Frederick Buechner - in The Media

In The Media

Buechner's work has been praised highly by many reviewers of books, with the distinct exception of his second novel, The Season’s Difference, which was universally panned by critics and remains his biggest commercial flop. His later novels, including the Book of Bebb series and Godric, received hearty praise; in his 1980 review of Godric, Benjamin DeMott summed up a host of positive reviews, saying “All on his own, Mr. Buechner has managed to reinvent projects of self-purification and of faith as piquant matter for contemporary fiction, producing in a single decade a quintet of books each of which is individual in concerns and knowledge, and notable for literary finish.” In 1982, author Reynolds Price greeted Buechner’s The Sacred Journey as “a rich new vein for Buechner – a kind of detective autobiography” and “he result is a short but fascinating and, in its own terms, beautifully successful experiment.”

Buechner has occasionally been accused of being too “preachy;” a 1984 review by Anna Shapiro in the New York Times notes “But for all the colloquialism, there is something, well, preachy and a little unctuous about making yourself an exemplar of faith. Insights that would do for a paragraph are dragged out with a doggedness that will presumably bring the idea home to even the most resistant and inattentive.” The sentiments expressed by Cecelia Holland’s 1987 Washington Post review of Buechner’s novel, Brendan, are far more common. She writes,“In our own time, when religion is debased, an electronic game show, an insult to the thirsty soul, Buechner's novel proves again the power of faith, to lift us up, to hold us straight, to send us on again.”

In 2008, the 50th anniversary of Buechner's ordination, Rich Barlowe wrote of Buechner in the Boston Globe, "Who knows? The words are Frederick Buechner's mantra. Over the course of an hourlong chat with the writer and Presbyterian minister in his kitchen, they recur any number of times in response to questions about his faith and theology. Dogmatic religious believers would dismiss the two words as the warning shot of doubt. But for Buechner, it is precisely our doubts and struggles that mark us as human. And that insight girds his theological twist on Socrates: The unexamined human life is a lost chance to behold the divine." In 2002, Richard Kauffman interviewed Buechner for The Christian Century upon the publication of Speak What We Feel (Not What We Ought to Say). Buechner answered the question "Do you envision a particular audience when you write?" by saying "I always hope to reach people who don't want to touch religion with a ten-foot pole. The cultured despisers of religion, Sehleiermacher called them. Maybe some of my books reach them. But most of my readers, as far as I can tell, aren't that type. Many of them are ministers. They say, 'You've given us something back we lost and opened up doors we didn't think could be opened for people.'"

Buechner has also played literary critic himself. In 1980 Buechner reviewed Unfinished Tales of Numenor and Middle-earth by J. R. R. Tolkien, noting that the book was “in short, a production less of Tolkien himself than of the Tolkien industry.”

Buechner’s largest presence in the media, however, is through the hundreds of readers who quote his works on a daily basis in articles, blogs, and speeches. Writers include his quotes in pieces for The Flint Times in Michigan, The Kansas City Star, The West Australian News, The Commercial Appeal in Memphis, The New Zealand Herald, and the Pembroke Observer in Ontario.