“This 12 months Amadeo Padilla is Jesus.” This opening line in a 2009 story in The Recent Yorker introduced the larger literary world to the fiction of Kirstin Valdez Quade. That Amadeo Padilla in “The Five Wounds” can also be the local ne’er-do-well, an absent father with multiple DUIs and more scars on his body than jobs on his resume, also revealed Valdez Quade’s remarkable ability to work inside and around religious symbols and metaphors in her work. Padilla, readers soon discovered, is just playing Jesus in his town’s yearly reenactment of the crucifixion of Jesus. Nevertheless, he ultimately asks not for a faked crucifixion, but for real nails for use on his hands and his feet. Jesus, his savior, was convicted and executed as a criminal. Padilla, a criminal, asks to share within the literal sufferings of Jesus.
Valdez Quade included “The Five Wounds” in her 2015 short story collection, Night on the Fiestas, which earned plaudits from The National Book Foundation, The Recent York Times and The San Francisco Chronicle, amongst others. She then expanded and adapted the story for her eponymous debut novel in 2021, one other award-winning effort that writer Colm Tóibín praised for its “luminous and memorable detail.” Along with the novel’s perfect pacing, he wrote, each scene was made with tact and care: “Kirstin Valdez Quade, by concentrating on the reality of small moments, has brought an entire world into focus.”
Colm Tóibín: “Kirstin Valdez Quade, by concentrating on the reality of small moments, has brought an entire world into focus.”
Valdez Quade was raised in rural Recent Mexico (the setting for The Five Wounds and most of her stories) and credits her grandmother and great-grandmother for the sense of Catholicity in her work. “I consider myself Catholic,” she told Jenny Shank in a 2018 interview for America. “That history, that tradition, feels very central to my understanding of my family history and my place on the planet. However, there are plenty of ways through which I feel that it’s a reasonably inhospitable religion for me. I feel that’s one other tension that I keep returning to. What does it mean for me to like this religion that I don’t all the time feel wants me?”
No matter that tension, the incarnational sense of Catholic fiction that David Tracy and Andrew Greeley have each written about previously is straight away recognizable in Valdez Quade’s work. “Jesus Christ’s paschal pain is all over the place in The Five Wounds,” wrote Kevin Spinale, S.J., the moderator of America’s Catholic Book Club, in a 2021 essay for America. Indeed, within the visceral reenactment of the fervour of Jesus that bookends the novel, Father Spinale notes, Amadeo Padilla “recognizes an additional truth: ‘To feel a little bit of what Christ felt. Tío Tíve said that over a 12 months ago. And what Christ felt was love. Amadeo doesn’t understand how he lost track of this. Love: each gift and challenge.’”
One other short story from Night on the Fiestas, “Strange Sins,” takes place in a parish office, where a lady partially based on Valdez Quade’s grandmother keeps the parish running within the midst of the sacred and the quotidian. For the priests and the lay employees alike, the each day work is by turns boring and elegant.
Kirstin Valdez Quade: “I consider myself Catholic. That history, that tradition, feels very central to my understanding of my family history and my place on the planet.”
“I’m fascinated with priests because they’re coping with probably the most sacred and vital moments of their parishioners’ lives, and so they’re this intermediary between their parishioners and God,” she told Shank in 2018. “However, it’s a job that they must do, day in and day trip. And presumably there are office politics and all types of tedium. I like the juxtaposition of the on a regular basis tedium of the job and the holiness of it.”
A few of Valdez Quade’s other short stories, like “Christina the Astonishing (1150-1224),” also explore the parallels between holiness and on a regular basis struggles, as with the title character’s unacknowledged mental illness in that story.
What does Valdez Quade herself take into consideration how religious her stories and characters might be, even when the theme will not be religion in any respect? “I all the time feel a little bit bit like I’m perhaps not equal to the duty,” she told Shank of the various Catholic and Christian publications which have praised her work. “I feel considered one of the explanations I proceed to jot down about these themes is because my very own thoughts about it are still uncertain. I’m still determining what I feel and I feel. So I don’t all the time feel like I’m the most effective person to really speak about it.”
Her readers appear to disagree about that. “What I continually recognize in Valdez Quade’s work is the pursuit of grace,” wrote the writer Liam Callanan in a 2017 essay for America. “Grace is commonly out of reach of her characters—but only ever just out of reach.” It’s a testament to Valdez Quade’s skill, he writes, “that engaged readers come to see the reality whilst her characters don’t.”
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Our poetry selection for this week is “To Make of Hell a Heaven,” by Philip Metres. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.
On this space every week, America features reviews of and literary commentary on one particular author or group of writers (each recent and old; our archives span greater than a century), in addition to poetry and other offerings from America Media. We hope this can give us a probability to supply you more in-depth coverage of our literary offerings. It also allows us to alert digital subscribers to a few of our online content that doesn’t make it into our newsletters.
Other Catholic Book Club columns:
Theophilus Lewis brought the Harlem Renaissance to the pages of America
William Lynch, the best American Jesuit you’ve probably never heard of
The spiritual depths of Toni Morrison
Parish priest, sociologist, novelist: The various imaginations of Father Andrew Greeley
Leonard Feeney, America’s only excommunicated literary editor (to this point)
Joan Didion: A chronicler of recent life’s horrors and consolations
Completely happy reading!
James T. Keane