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THE DEARLY BELOVED

by Cara Wall ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 13, 2019

A moving, eloquent exploration of faith and its response to the refining fire of life’s challenges.

Molded by their backgrounds and childhood experiences, the individual members of two couples adopt beliefs which will define them—until they are confronted by a heart-wrenching challenge.

Writing with restrained lyricism, Wall’s debut—15 years in the making—offers a kind of literary chamber music, combining the viewpoints of a quartet of characters across multiple decades and events. Charles, the son of a Harvard professor, is a man reliant on research and insight. James, whose drunken father was broken by war, will grow up to be full of impatience and the urge to action. Nan, the daughter of a Southern minister, has learned patience and generosity while Lily, orphaned at 15, is happiest when withdrawn. Charles’ unswerving love for Lily is matched by James’ determination to marry Nan even though neither couple seems a natural fit. When both men opt for a life in the church, Nan is better equipped for the role of clergyman’s wife than independent, brittle Lily, who feels no obligation to conform. The four eventually connect when Charles and James are offered the joint ministry of Third Presbyterian Church in Greenwich Village. Old-fashioned in tone and subject matter, the story is set in the mid-20th century and evokes some of the stifling social norms of the era. Wall has a very precise sensibility, and there is no escaping the sense of tidy predetermination in the clear, fixed positions of her four figures and their various oppositions, seen through the debates, struggles, rejections, and consolations that arise among them. Finely drawn and paced and written with intense compassion, the novel shifts ground with a late development that will test and push forward each of the four, leading to a conclusion consistent with Wall’s grace and control.

Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-982104-52-8

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: May 12, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019

LITERARY FICTION

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NORMAL PEOPLE

by Sally Rooney ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 16, 2019

Absolutely enthralling. Read it.

A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!

Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends , in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.

Pub Date: April 16, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Hogarth

Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest ) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

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Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, the dearly beloved.

From debut author Cara Wall comes THE DEARLY BELOVED, a heartfelt and poignant novel that asks readers to consider the “what ifs” of faith, love and commitment. Following four individuals from the far corners of Mississippi, Chicago and Greenwich Village through their highs, lows, marriages and friendships, the book covers decades of emotional evolution, echoing the works of authors like Ann Patchett, Elizabeth Strout and Mary Beth Keane.

In the beginning chapters, Wall introduces her characters one at a time, starting with steadfast and intellectual Charles Barrett. Equal parts doomed and fortunate to have the brains to follow in his esteemed father’s academic footprints, Charles is sent reeling when an unorthodox lecture awakens him to God, turning him on to a path of faith and ministry. From there we meet Lily, a bookish, thoughtful girl whose entire life is turned upside down when her parents are killed in a tragic car accident. Rather than turning to a higher power for solace, Lily decides that there is no entity that would allow something so terrible to befall her beloved parents and vows never to love or trust again.

In a very different part of the country, we meet James MacNally, a bright, stoic young boy whose life is darkened by his alcoholic father and beleaguered mother. James does not think much of religion or education, but he knows with all his heart that he must escape the confines of his small town and its mentally crumbling men --- all weighed down by memories of war and the knowledge that their wives and children will never know the darkness they have seen. So when a distant uncle (a man of faith, no less) offers to send him to college, he leaps at the chance and winds up in a world of privilege entirely foreign to him.

"Wall is a gifted and thoughtful writer whose words are dripping with meaning and metaphor. I believe that THE DEARLY BELOVED will have a lasting impression on all who read it."

Last of all is Nan, a preacher’s daughter whose life is wholly dedicated to her faith --- not only in God, but also in her fellow men and women, her family and herself. Unlike the other characters, nothing remarkable has ever happened to Nan...until the day her father tells her he is sending her away to school so that she can see the way others live, thus deepening her respect for faith.

Faith-driven Charles and staunchly atheistic Lily meet in college. He is instantly drawn to her quiet stability and thoughtfulness. Unfortunately for him, she is just as immediately turned off by his belief in something greater. Still, the two are keenly intelligent and share many good meals debating anything and everything --- except the one thing that could break them apart. On a different campus, James spies Nan for the first time and is captivated by her goodness: she is perhaps the only woman who could ever accept him --- hardscrabble beginnings and all --- and maybe, just maybe, help him become a better man.

As each couple starts down the path of marriage and eternity, they are all forced to confront their faiths (or lack thereof) and what role God will play in their relationships. While Charles and Lily silently agree to avoid the topic, James and Nan devote their lives to ministry, even as James continues to question his calling and his own beliefs. As the years pass, each couple experiences their share of joys and discontents, but the story really kicks off in Greenwich Village in 1963, when Charles and James are both called to preach at Third Presbyterian on the corner of Twelfth and Fifth Avenue.

Charles and James are not an obvious match at first: Charles' devotion is unstoppable, and his version of God is one that gives him peace and a quiet resolution to find answers. James, on the other hand, finds God in acts of activism and questioning injustices. Third Presbyterian has long been suffering at the hands of a flighty minister, and the board believes it will take the best of both men to bring it back to its highest potential. But when James pushes the parishioners too far and Charles begins to doubt his faith in his marriage with an unapologetically godless women, the two couples must learn to lean on one another and find whatever version of faith will keep them happy the longest.

I do not often gravitate towards books with non-secular themes or avid discussions of faith, but the faith that Cara Wall writes of in THE DEARLY BELOVED is something universal: a willingness to believe in something, anything. Wall is neither judgmental nor preachy, but rather intelligent, unbiased and meditative. Each of her characters is wholly realized, and their different approaches to faith, love and commitment are carefully balanced yet unflinchingly realistic. While I often disliked Lily, I also found her self-awareness admirable and strong, and felt that she added a much-needed edge to an otherwise intensely hopeful set of characters. At the same time, I found Nan’s capacity for faith inspiring and heartwarming. Yet it was the men, and especially Charles, who shined the brightest for me: Charles is someone you will trust and root for, and James’ passion and inability to ignore injustice makes him unignorable.

Set against the backdrop of the civil rights movement, war and the beginnings of political revolution, THE DEARLY BELOVED feels both timely and timeless. It is a perfect book club choice that will encourage its readers to consider the ways that faith and enlightenment play into their lives and how they can find the compassion within themselves to always do better. Religious, spiritual or atheistic, every reader will find a character of merit here, and hopefully a reason to believe in something greater than themselves --- be it love, family or something more intangible.

Wall is a gifted and thoughtful writer whose words are dripping with meaning and metaphor. I believe that THE DEARLY BELOVED will have a lasting impression on all who read it.

Reviewed by Rebecca Munro on August 16, 2019