Novels

Abide with Me

9781400062072_p0_v2_s260x420Abide with Me is a captivating read. Set in Maine in the late 1950’s, it centers on congregationalist minister Tyler Caskey, his family, and his parishioners. The novel picks up over a year after Tyler has endured a personal tragedy, and the idealistic young preacher, a devoted reader of Bonhoeffer as well as some of the contemplative Catholics, is still struggling. A more complete plot summary (without spoilers) can be found at Amazon.

There were several things I loved. One is the deep compassion and understanding of Strout’s writing. These are real people. The narrative perspective is mostly centered in Tyler Caskey, but Strout takes us into the point of view of several other characters to unfold their stories too. The temporal structure is complicated; it begins by presenting the tale as a past event, then in the telling it often delves further back and works its way forward to the time of the action. Strout manages all of this complexity smoothly, keeping us well oriented as we come to understand people’s motivations and personal histories. For awhile it seems that only Tyler is a likable character. He makes mistakes, but he has a great deal of personal integrity and seems to be entirely genuine. But by the end of the novel I felt sympathy for all the characters, and I saw all of them grow. They are deeply flawed, but I came to care about every one of them.

I liked the reminder that the world of the late 50’s bore a resemblance to ours. It has the same anxiety about the future, the same dismal politics. One family has a bomb shelter in anticipation of Russian attack, and recent military experience is very much in the mind and memory of the characters. Even without the oppression of the 24-hour news cycle or the chatter of our various technologies to magnify every event, there was still plenty to worry about. There was also a greater stability in family structure, despite the personal difficulties people face. The families don’t all look like the one in Leave it to Beaver, that’s for sure. But the fabric of the community is intact, and their experience of worry doesn’t have the same edge of panic all too common in our present isolated age. I found myself thinking about how our technological connectivity, which on the one hand makes being “in touch” with others so “easy,” has merely taken the pressure off face-to-face interaction. It’s easy to acquire information about one another, but without the risk and inconvenience of face-to-face, real-time interaction, our connectivity leaves us basically alone — or at least with a flatter, less richly dimensioned kind of friendship.

There can be a nostalgia in evangelical circles that looks longingly back at this period “when everyone went to church.” But Abide with Me reminds us that such “Christianity” was little more genuine than what we see in what some call America’s “post-Christian” era. The majority of the town attends church in this novel, but in the main it seems more like a social club than the body of Christ. There is plenty of hypocrisy, plenty of pettiness. Tyler works hard to establish love as the church’s defining trait, and although in a climax I didn’t see coming we learn that there is much more to these people than their gossip and their failures, the notion that lots of people with a church-going habit equates to a spiritually healthy society is subjected to an honest critique in Abide with Me.

There were some passages that made me uncomfortable to read. The head deacon and his wife are having problems and he has looked outside his marriage for excitement. I didn’t like being dragged into his thought life. But these passages are short-lived in the total sweep of the tale, and arguably they’re thematically necessary. This character too grows and wins our sympathy by novel’s end. It’s a measure of Strout’s skillfulness that this storyline, which I resolved early on to skim over whenever it surfaced, ended up being one of the most touching in the novel.

The struggle of today’s church is the same: to love one another, rather than merely to keep the institution going. A novel like this one offers a chance to reflect on some of the timeless dynamics of church life from the safe distance of several decades away from the immediate setting. It leaves us with lots to think about, and not least is the question of how someone can write with such skill, empathy, and power.

The title, incidentally, comes from Tyler Caskey’s favorite hymn. I liked this version I found on YouTube and thought it would make a nice conclusion to my review.

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