Loved the Hideous Strength quote, by the way. C.S. Lewis was a master.

Another thought... I would imagine that the problem of a lack of appetite for "solid food" in the printed realm also results in an increased tendency to replace reading the Bible with the works of Max Lucado.

Very possible.

I would, again, suggest that we determine first if there is really a problem. Walking through the fiction aisles of your typical Christian bookstore can be scary, definitely. But I think people frequent Christian bookstores more for the music selection and the non-fiction than the fiction. The fiction may be bad because there's not much demand for Christian fiction (other than Left Behind, I guess - which may blow my theory)

There are more theological resources available to Christians these days than ever before. Many of them are online. I can get to nearly every available Bible version, many commentaries, greek and hebrew resources, etc, from my computer these days.

There are far more bookstores (and they are WAY bigger now) than ever before. Certainly than when I was growing up. Christians frequent those bookstores too.

Just wanting to make sure we're not making assumptions that aren't true.

How do you think the speed-up of life and society plays into this topic?

I find poetry very intimidating. When I get it, I love it, but it's pretty hit and miss. Poetry lacks guideposts. When I go to read a book, I get to look at the jacket and get a flavor for the book. When I look at a poem, I have to take the whole thing in to know where it's going.

TS Elliot's Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, for example. I heard a snippet of it on an AIG commercial, and loved it. I went out on the net and finally found it, and loved the whole thing. The key was that I knew I was going to connect with it. I would love to have some kind of reference to genre's of poetry that I might enjoy. Right now, it's all just one big, scary mass of people smarter than me writing things that I probably won't ever understand.

As for Christian fiction, I barely register that there is such a thing. The few attempts I've made to read Christian fiction from the last 50 years all seem to rely on the protagonist being divinely inspired. I gave up on the idea a long time ago. I enjoy MacDonald, and ya'll have me re-reading Lewis's space trilogy, but I don't connect with books about people overcoming ridiculous odds magically because they are Christian.

Your post was brilliant and challenging, and I too loved the quote from THS. I can't wait to get back to that point.

I find it sad when, as a Christian, I find myself being touched and stretched and challenged by non-Christian authors like John Fowles and Frank Herbert, and not at all by modern Christian authors.

As it stands, if I ever want to be challenged and strengthened by literature, I know to never set foot in a Christian bookstore. That's sad.

Phil A., I'm with you, even as it pertains to non-fiction. I'm to the point where I'd rather peruse the theology sections at Borders or Barnes and Noble.
If I want a good, wide variety of theology texts by authors from various traditions -- charismatic, Anglican, Reformed -- I don't go to a Christian bokstore.

And I don't really read any Christian fiction that was written after 1960.
My reading basically breaks down into two categories: Christian theological or otherwise substantive non-fiction, and "secular" literary novels. I stray outside those two genres occasionally, but that's it. I'd love, however, to contribute to a renaissance of literary quality in Christian fiction. And I'm trying. ;-)

my Christian brethren who are buying the escapist stuff and just loving it. I know Jared is a big fan of Paul Auster, whom some consider American lit, but his Oracle Night was one of the worst books I've ever read.

Am I missing something as to how these two sentences are related? Are you saying Auster is escapist fiction?

"Oracle Night" is not one of his better works, but it's far from being one of the worst books I've ever read. There's no accounting for taste, I suppose.

As a writer and a reader, I tend to appreciate the "experience" of fiction, regardless of the style or plot, and I'd rather read a generally plotless novel written well and chock-full of Big Ideas than a strongly plotted novel written woodenly that doesn't really say anything. Which is why I prefer Auster and DeLillo to Clancy and Collins. The latter ones may be more entertaining if one's only interested in standard plot devices, but I don't personally get anything out of them (usually).

I also tend to draw a distinction between Plot and Story. There are lots of novels that seem plotless but nevertheless tell a story.
But, again, I think taste plays a big part here.

You mention Christian conviction, as well, and I hope my own spirituality is not called into question by my reading of secular literary novels (the French love Auster, btw, and read him like Americans read Stephen King -- maybe that says something both about the French and Auster!). Not sure what it says about me, but I have appreciated the interplay of Fate and Chance in Auster's works, as well as the deceptive simplicity he employs, especially in his early works, in which apparently straightforward detective (The New York Trilogy) or Bildungsroman (Moon Palace, Mr. Vertigo) plots tell stories about the nature of human identity and the nature of time.
I also like the way he treats writing and telling stories as forms of creation.

I find all of those ideas, not superficially evident in his apparently "plotless," "meaningless" stories, quite conducive to my Christian theistic philosophy.
But, again -- matter of taste.

Bill, you're right. I didn't mean that I like having access to heresy and heterodoxy in my book perusal. I just meant that a wider variety of orthodox perspectives would be nice. Just a greater selection, is all.
But you're right that a new Christian or a Christian "new" to theology is safer perusing LifeWay than Borders, especially if he can't match certain names with certain viewpoints.

Jared, did not mean to take you to task! Just saying that I didn't like one example of a modern lit writer and Auster fit that for me--I know he's been mentioned here before.

Also, Oracle Night contains all the things I mentioned in my previous post that I despise in modern lit:
1. Contempt for the "regular/escapist" reader. Auster had a great mystery going with his subplot about the man who chooses to disappear then accidentally imprisons himself in a place where no one could find him. That hooked me 1000%, but then Auster's writer character throws it all away. If that says something about the craft, well, it was heavy handed and uninspired.

2. Moral bankruptcy oozes out of the ending. The idea that we are simply hurtling toward fate and neither goodness nor badness makes a difference is typical of modern lit.

3. There is not one positive thing in the story. It is grim and ends grimmer. Like so much modern lit, it is the embodiment of nihilism.

That's the state of modern lit. Why would most Christians, especially women (who read 70% of the Christian books) want to read that?

Some of the older classics, though, do have something to say. I think I have mentioned this before, but Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey is phenomenal lit, while also managing to be an excellent story with powerful characters and a killer moral. I wish more people could write books like that. I know I hope to one day.

No way am I impugning anyone who reads secular books, lit or not. For many years Douglas Adams was my favorite author and we all know he was a spokesman for the whole atheist movement.

BTW, who would you deem modern lit? Vonnegut, Faulkner, Hemingway, Proulx, Auster, Guterson, Frazier? What about Gibson, Wodehouse, or Palahniuk? I've enjoyed Ishiguro (though I was partial to Vonnegut in my youth and still love "Harrison Bergeron.") I'm a huge fan of Kafka, but is he "lit?"

Dan, I didn't think you were taking me to task, really. I was just a little confused by the transition from "escapist reading" to me reading Auster.

I don't think Auster has contempt for escapist readers. He just doesn't write for them. If not having them in mind when one writes a book is contempt, then you may as well say that Jackie Collins and Jerry Jenkins have contempt for me because they don't write books for people like me.

It's been a while since I read "Oracle Night," so I don't remember all the details, but I don't recall reading it nihilistically. The spectre of the Holocaust falls over the entire novel, for one thing, and I'm not sure we can expect a writer who is not a Christian to acutely grasp the nature of human evil as we do.
Perhaps the man who cannot escape from the locked room (until someone helps him?) is symbolic of the inescapability of the problem of evil. I don't believe, as you seem to, that Auster denies goodness is preferable to evil. I don't think he'd ever suggest that.
Here's a brief bit I posted at my solo blog a while back that highlights Auster reflecting on evil right after "Oracle Night" was released:
http://thinklings.org/jared/index.php?p=244&more=1&c=1

That piece was actually posted on the heels of an earlier piece of mine lamenting modern lit's failure to deal with evil. I was actually refreshed that at least Auster was wrestling with it. Again, I do not agree that he is dismissive of it. But he's not a Christian, and we can't expect him to illustrate the Christian concepts of sin and evil in his works.

You might also want to peruse my Auster category at Mysterium Tremendum. There aren't a lot of posts there, but there's a brief primer on the man's work and a few posts that hopefully illustrate why he is my favorite modern novelist.
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To answer another of your questions:
I'm not sure what qualifies as "Modern Lit" anymore. Technically speaking, I assume Modern refers to 1900-1950; that's what it seemed to refer to in my college lit classes. The British Modernists I studied were Orwell, Auden, Eliot, Woolf, etc. Even Lewis might fall into that category, although he reflected Classicism and Romanticism more than his Modernist contemporaries.
But today when we say "modern," we mean "contemporary." So if I say "modern literature," I typically just mean anyone publishing novels today.