REVIEWS Ross Labrie, The Catholic Imagination in American Literature (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1997). x, 306. $39.95 (U.S.) cloth. This book highlights thirteen Catholic writers (Orestes Brownson, Caroline Gordon, Allen Tate, Paul Horgan, William Everson, Thomas Merton, Walker Percy, Robert Lowell, J.F. Powers, Daniel Berrigan, Flannery O’Connor, Ralph Mclnerny, and Mary Gordon) considered as having “high intellectual and artistic achievement” and “works that center on Catholic belief and spirituality” (ix) to show that their consciousness of themselves as Catholics was “different from the cultural majority in America” (1) and coloured their imaginations as Catholic novelists and poets. Their membership in the Catholic church provided wonderful training for them as artists by estab lishing a high standard of aesthetic formality based upon the “austerity and ‘richness of form and language and sensuality’ ” (267) of the church. Mary Gordon’s art was shaped by “the inspiration of the Mass with its dramatic sweep and rich lodes of rhetoric, which led to a consciousness of the ineffable” (250), and she laments “the lack of aesthetic standards in the contemporary Catholic church’s Liturgy and in its rhetoric, in particular the loss of the sense of solemnity that she treasured from her youth” (252). She is apparently like the other Catholic writers in this book who are unwilling or unable to change or to work through the changes initiated by Vatican ii. Still empowered by these images of her youth, however, she realizes that “she can’t go home again” (266). So her fiction challenges the contempo rary church “to engage the sensibilities of Catholics” with “the beauty and compassion of its vision of transcendental reality” (266) toward a renewed, post-Vatican n, modernized reality. Although I do not know a lot of the authors in this book, I did enjoy the analysis of their work and felt drawn to read some of them, particularly Ralph Mclnerny’s The Priest, since, like the fictional Father Ascue, I am one “who is caught between the old and new orders” (238). In fact, while reading the critique of The Priest, I thought Mclnerny’s novels must be remarkably like Andrew Greeley’s and then wondered why Andrew Greeley did not warrant a chapter in this book, as he is most certainly contributing to the Catholic, American imagination not only as a Catholic novelist but as a Catholic priest and sociologist. I would like to have had more biographical information, although I re alize that this book is not biography, but literary criticism. But enough biographical material about the writers is given to whet the appetite for more. Phrases like “Whatever the springs of her motivation as a writer” (265), with reference to Mary Gordon, made me want to learn more about her, particularly since she is in my age group. I read up to page 132 and then skipped to the last chapter, “The Catholic Legacy.” The book is balanced by an introductory chapter entitled “The 485 ESC 24, 1998 Catholic Imagination” and this final chapter on “The Catholic Legacy,” both of which set a framework and point of view or thesis. I was only familiar with Thomas Merton, Daniel Berrigan, and Flannery O’Connor, so I proceeded to read them first. Although I am not as glaringly liberal as a Dan Berrigan, I was challenged by the insight into liberalism on page 195: Change is needed at the depths of the human spirit, and when liberalism tries to accommodate all sides in a dispute, it absorbs the complexities and little is achieved. I wish Berrigan’s Trial of the Cantonsville Nine had been analyzed, but I realized that just the poetry was being analyzed. As a university instructor, I was intrigued by the analysis of the poem “The Gorges” (205). Like Berrigan, I am also a priest who is trying to reconcile priest with religious contemplative with artist and even with university English teacher. I enjoyed very much the liberal aspect of the Daniel Berrigan chapter, so much so that it made the ultra-conservatism of some of the others (Caroline Gordon, Allen Tate, Paul Horgan) more palatable. I think some of them were drawn to the Catholic...