture, and she tries to preserve that vision. Like the church, she presents a framework that doesn’t coincide with the lives most people live, but it is one she hopes can be created in the lives of her readers and in the world around them.

An America of Mitfords might bore many of us. There would be few material opportunities, even if it were spiritually and communally rich. But the yearning for a Mitford gnaws at many of us, especially as the realities of high-tech urban life disturb us and material fullness leaves us empty.

A century ago, novelists created a stultifying rural America. Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather and, a bit later, William Faulkner portrayed their Mitfords as pathetic, disturbing, dead. For them, cities held the promise of American life. Now that cities and suburbs are fraying at the edges and from within, Karon holds up the apocryphal small town as the emblem of what has been lost and what needs to be reclaimed. But the undercurrent is that this place has no room for those who don’t believe in Christ, who don’t mind takeout food and who revel in accumulating things. Karon believes in the fundamentals of the New Testament and is against amoral capitalism and modernism. Her Mitford has no room for those who adhere to the cult of American materialism. As the mayor of Mitford might say, there’s no room for those folk in this town.

Yet those folk are just as American as the denizens of Mitford, just as much a part of our culture. They may not like Mitford and the inhabitants of Mitford may not like them, but they’re stuck with each other. They’re stuck even as the last remaining Mitfords vanish, because the image of that archetypal town is woven into the fabric of our society and, for the moment, Jan Karon is the one doing the weaving.