“The Secret” by Beverly Lewis: this is what a “Christian novel” should be

My review in a nutshell? I loved this book.

I had read the blurb, so I knew a little of what would develop in Beverly Lewis’s latest Amish novel, The Secret, due out in April. But having this foreknowledge or not, I’d have kept reading. The action in the book was pretty low key, but that’s what you’d expect, since the plot features an Amish family in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Yet the story was sweet without being saccharine, a tale of a culture — personified by Grace Byler, the main character — that values community, good food, hearty work, and decent living.

I couldn’t put it down. Despite the rather strict rules in this community, you recognize the complexity of the relationships and the depths of the people’s feelings. And yes, you also see the difficulty these rules put the folk in, when their teaching against being preoccupied with “self” collides with a genuine crisis where they need, most of all, to be comforted.

You become truly interested in the members of the Byler family, wondering how they will cope with the crisis that strikes them, centred on their mother’s secret, and how they’ll choose their futures. The Amish way of life is presented not so much as “old fashioned” as it is simpler, more willing to share others’ joys and burdens than the one we readers come from. Reading about this community, you never feel condescending toward it. There might even be a little envy.

The book follows two plotlines: the main one, with Grace and her Amish family, and another featuring Heather, a young woman from the “outside” world, who faces a troubling medical diagnosis. At first these plots seem completely unrelated (apart from interesting parental parallels). But the stories finally begin to intersect near the end of the book, and you realize that they are going to intertwine more and more deeply.

But not in this book, not yet. Because I discovered, at the end, that this is only the first in a new series for Lewis: the “Seasons of Grace.” It’s a measure of her accomplishment that when I realized that the story will continue into other books, my first thought was, “Oh no, we have to wait to find out what happens now??”

I already can’t wait for the next book in this series. And having discovered Beverly Lewis and her novels, I want to read more. Although Lewis is a Christian novelist, the Christianity, in The Secret at least, was not preachy or in your face. The story of the people themselves was first and foremost, and never used as an excuse to sermonize or condemn.

Meanwhile, I have “a secret” of my own: my Mennonite ancestors moved up to Canada a century or so ago — from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. The way this lovely region and its people were presented in the story made me feel the way Heather feels: that some day I must spend some time there, even if it’s just to walk and breathe.

 

“The Glister” makes me uneasy. Which was probably the point.

You know going in that The Glister, by John Burnside, will take you to some extremely dark places. The very setting tells you this: a dying town, the Innertown, gradually fading over time after the local chemical plant was shut down. Even years after the shutdown, people in the town end up sick with strange diseases, and the residue of the chemicals has poisoned the air, the land, and the nearby forest. Even if there are plans afoot to rejuvenate the place, headed by one of the residents of the more prosperous Outertown (a man who always finds ways to profit from even the nastiest circumstances), no one really believes there will be improvements.

And so the Innertown residents just keep going through the motions, waiting for their inevitable illnesses, waiting for nothing to happen. The inertia sits on their souls like a heavy, dusty blanket.

And that’s just the setting for the story. Add to this the even darker, more sinister fact that five high school boys have disappeared one by one in recent years, the townspeople maintaining the fiction that the boys have just skipped town unexpectedly, and you anticipate a lot of gloom, and probably even horror.

Which is why you root so hard for Leonard, the high school boy at the centre of the story. He seems so aware, so determined to figure things out. You really believe that he will both solve the mystery of the murders (because everyone knows those disappearances were murders) and will even manage to escape this grim town and make a real future for himself. He is the one who thinks about what’s really at stake, unlike his nymphomaniac girlfriend, who doesn’t think about much at all, despite her own inner unease that leads her constantly to seek the comfort of sex.

But even when Leonard does seem to find a way to escape, it’s not a happy thing, and it never lifts the dark burden from your shoulders. There are so many questions left unanswered, and it’s hard to tell if that was author Burnside’s intention, or if he believed he actually was providing some type of answer.

If it’s the latter, then the reader needs to do some heavy lifting to discover what it is. Is it that there probably is no real hope, in the end? Or that the only way to shake people out of hopeless inertia is to do something outright evil? Can committing specific terrible acts ever atone for or cleanse the sin of not acting at all?

Or is the final answer a variation on the Buddhist doctrine that the only way to escape suffering is to abandon all attachments to loved ones, to the world, and even to life? Wasn’t that what the townspeople had already done? An answer that risks circling us right back to the “there is no real hope” answer.

Or could it possibly be that the nympho girlfriend, in her endless search for sex, which could be interpreted as a quest for something life-affirming, will actually be the one to crack the inertia and finally achieve something positive?

Or is the whole thing really metaphorical, with “Innertown” and “Outertown” perhaps meant to link a shiny-but-fake outer life with the deadness of one’s inner life?

It’s probably a good sign that I want to reread the book, just to try to get a better handle on the possible answers (if there are any) and what Burnside was getting at. (**)

If it does nothing else, The Glister will certainly prompt you to think — hard — about what constitutes evil, not to mention whether there are ever any genuine solutions to it. That may have been Burnside’s ultimate goal in writing his book.

(** There may in fact be an answer to my own questions about the answer, in the suggested Reader’s Guide that the publisher, Doubleday, provides for reading groups.)

 

Rene Descartes: the father of us all?

The paradox, of course, is that after Descartes horrified the church by splitting mind from body, the church now relies on Descartes’ work in its frantic attempts to stop their reunion. And thus the French philosopher triggered the “faith versus reason” debate that continues to this day, while providing both sides in the battle with their principle weapons.

Russell Shorto chronicles a fascinating history of modern thought in his Descartes’ Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict Between Faith and Reason. Taking the fate of the philosopher’s remains as a skeleton (sorry) upon which to hang his narrative, Shorto follows the growing debate that resulted from a simple declaration: “I think, therefore I am,” or in Latin, “Cogito, ergo sum.“

It’s almost impossible, now, to grasp just how revolutionary Descartes’ work was. But Shorto does a thorough job of trying to describe the massive shift in thinking between the Before and After. In fact, as Descartes’ bones were continually dug up and moved from place to place over the years, the process of evaluating their authenticity mirrored the latest developments of thought that this shift created.

Before, one viewed the world through “received knowledge,” that is, assumptions about the world decreed by some authority. In Descartes’ time, that authority was the church, combining the biblical and Aristotelian world views. These assumptions weren’t justified by anything — they were simply there, and everything else was derived from them. For example, no one thought to ask whether angels actually existed; people devoted all their efforts instead to imagining the angelic hierarchies and angels’ divine substance.

Descartes changed all that, using doubt as a method and stripping away everything that was believed simply because “someone said so,” trying instead to find the absolutely certain, bedrock fact upon which we could build an edifice of reliable knowledge. He found it inside our own minds, where there was a “thinking thing.” If thinking was going on, something was there, doing the thinking. You couldn’t even deny the claim without thinking about it, and thereby proving it.

From that point, the floodgates opened. One’s own mind became the instrument of acquiring knowledge, the use of doubt and the requirement of proof becoming its method. From this seed grew countless new scientific enterprises, and even in religious and political circles, one’s individuality before God or the state became paramount.

But this use of doubt and this “thinking thing” became a problem, separating mind from body. Nobody could devise a way to meld the two again, or to explain how an immaterial mind could have any influence on a physical body. Except the materialists, who were quite prepared to identify the mind with the physical brain, so that nothing like a “soul” was required to explain anything about a human being.

And this was when the church found itself having to keep mind and body separate, to prevent the human soul from being done away with entirely, and to prevent itself from going out of business. Never having wanted the split in the first place, it recognized that healing it in this fashion would be even worse. So the religious establishment is still forced to use modern thinking and modern methods — all stemming from Descartes’ revolutionary work — to battle other results of the same work. It’s not a pleasant dilemma.

Shorto follows the historical debates with meticulous research, yet his narrative never becomes dull, nor the facts too heavy. He clearly explains how today’s “culture wars” constantly replay the battle that began in 1637 with the publication of Descartes’ Discourse on Method. Many philosophers have abandoned the idea that the mind/body problem can ever be solved, though Shorto believes that Descartes himself might have been close to finding an answer, by adding human love to the equation.

Unfortunately, the philosopher died before he could succeed, and so the “faith versus reason” battle continues raging. Russell Shorto has done a thorough and fascinating job of chronicling how it developed, as he followed the journey of Descartes’ bones through space and through history.

(For a bonus treat, check out Russell Shorto himself, in this Amazon.com video, discussing his book.)