Books — Little Faith

As part of my sabbatical, I read widely and by choice, dipping into books I’ve wanted to get to but could not as well as several that came out recently. As part of my post-sabbatical reflections, I’ve written several short but specifically focused responses to some of what I read. These responses, like the one below, focus on one element each from a select list of readings and represent the best of what I encountered. 

Little Faith

Nikolas Butler, Ecco (2019) 

Find the book here. Check out Butler’s website here.

I read Nickolas Butler’s Little Faith on the advice of my friend Chris, who suggests books from time to time and is always on the money with what he thinks I’ll resonate with. In specific, there are three elements of this book that really align with what I try to create in my own work. 

First, this is what I would refer to as a quiet narrative. It slowly burrows into the lives of a retired couple living in rural northern Wisconsin who are trying to hold onto their tenuous relationships, primarily with their adopted daughter and grandson, around whom their lives increasingly revolve. Buried in the core of all of this is the loss that reformed their lives in the first place. 

“The heaviest thing in the world is the coffin that carries the weight of a little child, for no adult who has ever borne the burden will ever forget it. To bury a child is a tragedy many parents never overcome. It blots the sun, steals every color, snuffs out any music—it dissolves marriages like acid, bleeds out happiness and leaves in its wake nothing but gray despair.

“No one knew this better than Lyle and Peg…” (291).

This loss is what every moment is reflected against for the entirety of the novel, deepening even the casual gestures of connection with their community while adding weight to every slight and rejection of human connection.

The second facet I gravitate to in this narrative is the way in which it interrogates fairly the damage bad religious practices can inflict and also the ways in which faith is pervasive in the face of it all. Butler captures this in a spot-on depiction of a corner of Evangelical culture ripe for becoming a cult of personality reconstituting the object of its belief around a charismatic pastor.

Rather than just depict faith this singular way, however, Butler counterpoints what might be seen as an easy representation of bad church culture with Lyle’s relationship with his life-long friend and now Lutheran pastor Charlie, who listens to jazz over bourbon, shepherds a slowly dying congregation of stoic Midwestern believers, and dispenses quiet, worldly wise advice when Lyle feels like he might be losing his ability to believe.

The contrast between the two is necessary in any depiction of faith because, counter the American desire to overwrite one cultural narrative on any diverse community, religious practices and expressions of faith are numerous and divergent and seeing them as such matters.

And finally, I love stories built around decisions characters make that have clear necessity but don’t discount the costs they also carry. In this case, Lyle decides to take his grandson, who is gravely ill and being denied medical care by the cult his mother has joined, by physical force. The decision may have saved the boy’s life, but it also likely ended his relationship with his daughter. 

In sum, this book is a meditation on loss and love and what people hold closest when life inevitably begins to strip the rest away. And it is just so good.