Böcker av Katy Carl

If artists are no longer able to fall back on the explanatory power of familiar grand narratives, or to lift up, within a story's scope, any single perspective as the key to reality, how can literature make good sense of life? What possibilities still await realistic fiction, given that earlier conventions of realism are widely received, today, as contrived, overdone, and insupportable? While walking the skeptic's tightrope, fiction writers must still find ways to recover the enduring virtues of fiction-to create sympathy between character and reader so as to truthfully render common human experience against the fragmentations of a postmodern world. Faced with the inherent limitations of fictional technique-and an audience trained to be hyper-conscious and even cynical in the face of those limitations-novelist Christopher Beha nevertheless finds ways to re-enliven the aesthetic quest to represent real life in an amorphous age. The consequential weight of free will and the restless longing for transcendence do not dissolve into lost illusions; instead, they turn out to be as demonstrably present to Beha's characters as the smooth pane of a window or the polished handle of a car door. As Beha's novels achieve an outward turn, freeing characters from solipsistic self-focus, they also move toward locales and liturgies widely supposed to be empty of any metaphysical reality-only to find these empty places uncannily occupied.

In these stories, characters' bodies trouble their souls, stirring questions about why we are here and how we are to live. Confronted by their own vulnerabilities, they must also contend with the weaknesses of those they want to love. Will they find their trust well placed; will they rise to moments of grace-or will their lives crack under pressure? These stories seek to do justice in art to the human condition's real, though fleeting, gifts-to our much-explored, but only ever partially understood, potential for comic resolution, tragic failure, and the substance of things hoped for between the two.