Christmas Critics.

I've been on leave from teaching for the past six months, which means that I have gloriously free evenings. No need to sit down after dinner with a stack of undergraduate essays or the book for this week's seminar. How have I used this fleeting season of liberty? Mainly to devour novels--a passion that dates from my first acquisition of a library card. I would have been an English major had that discipline not developed such peculiar tics.

But let me begin with nonfiction, in deference to a conscience that still murmurs against novel reading as potentially frivolous. (That first library card, after all, was acquired in Grand Rapids, Michigan--in those days a stronghold of barely diluted Calvinism.) Probably the single most engrossing book I have encountered this past year is Jason DeParle's American Dream (Viking, $25.95, 422 pp.), which follows three poor, single mothers through the wrenching social experiment we call welfare reform. The action is set mostly in Milwaukee, where the protagonists, Chicago natives all, had moved in search of more generous welfare benefits and more orderly streets and schools. Milwaukee was the site of nation's most ambitious experiments in welfare reform, which at least theoretically provided support to single mothers as they moved from welfare to work--or, as was actually the case, from off-the-books casual work to conventional employment. DeParle looks closely, and often sardonically, at the content of these experiments, which often was less than met the public eye. He focuses principally on the fates of his three protagonists and their ten children, varying from tenuous success to almost unutterable disaster. The inadequacies of our social welfare system have seldom been more convincingly portrayed, nor the literally incalculable toll exacted by the absence of husbands and fathers.

I would also commend John T. Noonan's recently published A Church That Can and Cannot Change (University of Notre Dame Press, $30, 297 pp.). Crisply written and immensely learned, the book documents profound change in Catholic teaching on three topics--slavery, usury, religious liberty--and significant development with regard to a fourth, the dissolution of marriage. The section on slavery, the longest and most meticulously argued, is especially compelling as a case study in what Noonan sees as doctrinal development. Slavery, a practice that Pope John Paul II condemned as intrinsically evil, was, as late as the nineteenth century, regarded as morally acceptable by nearly all Catholic theologians. Popes themselves once owned slaves, as did numerous religious orders. The impetus to change, in Noonan's view, came principally from two sources: the behavior of the laity ("Christian custom"), as Europe moved slowly from slavery to serfdom, and the moral force of a mostly Protestant abolitionist movement. The "church teaching," in other words, learned from the "church taught" and indeed from "the world." Is this truly a case of doctrinal development? Certain conservatives, for obvious reasons, have argued that it is not. But especially in the case of slavery, the dispute seems largely semantic.

And now to fiction. Ian McEwan's Atonement (Anchor, $14, 351 pp.) seemed in its early pages to be a dark comedy of manners, which is about as edgy as I like my novels to be. Before long, however, darkness had triumphed. The drawing room gave way to an excruciating account of the Allied collapse at Dunkirk, precisely the kind of thing I read fiction to forget, and the horrific consequences of a child's confused act of bad faith. It is no small tribute to McEwan's haunting prose and his genius for characterization that I kept going. I'm grateful that I did. Atonement is an artful novel about class, sex, guilt, the human proclivity to violence, and ultimately--but never easily--forgiveness. Although its take on the human condition is relentlessly grim, this reader was comforted by McEwan's moral seriousness.

For a genuine comedy of manners, indisputably of the dark variety, I turn to The Summer House (Penguin Books, $9.95, 339 pp.), a trilogy of interrelated novellas by the late Alice Thomas Ellis, an English Catholic. (No, I haven't seen the movie.) She too is preoccupied with class, sex, and violence, but the context is thoroughly domestic. No battle scenes here, only conventional cruelties. There is in fact a murder, but it remains buried in the mind of young Margaret, who might pass for the book's protagonist were she not so alarmingly passive, so utterly unwilling to speak the truth or act to save herself. Margaret is eventually rescued--this gives nothing away--by the character whom the moralists of my youth would have called the most flagrant sinner of the lot. There is a happy ending, then, although of a peculiarly Catholic sort, rather in the mode of Graham Greene at his most countercultural.

Finally, let me recommend Marilynne Robinson's remarkable Gilead (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25, 247 pp.). The novel has been so widely and enthusiastically reviewed that summary seems pointless here. Anyway, the plot is less important than the voice--rendered with astonishing authenticity--of the book's principal character and narrator, the Reverend John Ames, contemplating a probably imminent death in his native Gilead, Iowa. What Robinson has produced is a God-haunted novel--a graceful meditation on history, morality, the delights of life and language, and most especially love, both human and divine. The stern librarians of my Grand Rapids girlhood would have approved.

Leslie Woodcock Tentler, author of Catholics and Contraception (Cornell), teaches in the Department of History at The Catholic University of America.