Faith/Jennifer Haigh: Reflections

It's been a long time since I've written about a book on this blog—many pressing corporate projects added to some responsibilities on my own two forthcoming books (compromised by a little too much time in the dance studio) have thwarted my best intentions.  Throughout all this time, in the smallest increments, I have been reading Jennifer Haigh's Faith, a book highly recommended by many of you.

Faith is a sister's story about a Catholic family.  It's about a year—2002—during which priests across Boston are being accused of molestations, tried by rumor and innuendo before they are tried by the facts.  Sheila McGann's brother, Art, is one of those being accused.  Little by little, Sheila pieces his story together, moving in and out of the facts of her broader, complicated Catholic family with nearly omniscient knowing.

What struck me with greatest force, as I slowly read the book, was this very omniscience.  Over and again, Sheila McGann finds a way to relate far more than she could have possibly witnessed herself—integrating the broader narrative via things overheard or told, through letters, through every possible means of imaginative empathy.  The book begins with a simple sentence:  "Here is a story my mother has never told me."  It sends a signal that what we are about to read is the forthright conviction of a sister who has worked hard to weave together a wholly defensible, but never utterly knowable truth out of stories mostly borrowed.

The search to know is often a jagged enterprise, self contradicting and unsure.  Faith is anything but that:  It is smooth, continuous, full.  Haigh has Sheila dwell not just with Art and those with whom he surrounds himself, but with their brother, Mike, their mother, their mother's second husband, Ted McGann. No stone, in Faith, is left unturned.  Everything is both delivered and explained, and at times I wished that Haigh had delivered less in the way of explanation—had left more for the reader to ponder and parse.

Still, I have enormous respect for the great research that is represented here, the Catholic knowing so embedded in each page.  I have respect for the time Haigh clearly spent coming to terms with her characters and seeing their stories through.  Clearly, Haigh sought to take us beyond the awful headlines of molestation into the workings and demons of the modern Catholic church, and this she does with deep care and telling compassion.

I have new books to turn to now, and after this evening's dance showcase, I'll be getting to them.  A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman (Margaret Drabble) will be my next iPad read.  After that, I'll be reading Dana Spiotta's Eat the Document and Ransom Riggs' Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, both of which arrived yesterday.  I need to get my life's balance back.  These books will, as most books do, help return me to me.

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Stone Arabia/Dana Spiotta: The Book of This Year?

Let me call this one as I think it rightly is: You might be headed to the BEA next week in search of the Book of the Year, the Big One, the Ultimate Prize Winner. You may imagine yourself wending down and through those Javits Center aisles, your shoulder a book-bag-burdened sloop, your ears somewhere between burn and buzz, the whole of your senses gone hyperkinetic as you pile on the galleys and pack in the giveaways and assure yourself that somewhere, inside all that brilliant literary mayhem, is the Best Book of This Year.

But unless you somehow find yourself a copy of Dana Spiotta's Stone Arabia (and at the moment copies are scarce) you are (I am sorry to report) not in possession of this year's best. You may just have to wait until July 12, when this slender volume sets sail.

Because maybe Jennifer Egan and her music-saturated, technically daring Goon Squad captured our imaginations in 2010. But Dana Spiotta, with her own lyric-besotted, indie-spirited Stone Arabia (Scribner), does something different, something more. It's a book about losing, fudging, and outfoxing memory. It's about a brother and a sister in their reeling mid-lives—that brother's life as an almost-musician, that sister's lonesome, fated love.  It's about the anomie of living right now—when the news affronts and hallows, and the tragedies of perfect strangers make us cry, and we lose ourselves within the portals of internet knowing and emerge merely more lost and a lot less knowing. (It's also, in small part, a calibrated riff on our blogging culture, but I only smiled, took no offense.)

We are a half step from forgetting, Spiotta reminds us, and we are a half step from being forgotten, but we are not vanished yet. We still have it in our power to live beyond the authoritative record, to tinker with our own legacies. The brilliance of Stone Arabia is matched by its beauty, which is to say that this is a fiercely intelligent book and also (importantly) an utterly humane one.

A personal note: I found Lightning Field, Dana Spiotta's gorgeous first novel, in a bookstore and brought it home a decade ago. Soon enough, Spiotta's second novel, Eat the Document, was nominated for the National Book Award. From time to time, then, in conversations with other writers, I would hear about Spiotta's graces as a person—her unshowy intelligence and big heart noted by writers like Rick Moody and Ken Kalfus.  Her university workshop students seem to love her, too; I've heard a fine tale or two about that.

But none of what I thought I knew prepared me for the power of Stone Arabia.  I hate that it's late May and that you'll therefore have to wait until mid-July to read it.

Read it, though, as soon as you can.

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