Related articles and links |  1 of 3

Bret lott's novel Jewel came out in 1991, and it did well—Publishers Weekly called it "haunting," and the hardback sold respectably, but then people pretty much forgot about it, this novel that tells the story of Jewel Hilburn, and how she pieced together a hardscrabble life in rural Mississippi, and in particular how she unstintingly loved, and fought for, and had faith in her daughter Brenda Kay, her sixth child, who was born in 1943, and who had Down syndrome.

No one much heard anything about Jewel—that is, until 1999, when Oprah selected it for her book club. This was the first incarnation of her book club, when she was picking contemporary novels, not classics. You might remember when she picked Jewel. It was right after she picked Where the Heart Is by Billie Letts (and I confess that for years, I knew nothing about Bret Lott or Billie Letts, except that both of them had written Oprah books, and their names were so oddly similar, I used to get them confused with one another).

The day Oprah called, of course, changed Bret Lott's life, or at least his career. Before Oprah called, Lott was a mid-list Southern novelist whom everyone respected but maybe hadn't read. After she called, he was a phenomenon.

One reason it's worth paying attention to this phenomenon is that Bret Lott is a fine, fine writer. Another reason is this: He's a true-blue evangelical, one of our own, yet anointed by Oprah—a true-blue evangelical who writes literary fiction that New York takes seriously.

Also, after half a decade of silence—call it post-Oprah writer's block—Bret Lott's just now coming out with three new books. They're all delicious.

Bret Lott had one of those dramatic, datable conversions, a venerable John Wesley-like conversion. He was in college, a forestry major at Northern Arizona University, and one night—maybe because he didn't have anything better to do, maybe because the Holy Spirit was stirring—he went to a Josh McDowell rally. He was taken by McDowell's message and filled out one of those if-you-want-to-learn-more cards, and a few nights later, "some guys came to my dorm room and spoke to me about the gospel, and it all made very deep sense." And that was that. Bret Lott—who, mind you, had grown up going to church but had never really gotten it before—gave his life to Jesus Christ.

There's a story about how Lott became a writer, too. He'd quit college and was working as an RC Cola salesman. One day, after a particularly lousy afternoon of hawking cola, he realized he didn't want to sell RC for the rest of his life, so he started back to school. His only free nights were Tuesdays. The community college offered only creative writing on Tuesdays, so that's what Lott took. He thought it was fun.

The next year he took another creative writing class, and one day the professor read a sentence from one of Lott's stories aloud to the class. After reading it, the professor said "That's a writer's sentence," and at that moment Lott began to think, Oh, maybe … maybe I'm a writer. (Lott no longer remembers what the sentence was, and, in a fit of angst and drama that he now regrets, he once burned all of his early stories, so there's no way to go back and find that one perfect sentence.)

"I was a Christian before I started writing," says Lott, so from the very beginning, "I was trying to evangelize or teach" in fiction.

And yet—if you've read Lott's novels, you might think, Hmmm. He's actually a lot less evangelistic or teachy or preachy than lots of "contemporary Christian fiction." Indeed, his novels aren't really overtly Christian at all.

next page... |  1 of 3

June 2005, Vol. 49, No. 6