Peculiar fellow …

… Churchgoing | The Hudson Review. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Presumably Powers felt some kinship with these poor, lonely priests of his—who have devoted themselves, however imperfectly, to God, just as he devoted himself to art. The difference was that he himself was a zealot, and of a stubbornly uncompromising sort. We know this from Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiograph­ical Story of Family Life, a 2013 anthology of letters edited by his daughter Katherine A. Powers, recently reissued in paper­back. In an introduction and an afterword, she talks about her father with a mixture of fondness and extreme exasperation. “Growing up in this family is not something I would care to do again,” she says, and the reader comes to feel much the same way.