In addition to being a finalist for the 1981 Pulitzer Prize, Godric received critical acclaim. Buechner himself has noted his love of the novel, remarking that: ‘If I were to be remembered by only one book, this is the one I would choose. In every way it came unbidden, unheralded, as a blessing.'[6] Literary critic Dale Brown agrees with the author’s preference for Godric, writing that his ‘thirty-year apprenticeship yields and unquestionable masterpiece’. He continues: 'Godric is one of those great books, the kind where we prolong the reading, dread turning that last page, because the journey has been so musical, the journey so complete as to rearrange the chords of our inner lives, the kind of book that makes you want to run up to strangers and ask them if they’ve read it.'[6]
Concerning the prose style that Buechner crafted in order to fully render his twelfth-century protagonist and the world within which he moved, Brown also writes:
Buechner recreates a Saxon feel for his novel, a twelfth-century visitation featuring pre-French-Latinate vocabulary. Although the Anglo-Saxon language is often archaic, context usually provides the sense, and most readers settle into the prose as part of the pleasure of the book. From the major news organs to book review pages all across the country, readers were remarkably effusive in their acclaim, and all of them mentioned the language as part of the triumph.[7]
The Wall Street Journal review of Godric certainly focused in on the author’s prose style, concluding that, 'With a poet’s sensibility and a high, reverent fancy, Mr. Buechner paints a memorable portrait.'[8] Likewise, the reviewer for Booklist referred to the ‘Chaucerian exuberance’[9] of the novel, while Peter Lewis declared it to be a ‘picaresqe narrative’, and a ‘stylistic tour de force’, formed out of language that is ‘neither ancient nor modern but a bit of both cleverly combined.’[10] Writing for Times Literary Supplement, Lewis offers further comment on the protagonist of the novel, writing that: ‘In the extraordinary figure of Godric, both stubborn outsider and true child of God, both worldly and unworldly, Buechner has found an ideal means of exploring the nature of spirituality’.[10] In his review, published in New York Times Book Review, Benjamin DeMott presented the author as a ‘major talent’: ‘Frederick Buechner’, he wrote, ‘is a very good writer indeed’. Concerning the novel itself, the reviewer added: ']All on his own, Mr. Buechner has managed to reinvent projects of self-purification and of faith as piquant matter for contemporary fiction [in a book] notable for literary finish'.[11] The novel has also drawn praise from several notable academics and authors. Novelist Tony Abbott wrote that ‘Godric is absolutely astounding, and no matter how many times you read it, it is still moving,’[12] and Revd Dr Michael Lloyd, principal of Wycliffe Hall, University of Oxford, suggested that "The first line of Godric is one of the best in all of literature.’[12] In an article written for Newsweek, reviewer Peter S. Prescott also noted the power of the novel’s opening line: ‘From the book’s opening sentence’, he writes, ‘any sensible reader will be caught in Godric’s grip.’ He continues:
Like all good writers of historical fiction, Buechner strives less for verisimilitude than for a vision of the past. […] In telling his long story in such a short space, and from both of its ends at once, Buechner glides deftly from the fanciful to scenes that are nearly realistic […] Buechner has risked much in attempting to define the ambivalences in the life of a saintly man, and risked even more by adopting a language that could easily have become overwrought […] Godric glimmers brightly.[13]
In addition to that of reviewers, Godric has also met with approval from literary academics. In her work, Listening to Life: psychology and spirituality in the writings of Frederick Buechner, Victoria S. Allen affirms the ‘literary excellence’ of the novel, writing that ‘the literary quality of Godric stands on its own.’[14] Allen points beyond literary questions to the psychological nature of Buechner’s craft, writing that: ‘In Godric Frederick Buechner’s psychological spirituality finds its ultimate literary expression as an old monk listens to his life.’[15] She further adds that, ‘the use of first-person narration and a natural presentation of the inner dynamics of psychotherapy and spirituality produced a work both secular and religious readers found remarkable.’[16] Marjorie Casebier McCoy’s investigation into the work of Buechner, Frederick Buechner: novelist and theologian of the lost and found, also features an extensive study of Godric. McCoy suggests that the novel ‘reminds us of all that has gone before in Buechner’s writing’, while insisting that ‘this book must be viewed in a class unto itself among the novels.’[17] Godric, she writes, 'has all the Buechner ability to draw us into a storied world, to make us listen to the characters and discover that they are talking directly to us, and to compel us to take even the impossible possibility of God and faith in God with complete seriousness'.[18] McCoy concludes by proffering what she perceives as the chief ‘insight’, unearthed by Buechner with ‘sensitivity and brilliance’ in Godric: ‘The distinctiveness of Buechner’, she writes, ‘is that he not only knows the theological power of metaphors in stories told with artistic force and set within a comprehensive religious vision’.[19]
