DRAMAS OF DECLINE AND FALL

The Index of Self-Destructive Acts: A Novel BY CHRISTOPHER BEHA TIN HOUSE, 528 PAGES, $27.95 Missionaries: A Novel BY PHIL KLAY PENGUIN, 416 PAGES, $28 In 2013, Dana Gioia argued in these pages that "although Roman Catholicism constitutes the largest religious and cultural group in the United States, Catholicism currently enjoys almost no positive presence in the American fine arts." The sense that I am alone, that none can hear me, none can understand, that no one answers my cries, it is a sickness over which, to borrow from Bernanos, "the vast tide of divine love, that sea of living, roaring flame which gave birth to all things, passes vainly." Frank has always wanted to write a political magnum opus, but it is his baseball books-The Crack of the Bat and The Smell of the Grass-that remain his greatest achievement. The cast of characters grows to include the rest of Doyle's family: his investment banker wife, Kit; his grad student daughter, Margo, who aspires to write poetry; and his son, Eddie, who chose to enlist in the armed forces rather than accept a cushy job in some Manhattan skyscraper, but who is now struggling to recover a sense of meaning or purpose after his experience of war.