Books, Arts & Manners: Benefit of Clergy

Wheat That Springeth Green, by J. F. Powers (Knopf, 335 pp., $18.95)

J. F. Powers is not a prolific writer. Up until last year, he had produced, in a forty-year career, one novel and three slim collections of stories. Nor is he a writer of great variety. “Powers’s stories,” wrote Flannery O’Connor in 1958, “can be divided into two kinds—those that deal with the Catholic clergy and those that don’t. Those that deal with the clergy are as good as any stories being written by anybody; those that don’t are not so good.”

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John Wauck

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Wheat That Springeth Green, by J. F. Powers (Knopf, 335 pp., $18.95)

J. F. Powers is not a prolific writer. Up until last year, he had produced, in a forty-year career, one novel and three slim collections of stories. Nor is he a writer of great variety. “Powers’s stories,” wrote Flannery O’Connor in 1958, “can be divided into two kinds—those that deal with the Catholic clergy and those that don’t. Those that deal with the clergy are as good as any stories being written by anybody; those that don’t are not so good.”