Things that haunt
“Do you think the act of loving secures love’s return?”
Having children sent me back to church. Briefly. I was a lapsed something or other in my twenties (lapsed what? Evangelical? Protestant? Fundamentalist? Adults in my life declined to offer concrete language growing up and so my own adult language remains equally as shifty). My twins rocking inside my belly, I swiped through my internet browser at night, skimming nearby church ‘about’ pages, and clicking through YouTube sermons to get a sense of my choices. Imagining my babies there.
I ruled out the Catholic options (sorry to my husband), the super tiny ones unlikely to have a lot of children, and the kind whose names were too evocative of the end times. I was looking for something specific, but I wasn’t sure if it existed. I wanted to find a church that held all the positive memories from my childhood, but none of the negative. This is to say, a place that believed strongly in community, and also in things like asking questions, gender equity, and marriage equality (my childhood churches did not). I also wanted them to base their teachings firmly in the Biblical. No cults of personality for me, please. (There’s that blasted fundamentalism! Deeply rooted, isn’t it?)
I wasn't sure, as I scoffed at sermons delivered by grumbling men and websites using intentionally obscure language to explain intolerance, that I even believed in any of this stuff anymore, but I did know two things: I wanted my children (and my family) to have a sense of community outside the workplace, and I also wanted my kids to grow up with an understanding of a major world religion. And, maybe, at least one possible explanation for why we were all here, why they were born in the first place. I didn’t know if I believed the one modern Christianity was proffering, but it’s what I’d had growing up, and although it was the source of as much pain as it was comfort, it seemed a good place to start. If there are no atheists in foxholes, pregnancy was very much a foxhole.
I grew up with a flavor of (let’s just call it) Protestantism that taught once a person was saved (bought in, joined up, whatever you want to call it), they were saved forever. There was no opting out. Parables of wayward sheep and prodigal sons were drilled into my prepubescent brain during Sunday school. These sheep and sons were lost, they ran away, and they were dutifully returned. If I left, they said, the gravitational pull of God’s love would reel me back eventually. As long as I’d offered my soul to God and acknowledged I was a sinner, even if I did that when I was only eight years old, I’d be okay in the end. It’s a haunting origin story, and in the context of this review, I mean that literally.
The characters in Sarah Perry’s ENLIGHTENMENT, which is out in the U.S. tomorrow, June 4, are entrenched in these binds. They belong to Bethesda Chapel, a strict Calvinist group in Essex. The story is led by Thomas Hart, a local newspaper columnist who grew up in Bethesda and attends its services faithfully through much of the novel. Readers learn quickly that Thomas has compartmentalized his life into two buckets: there’s the Thomas who leaves town and is openly gay, and then there is Thomas the lonely local (closeted) writer who attends church services and strikes up an unlikely friendship with the minister’s daughter, Grace Macaulay, 33 years younger than him and charmingly abrasive.
It would be easy to make the drama revolve purely around Thomas’s sexuality, but that would be thin and boring. Instead, Perry introduces her characters to a quandary nearly as formidable as their god: the stars.
The inciting incident here is a quiet conversation in the novel’s early pages: might Thomas try writing about astronomy in his column, branching out from local ghosts and literature, his editor asks? Begrudgingly, Thomas agrees to consider the moon and then a comet, unknowingly inserting himself into a century-old mystery about a local astronomer named Maria Văduva and her unsolved disappearance. As Thomas unpacks what scant information there is about Maria, the great home she once lived in, and the comet she may have discovered, he falls irrevocably in love with the man who cannot love him back. It is this unrequited love that undergirds the central tension in the novel — for both Thomas and for Grace Macaulay, both of whom we see age and grapple with a question Maria gives voice to from the grave: “Do you think the act of loving secures love’s return?”
Even as Thomas and Grace step away from their religiosity, they think in terms of eternal love, weighted love, love that comes with a price. It’s as baked into their bones as the stardust Thomas obsesses over.
Throughout reading, I could not tell how Perry was going to resolve this knot of love, salvation, and lost faith. Or, more accurately, faith that was misplaced but which one senses still exists, just not by a name one recognizes. The stunning coincidence of existence becomes the path toward disentanglement, or as the novel suggests, enlightenment.
Our stint as churchgoers is also paused, and like Thomas and Grace, my feelings about it all vary from morning to night. The hellfire calls — looms in the periphery — but as it does for Thomas, so does the goodness, the astonishment, the heavens.
If you’re looking for a completely different type of summer read, there’s also Olivia Muenter’s SUCH A BAD INFLUENCE, out tomorrow, as well.
SUCH A BAD INFLUENCE, written by writer and podcaster Olivia Muenter (whom I follow and whose podcast Bad on Paper I listen to), is a mystery/light thriller that revolves around two daughters raised in the spotlight of their family’s internet fame, and particularly their calculating, career-influencer mother. There’s 18-year-old Evie, who has leaned into the family trade and amassed a multi-million dollar lifestyle influencing career of her own, and older sister Hazel, who loves her sister dearly but who doesn’t love the cost of her fame. (Fake friends, stalkers, suffocating momager, etc.) One day, Evie goes missing during a disturbing livestream, and Hazel, otherwise unenthused about her own life, commits herself to figuring out where her sister has disappeared to. Kidnapped, harmed, runaway? She sleuths through Evie’s life while reflecting on the sharp double-edged sword that is sharing one’s life on the internet, and resenting their mother for making it a compulsory part of growing up.
As I reflected on this one, I pulled open some of the influencer accounts I follow (Olivia included). What is it about the handful of them that keeps me coming back, even though I know — have reported on — how monetizing one’s following is another way of saying “making oneself into a one-person marketing agency?” There’s a lot of talk about authenticity and relatability in these spheres, but I think it may be more aptly put as a suspension of disbelief. What these — mostly beautiful women — are sharing is the kind of content that feels almost too real, so nearly real that I, as their follower, can lose myself in the narrative of their photos, videos, and stories and willfully pretend that I believe what they’re sharing to be the story of their lives. That’s my drink of choice, anyway: thrifting blips of other people’s lives and temporarily losing my mind in webs of vintage glassware, creative hobbies, and an aspirational intolerance to cringe. I too want to care that little and that much; I too want a sunset glass of wine over rolling hills. I am but a person online.
SABI is an of-the-times novel that asks philosophical questions about parasocial relationships and the commodification of the self in a whodunnit’s clothing. It’s probably not for people who haven’t been extremely online at some point in the last decade, or for people who say things like “I don’t really use social media.” But, good for those people, I love that for them. For the rest of us, suckers for a mystery and some pointed social commentary, clink clink.
xoxo
Monica