Scandalous Truths

Susan Howatch's global bestsellers have appeared regularly since the 1970s, but a radical shift in her subject matter in the 1980s and especially the 1990s made reviewers and then academics adjust their glasses and stare hard at her pages. Howatch began to take her loyal following of gothic and family-saga readers into unexpected psychological and theological depths, while taking to an extreme, with a serious-novel format, the experiments begun in her family sagas. She also introduced to her readers a character only half-alive in Trollope, the Anglican Church. The twentieth-century church born in Howatch's later fiction is a huge, sometimes monstrous, sometimes life-giving creature whose various dimensions make it entirely engaging and weirdly central to the center-less postmodern world. ""Scandalous Truths"" provides a way into Howatch's new world by presenting for the first time many of her own considerations of her work, and by allowing a group of scholars to engage in a wide-ranging discussion of Howatch's art. Bruce Johnson is Associate Professor of English at James Madison University. Charles Huttar is Professor of English, Emeritus, at Hope College.