Mennonite and Amish characters play small but crucial roles in the best-known novels of John Updike and Denis Johnson, two celebrated contemporary writers in the United States. At their best, both Updike and Johnson manage to break through the sort of stereotypical depictions that characterize much writing about Mennonites and Amish by non-Anabaptist fiction writers. In part because of their gift for narrative irony, a relative complexity emerges in the Anabaptist characters drawn by Updike and Johnson, even though both novelists seem capable of writing about these characters only at arm's length. Yet, a careful reader can detect an almost palpable yearning on the part of the novelists' protagonists for the power that Mennonite and Amish belief and practice might offer a broken people in a broken world.