Partial Faiths

Spiritual conversions figure heavily in such novels as Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland , Toni Morrison’s Paradise , and Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine . What connects such varied works is that their convert-characters are disenchanted with secularism yet apprehensive of dogmatic religiosity. Partial Faiths is the first study to identify a body of contemporary fiction in such terms, take the measure of its structures and strategies, and evaluate its contribution to public discourse on religion’s place