Sir Thomas More: a man for one season -- Jane Austen's heroic consciousness -- The all and the if: God and metaphor in Melville -- Half against Flaubert -- Gogol's realism -- What Chekhov meant by life -- Knut Hamsun's Christian perversions -- Virginia Woolf's mysticism -- Thomas Mann the master of the not quite -- D.H. Lawrence's occultism -- T.S. Eliot's Christian anti-Semitism -- George Steiner's unreal presence -- Isis Murdoch's philosophy of fiction -- Thomas Pynchon and the problem of allegory -- Against paranoia: the case of Don DeLillo -- John Updike's complacent God -- The monk of fornication: Philip Roth's nihilism -- Toni Morrison's false magic -- Julian Barnes and the problem of knowing too much -- W.G. Sebald's uncertainty -- The broken estate: the legacy of Ernest Renan and Matthew Arnold.