Remembering Karen Novak, 1938-2009

I almost emailed Karen today. It’s just part of how we live now, that electronic tic. There was a story I wanted to tell her, a small knot of thought that had been nagging for weeks and finally had gotten untied in a way that I thought would amuse her. So I tapped the key that would bring up her address, only to realize that this particular story”unlike others we had tossed back and forth during the past year before her death”would have to wait indefinitely. Such is the hypnosis of the Internet, that it can lull us for a split second into forgetting even the otherwise rather singularly unforgettable fact of death.

To many people, including readers of First Things , the name Karen Laub Novak is recognizable first as that of the wife and longtime love of one of the great theologians and public intellectuals of our time, Michael Novak. Theirs was “a marriage,” in the words of their longtime friend Hadley Arkes, “sustained by two wings, by faith and reason, nature and art”by the relentless wit and energy of Michael and the genius and deepening sainthood of Karen.” And just as it is impossible for anyone who has known them to imagine Karen apart from Michael, so is it equally impossible to imagine Karen apart from her children. Just how remarkable it would have been to find oneself a child of Karen’s was powerfully in evidence at her funeral, especially. As Jana put it with devastating simplicity, “I have spent”and will spend”my life trying to follow her example.”

And there was of course a third essential woman there”this one known as well to the outside world: Karen Laub Novak, the artist. A former student of the expressionist Oskar Kokoshka in Vienna, she went on to create a dazzlingly wide collection of lithographs, paintings, and sculpture, much of it graced with what admirers have identified as Catholic mysticism. Her work has been exhibited all over the country (an especially evocative selection is currently on view through October at the John Paul II Institute at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.). Other works included illustrations for ­children’s books and numerous magazines”the New Republic , Washington Monthly , and Crisis among them. Karen’s commissioned art cut a wide swath, from John Paul II on down. Her statue of the Green Revolution titan and Nobel Prize’winner Norman Borlaug”who died only a few weeks after Karen”has been called by one critic “one of the two most beautiful” statues in North America.

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