A Pleasant Fiction as an Existential Reply to A Grief Observed

Note: The following essay is the first in a series comparing and contrasting A Pleasant Fiction to and with C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed. It is an AI-assisted analysis written in a style similar to the essays in Coming of Age, Coming to Terms, and will appear in the forthcoming second companion volume to the Calvin McShane series, Musa Ex Machina, due out in 2026.

Two books written more than sixty years apart stand like bookends on the question of how a human being survives grief. C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed (1961) and Javier De Lucia’s A Pleasant Fiction (2025) begin in the same raw place—the shock of loss, the shattering of meaning—but they part almost immediately in purpose. Lewis turns inward toward God; De Lucia, through his narrator Calvin McShane, turns outward toward life. One seeks reconciliation through submission, the other through endurance. The result is not a dialogue of faith versus unbelief so much as a record of two very different ways of remaining human after everything collapses.

The Shared Beginning: Raw Grief

In their opening movements, the two books share an unmistakable emotional DNA. Both capture the early stage of grief before language catches up to experience. Lewis’s pseudonymous narrator N. W. Clerk writes of a world that has “shut up” on him, of a God who seems “deaf.” Calvin McShane opens A Pleasant Fiction in much the same paralysis: the fog of routines, the weight of loss that distorts time itself. Each man speaks from the hollow between disbelief and faith, where pain is still an astonishment.

This is the territory of honesty—the moment before interpretation. Neither writer is yet bargaining; both simply record. Their sentences are blunt, unguarded, and occasionally blasphemous. Lewis’s “cosmic sadist” and Calvin’s “If I still believed in God, I’d say he was cruel” are born of the same despairing need to make sense of senselessness. At this stage, theology and philosophy are irrelevant; what matters is testimony. The reader feels the nearness of truth because both narrators have momentarily stopped trying to explain.

Diverging Paths: Theology vs. Experience

The resemblance ends once each man begins to search for meaning. A Grief Observed is ultimately a theological exercise, however reluctant. Its structure is a pilgrimage back toward faith. Lewis examines his anger, analyzes it, repents of it, and gradually rebuilds the scaffolding of belief. Every question—about suffering, justice, or love—circles back to God’s character. Grief is the experiment; theology is the lab.

A Pleasant Fiction, by contrast, is not framed by the question “Where is God?” because that question has already been exhausted before the book begins. Calvin lives in the aftermath of faith. His task is not to reconcile pain with providence but to live honestly in a world where providence no longer answers. The difference in focus is decisive:

• Lewis writes to defend divine goodness.

• De Lucia writes to defend emotional truth.

That shift in purpose changes the very language of grief. Lewis translates experience into doctrine; Calvin translates it into memory, friendship, and art. Where Clerk looks upward for validation, Calvin looks laterally—to others, to the small continuities that make existence bearable. The sacred has become human.

Two Frameworks, Two Centuries

Part of this divergence is historical. Lewis wrote A Grief Observed eight years before Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s On Death and Dying (1969) introduced the now-ubiquitous stages of grief. Without that psychological vocabulary, Lewis had only theology as an interpretive frame. His analysis of sorrow is pre-Kübler-Ross and pre-existential; the only model available is divine testing and ultimate submission.

A Pleasant Fiction was written in a world where grief has long been studied as process rather than punishment. Its author—Javier De Lucia, who holds a doctorate with a specialization in social psychology—writes from within that modern understanding almost by instinct. The book’s oscillation among anger, depression, reflection, and resignation naturally mirrors the psychological stages Kübler-Ross described, even though it was not written to illustrate them. The framework of faith has been replaced by the framework of human process.

Lewis interprets emotional change as spiritual correction; Calvin recognizes it as emotional rhythm. The difference is not just in what they believe but in what intellectual tools each has to work with.

Submission and Resignation

Both books end in quiet, but the quiet means opposite things.

In the final chapter of A Grief Observed, Lewis decides that his earlier questions were “nonsense questions”—problems that exist only because humans presume to think in categories beyond their reach. God’s silence, he concludes, is not absence but a father’s knowing smile at the child who cannot yet understand. The peace he attains is hierarchical: man below, God above, mystery restored.

Calvin’s stillness at the end of A Pleasant Fiction comes from resignation, not submission. He doesn’t believe the universe owes him an explanation, and he never really looks for one; his peace is not philosophical but experiential: what happened is enough. Meaning is not discovered in theory but recovered in memory, in friendship, in the quiet persistence of love. He is not arguing a case; he is telling the truth as he has lived it. And what endures is continuity: he is his parents’ continuation, he is the living trace of their love. It may not matter to them—they are gone—but it matters to him, and therefore it matters. That modest assertion is his theology of the human.

Two Forms of Courage

In the end, both men are courageous, but in different ways. Lewis’s courage lies in confessing doubt within a religious culture that prized certainty. De Lucia’s lies in finding his only consolation in what remains. A Grief Observed retreats into submission; A Pleasant Fiction settles into the calm of acceptance. One reasserts faith; the other reasserts honesty.

Yet they are not enemies. They are successive steps in the same human project—the attempt to make meaning after loss. Lewis’s book begins the conversation that De Lucia’s continues. If A Grief Observed ends where faith demands silence, A Pleasant Fiction begins where honesty demands speech.

Coda

Over sixty years, the center of consolation has shifted. What was once sought in revelation is now often found in reflection. A Grief Observed turns toward God; A Pleasant Fiction turns toward truth. Each surrenders to something larger than the self. Between them lies a continuum of faith—one divine, one human—and the enduring need to make meaning from loss.

© 2025 Chapelle Dorée Publishing, LLC. All rights reserved. This content may not be reproduced, distributed, or modified without permission.