Sometime in the past year I read several books from a modern author. The author is an immigrant, the books are award winning, the prose is exceptional, and the books are unrelentingly depressing. 

This person is supposedly writing about a particular immigrant experience, but the whole canon was utterly alien to me. I spent some time trying to figure out why. There are several stories in which women marry very successful men and then have the ideal life, in that they don’t have to worry about … well … anything. They don’t have to engage with their kids or much with their husbands. In one story a woman uses her brother as a babysitter, just once, but he’s a drunk and the child nearly drowns in the bath. This causes a rift in her marriage, but there’s no further discussion of this fact. In the end I came to realize that the writing was completely unchristian. 

There was no sense of the holiness of other people, no idea of forgiveness or guilt, no belief in marriage or sex as anything other than a chance to escape loneliness. No lasting connections were discussed, only connections that were failing or had failed, and the personages within the story were realizing it. 

Here’s a shocking comparison… 

I read a Cherry Ames book last week. In case you don’t know, Cherry Ames is a dark-haired Nancy Drew in a nurse’s uniform. From the fifties. A nurse, to whom I spoke about this, said, that she had tried one of the books but didn’t really like it. She said that nursing has changed so much that Cherry Ames books aren’t really accessible to her as stories about nurses. Fair enough. A LOT has changed since 1950. 

For instance, the story, in the particular book I read, took place less than fifty miles outside of New York City, but when Cherry gets off the train she is met by someone in a horse and buggy. He had gotten a flat tire just as he set out to get her, and hitching up the buggy was quicker than fixing the flat. Cherry is going to be the night supervisor at the local hospital, so she isn’t on duty till 8 p.m., but at 6 someone calls and she goes to work because there are six women there, all having babies at once. Lest you think that’s all the babies in the community, a dad shows up with triplets in a basket, later that evening, and later in the week two more babies are born. 

Also, people go to this hospital when they are worn out and just need to sleep for a while, whereupon they are giving sleeping pills and the lights are turned OUT. And it’s Cherry’s job to go around and make sure those lights STAY OUT. She has to do this in mostly darkness herself because this hospital is criminally short of money so they are saving on the electric bill,  … and that’s where the really interesting comparison came to the modern books I had read.

Almost everyone at this hospital is a volunteer. And they are all volunteering extra, because of some plot point about embezzlement, and Cherry sends for a neighbor of hers to come and volunteer as well. A ‘famous landscape painter’ volunteers, but only when he can’t paint, so everyone hopes for grey days. The characters volunteer because they are swayed by the charismatic chief doctor and his vision for the hospital, and how good it really could be. This is mostly a statement rather than the reader being shown anything particularly charismatic, by the way. But the point is that connection and self-giving are paramount. 

As an aside, as I was considering the world of Cherry’s hospital, I realized that in that time period there were probably quite a few Catholic hospitals staffed and run by nuns. Saint Agnes in Baltimore is one of them. Saint Mary’s in Minneapolis, which was then taken over by Mayo, was another. That’s a whole different discussion about volunteering, and payment or non-payment for services rendered. I also thought about Emma Lathen, who wrote murder mysteries in the sixties and seventies. She had at least two that involved hospitals, or people making large donations to build them, or doctors making enormous amounts of money while others didn’t. (_Sweet and Low_ and _A Stitch in Time_)

The Cherry Ames book, itself, is not “christian”. No-one goes to church or discusses God. It’s just reflecting the culture around it. However, this culture includes not one but two different 19 year old girls getting engaged to two of the doctors because marriage is important.** These girls are not presented as dumb teenagers, by the way. They are both smart and hard-working. People care about each other and the hospital very intensely, and they are very interconnected. The community is grateful for the hospital and provides them with food since it hasn’t got any money. And the bad guy is bad, but possibly redeemable.

This is the era of Nancy Drew and the Hardy boys as well, and I know that they have been rewritten to reflect modern ideas of how to live. I’m not sure Cherry Ames can be rewritten considering my nurse’s input above. Nancy never had a job that confined her, at least as far as I remember, so it’s easier to change social mores. 

What this has to do with writing though is fairly straightforward. If I want to write Catholic fiction, that takes place in this current timeframe, I have to accept that there are a lot of people who think award-winning author #1 is accurately reflecting the world they live in. Unconnected. Amoral. This is totally different from the sentimental and pulpy world described or better yet, taken for granted, in Cherry Ames.

My characters don’t really live in either of those worlds but it’s always a good idea to pay attention to unspoken assumptions. 

**The third doctor falls in love with Cherry (in the first week, and there isn’t anymore to the book) but she can’t be bothered to engage on any level with this nonsense.