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.

Books — House of Broken Angels

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. 

The House of Broken Angels

Luis Alberto Urrea, Back Bay Books (2018)

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

I’ve been a fan of Luis Urrea‘s work since someone handed me his book Beside the Lake of Sleeping Children almost a decade ago. His prose, both in fiction and nonfiction, is so spare and precise without losing its emotional energy.

Urrea has a way of using the sequence of his details to carry the sense of a moment, whether in scene or dialogue, that is powerful in its unassuming form. He leaves the reader to sit with what’s what’s just been revealed on the page and also prompts us to explore what they make of where it takes us off of it. The effect allows his stories to feel strangely familiar even when the circumstances are not.

This is a key to the deeply moving story at the core of his novel The House of Broken Angels, a multi-perspective rumination on family and belonging and the endings that inevitably follow beginnings.

The basic premise of the book revolves around the funeral of Big Angel’s mother and the last birthday party he will ever have, both of which happen within a few days of each other. The two events bring Angel’s extended family together at his East County San Diego home where all of them wrestle with where life has taken them and how it will, inevitably, give way to something else in death.

Swirling around Big Angel—who until his cancer became advanced was the loud, decision-making patriarch of the clan—his children and siblings try to honor his wishes for one more party and chance at reconciliation for all the ways life has estranged and bound them together at the same time.

In everyone else, the patterns of life and family unwind in new generations while the members of Angel’s ponder slipping into the roles of the elderly, some clinging to their youth while others succumb to the persistent erosions of time. This reminded me quite a bit of the dynamic of Alice McDermott’s Charming Billy  in which the characters who attend the titular Billy’s wake construct themselves in the same moments they build an increasingly complex portrait of him. 

And in it all, Big Angel tries to understand what he is about to give up in death; to evaluate whether or not he has truly lived and lived well. This rumination ends in a single moment when he is able, in his weakened way, to act one last time as the father figure so many in the family still needed.

“And that was it for Big Angel. The string was cut. He felt and saw sparks rise around him. Now he knew why he was not dead yet. The sparks whirled. He thought he had stayed alive to enjoy his own wake. He thought he was still alive to make amends. He thought he was still alive to try one last hour to unite his family. But now he knew. What a pretty little tornado of light” (306).

The House of Broken Angels, then, is a novel about the living we do when we know that dying will come, not in the abstract but the tangible. And in this space, Urrea challenges readers to ask the same questions of themselves they find his characters asking.

This, I believe, is a gift.