Adam Shields
Summary: The story of two couples, a shared pastorate and their wives in mid 20th century NYC.
There are not many books that I stay up too late on multiple nights in a row to finish, but The Dearly Beloved is one of them. It has the feel of Gilead or the Starbridge series by Susan Howatch but it did not quite rise to that level. This is a book that I devoured in audio and I will come back and read again in print. But I wanted more.
The Dearly Beloved opens with the death of one of the four, but we don't know until the epilogue when that death occurs. After the brief initial opening, we go back and the four characters are developed from their origin stories until about the midpoint of the book where the two men are jointly called to be co-pastors in the mid 1960s New York City. I could not help but think of Eugene Peterson as I read about their early years as pastors. Eugene Peterson was also Presbyterian and also was a young pastor in NYC as he worked on his PhD and tried to decide if he was going to be an academic or a pastor. Both of these pastors in the story had their PhDs, and one of the wives also had a PhD in Literature and in the opening years of their ministry she was a professor at The New School. Eugene Peterson planted his suburban Maryland church in 1962, right about the same time as these two were coming to their 100 year old church that had seen better days.
One of my favorite parts of the book was Jane, the church administrator/secretary who trained the two to be pastors together. She understood the church and the community and what it needed. She loved the church and loved the two pastors. She had her own weaknesses and biases, but she helped them find their way and kept them together as they knitted together "a call."
The book is structured in three parts, the early years of the characters and how each of them met and married. The second part is the early years of ministry and the ways that their history and faith and personality came together (or didn't). The third part is the crisis and resolution. The crisis and resolution makes sense internally, but I also felt like it was too simple for the first two parts, it ended the book too early. I don't like complaining about what is not in a book, but the build up of character and background felt like it was too big for the main crisis and resolution to be only a four year period of the late 1960s. I think there needed to be at least two additional parts that followed the couples into middle age. It is not that people do not have significant life struggle in their 30s, but when there is significant life struggle, the resolution of their 30s or early 40s will not maintain equilibrium into their 50s and 60s or beyond.
But for the weakness, this was a book that took faith, and lack of faith seriously. This was not a "christian novel" that talks about faith. This was literature that took faith seriously as part of what it means to be human. Lilly, the wife with a PhD, never found faith. Her parents died when she was a teen and the trauma of that death and the ongoing grief of their loss shaped her throughout the book. It gave her strength, but also fragility. In many ways I think that she was coded as potentially on the autism spectrum in the way that she liked order and was internal with her emotion and interactions. But as the book goes on, I think what seemed to be initially coded as autism was trauma.
Lilly was married to Charles, the privileged child of a Harvard professor and a debutant mother. There was family money, but not love. He came to faith in college and his father thought that faith was simply a way to get out from under his father's shadow. James was very different. He grew up in Chicago, the child of an abusive alcoholic WW2 vet with PTSD. His mother was an immigrant and pledged to keep that family together, but James would do anything to get out. He married Nan, a pastor's child from Mississippi in the 1940s and 50s. Her father wanted her to get out of Mississippi and understand the world and sent her to Wheaton Conservatory to study music. James and Nan met when she was filling in for an accompanist at a concert at the University of Chicago. James fell for Nan, but Nan was a Christian and to be with Nan, James went to church.
The characters were archetypes of faith. Nana initially never questioned faith. Faith was just part of the water of her life. Charles was the evangelical with an adult conversion experience and the traditional biblical evangelical faith of the midcentury moderate. James was the activist who understood faith as a calling to make the world a better place., no cause was inadequate to work on, but doubt was his constant companion. Lilly was mad at God intellectually never understood the purpose of faith until a later crisis.
I like novels that explore ideas as well as people. I don't need a strong plot if there are good ideas and good characters. I understood these characters and wanted to know them more. This is in part why I wanted a longer story with them. But I think the desire for a plot to focus the build up of the character's back story, short cut the development of the story more than I wanted it to.
The ideas in the background were largely around tragedy and faith. How, or if, God was with us in that tragedy. As the couples are thrown together and the men become deeply bonded, the women, who are not temperamentally compatible, do have to relate to one another. Under the initial tutelage of Jane, it is clear that the two men fit together, and cannot work apart. Their pastorate is a package deal. And if one goes, the other would also have to go. That development of church as shared reality is part of what makes that third section work, but what does not work about it is that the crisis is too big and I don't think that Cara Wall could figure out how to keep telling the story as the couples would have gone into their 40s and 50s, so the story jumps to their 70s for the end and it feels unfinished. Every novel like this is unfinished. There is always more that could be said. The crisis that was here was developed well and told an important story. But for most people, there is not a big crisis, but many little ones. It is life in the little struggles that build upon one another the lead to the life well lived.
This was originally published on my blog at https://bookwi.se/the-dearly-beloved/
Originally posted at bookwi.se.
Summary: The story of two couples, a shared pastorate and their wives in mid 20th century NYC.
There are not many books that I stay up too late on multiple nights in a row to finish, but The Dearly Beloved is one of them. It has the feel of Gilead or the Starbridge series by Susan Howatch but it did not quite rise to that level. This is a book that I devoured in audio and I will come back and read again in print. But I wanted more.
The Dearly Beloved opens with the death of one of the four, but we don't know until the epilogue when that death occurs. After the brief initial opening, we go back and the four characters are developed from their origin stories until about the midpoint of the book where the two men are jointly called to be co-pastors in the mid 1960s New York City. I could not help but think of Eugene Peterson as I read about their early years as pastors. Eugene Peterson was also Presbyterian and also was a young pastor in NYC as he worked on his PhD and tried to decide if he was going to be an academic or a pastor. Both of these pastors in the story had their PhDs, and one of the wives also had a PhD in Literature and in the opening years of their ministry she was a professor at The New School. Eugene Peterson planted his suburban Maryland church in 1962, right about the same time as these two were coming to their 100 year old church that had seen better days.
One of my favorite parts of the book was Jane, the church administrator/secretary who trained the two to be pastors together. She understood the church and the community and what it needed. She loved the church and loved the two pastors. She had her own weaknesses and biases, but she helped them find their way and kept them together as they knitted together "a call."
The book is structured in three parts, the early years of the characters and how each of them met and married. The second part is the early years of ministry and the ways that their history and faith and personality came together (or didn't). The third part is the crisis and resolution. The crisis and resolution makes sense internally, but I also felt like it was too simple for the first two parts, it ended the book too early. I don't like complaining about what is not in a book, but the build up of character and background felt like it was too big for the main crisis and resolution to be only a four year period of the late 1960s. I think there needed to be at least two additional parts that followed the couples into middle age. It is not that people do not have significant life struggle in their 30s, but when there is significant life struggle, the resolution of their 30s or early 40s will not maintain equilibrium into their 50s and 60s or beyond.
But for the weakness, this was a book that took faith, and lack of faith seriously. This was not a "christian novel" that talks about faith. This was literature that took faith seriously as part of what it means to be human. Lilly, the wife with a PhD, never found faith. Her parents died when she was a teen and the trauma of that death and the ongoing grief of their loss shaped her throughout the book. It gave her strength, but also fragility. In many ways I think that she was coded as potentially on the autism spectrum in the way that she liked order and was internal with her emotion and interactions. But as the book goes on, I think what seemed to be initially coded as autism was trauma.
Lilly was married to Charles, the privileged child of a Harvard professor and a debutant mother. There was family money, but not love. He came to faith in college and his father thought that faith was simply a way to get out from under his father's shadow. James was very different. He grew up in Chicago, the child of an abusive alcoholic WW2 vet with PTSD. His mother was an immigrant and pledged to keep that family together, but James would do anything to get out. He married Nan, a pastor's child from Mississippi in the 1940s and 50s. Her father wanted her to get out of Mississippi and understand the world and sent her to Wheaton Conservatory to study music. James and Nan met when she was filling in for an accompanist at a concert at the University of Chicago. James fell for Nan, but Nan was a Christian and to be with Nan, James went to church.
The characters were archetypes of faith. Nana initially never questioned faith. Faith was just part of the water of her life. Charles was the evangelical with an adult conversion experience and the traditional biblical evangelical faith of the midcentury moderate. James was the activist who understood faith as a calling to make the world a better place., no cause was inadequate to work on, but doubt was his constant companion. Lilly was mad at God intellectually never understood the purpose of faith until a later crisis.
I like novels that explore ideas as well as people. I don't need a strong plot if there are good ideas and good characters. I understood these characters and wanted to know them more. This is in part why I wanted a longer story with them. But I think the desire for a plot to focus the build up of the character's back story, short cut the development of the story more than I wanted it to.
The ideas in the background were largely around tragedy and faith. How, or if, God was with us in that tragedy. As the couples are thrown together and the men become deeply bonded, the women, who are not temperamentally compatible, do have to relate to one another. Under the initial tutelage of Jane, it is clear that the two men fit together, and cannot work apart. Their pastorate is a package deal. And if one goes, the other would also have to go. That development of church as shared reality is part of what makes that third section work, but what does not work about it is that the crisis is too big and I don't think that Cara Wall could figure out how to keep telling the story as the couples would have gone into their 40s and 50s, so the story jumps to their 70s for the end and it feels unfinished. Every novel like this is unfinished. There is always more that could be said. The crisis that was here was developed well and told an important story. But for most people, there is not a big crisis, but many little ones. It is life in the little struggles that build upon one another the lead to the life well lived.
This was originally published on my blog at https://bookwi.se/the-dearly-beloved/
Originally posted at bookwi.se.