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.

Katy Carl is editor in chief of Dappled Things magazine and author of As Earth Without Water, a novel (Wiseblood Books, 2021) and the short story collection Fragile Objects (Wiseblood Books, 2023). Her fiction and essays have appeared in Fare Forward, Windhover, Vita Poetica, Belle Ombre, Across the Margin, Exposition Review, Psaltery & Lyre, Sostenuto, Mom Egg Review, Genealogies of Modernity, St.

Louis magazine, Mere Orthodoxy, Public Discourse, Church Life Journal, and the Mid/South Anthology, among others. .