The notion of “Christian fiction” is problematic in the same fashion as the notion of a “protest song”. Consider: how many good protest songs have you actually ever heard, in comparison with the number of bad or terrible ones? I would be willing to bet that the latter list was a lot longer, and the reason is simple enough: polemic and poetry don’t mix. Making a point or pushing an agenda sits very badly with the task of exploring the complexity of human being in all its fullness. Somebody who already has all the answers may be unwilling to dig very deeply into the pushes and pulls of the human soul. There may also be places they don’t want to go, or consider themselves banned from exploring.[…]
And so we come to Fredrick Buechner.