A friend in my writing group recently mentioned that at the
end of each year she makes a list of all the books she read, and then she stars
the ones that she really enjoyed—a simple discipline, but one that got me
thinking about the many books I read in 2013 that I never
One in particular came to mind: What Happened to Sophie
Wilder by Christopher Beha. I read it a full year ago now, but sometimes
what we remember about a book is almost more valuable than anything we might
say of it at the time.
I was eager to read What Happened to Sophie Wilder
because I knew it had a Christian angle to it, and as a writer and Christian
myself, I have long been interested in portrayals of faith in literature.
Around the same time that I started reading Sophie Wilder, Paul Elie’s
article “Has Fiction Lost Its Faith?” appeared in the New York Times,
describing Christian belief in contemporary fiction “as something between a
dead language and a hangover.” Clearly I’m not the only one who thinks good
Christian literary fiction is a bit of a rarity these days, so I had high hopes
for Sophie Wilder.
I found a lot to be admired. Beha structures the novel
deliberately—alternating chapters contain alternating points of view—and with
suspense, building from the start a sense of mystery around the titular
character. It’s a book I found hard to put down, perhaps in part because the
characters were familiar to me: Charlie, the first-person narrator, is an
aspiring writer who falls in love with Sophie, also an aspiring writer but of
the kind who has innate talent and who has a major publication early in her
career. But then Sophie flounders, unable to dig into her next big writing
project until a phone call from her husband’s father, whom she’d been told was
dead. Despite her husband’s wishes, Sophie becomes involved in her
father-in-law’s final days as he dies of cancer. I won’t say too much more
because part of the fun of the book is the mystery it sets up and the unfolding
of that mystery.
The novel is clean and economical in its presentation; it offers
a scene of Sophie’s conversion to Catholicism at the very time of Paul Elie’s
decrying the lack of the believer’s experience in fiction (in fact, a whole
year later without the book in front of me I can remember that Sophie, in her
moment of conversion, feels “occupied”); and it made me want to keep reading.
So why, when I finished, did the novel bother me? Why have I not, in the
intervening year, found myself recommending it at every turn?
Flannery O’Connor provides the best way I’ve found of
articulating a quality of many contemporary works that provoke a negative
reaction in me. She writes in her 1963
essay “Novelist and Believer,” “At best our age is an age of searchers and
discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned
to live with it happily.” Of course I
realize she was writing a half century ago, but when I pick up many New
Yorker fiction selections, for example, I see the mood of “domesticated
despair” dominating. A prime example is Donald Antrim’s short story “He Knew,” which
follows an out-of-work actor who lives with a “normal daily load of terror” and
his much younger, recently suicidal wife. They regulate themselves with
medications, go shopping in New York ,
and delicately avoid things that upset them.
Their one dream is a road trip through the mountains to North
Carolina , where both grew up but where neither have
any family left; they are essentially rootless.
Don’t get me wrong; it’s not that literature shouldn’t
reflect harsh realities. The problem
comes when such vacuous living is portrayed as something we’ve “learned to live
with,” that this daily terror is “normal,” and there is no narrator or
consciousness whose subtle shaping satirizes human folly (as we find in Evelyn
Waugh or William Thackeray) or exposes the capacity for beauty and grace to arise
from the grotesque and tragic (as in O’Connor).
Despite the Christian themes presented, What Happened to
Sophie Wilder reads like a book that has domesticated despair. Both Charlie
and Sophie are supposedly disenchanted with the artistic affectedness of their
friend Max, but to me, they seemed equally affected, mooning around in
disheveled apartments, drinking, dissatisfied, and in many ways, the agents of
their own dissatisfaction. I appreciated
the reflections on prayer at Sophie’s father-in-law’s bedside; I appreciated
the representation of suffering and the treatment of a character who takes
damnation as a real possibility. But I
saw no sense of surprising grace or distant hope for redemption that even the
most brutal O’Connor stories contain. Instead, the book seems to suggest that
such redemption is possible only in our own fictitious refashioning of cruel
realities (at least, that’s how I read the final sequence where Sophie’s ending
gets re-written). Faith, in this
treatment, becomes merely a plot device that provides Sophie’s conflict.
And perhaps that’s all the more Beha meant to do with it. Still,
I found a similar sense of disappointment circulating in the Christianity
& Literature listserv. One of the contributors, a literature professor,
agreed with my reading but suggested another possibility: it’s very difficult
to write convincingly of faith and conversion if it’s not an integral part of
who you are. An interview on Beha’s website reveals that Beha once took his
Catholic faith seriously, but “lost the ability to sustain that belief.”
I’ll take it one farther—it’s very difficult to write
convincingly of faith and conversion period, even if you are a practicing
Christian. And so, a year out from reading the book, I wonder if my
expectations for Beha were too high, if, in the dearth of books that are brave
enough to explicitly address conversion, prayer, suffering, and life after
death, we become so desperate for someone—anyone—to portray those very elements
with the living fire we believers know they contain, that we foist the same
expectation on anyone willing to attempt using that material at all.
Suffice it to say, Sophie Wilder gets more than a
star on my list of books read in 2013. It gets a star, a question mark, and
maybe a few ellipses of wonderment.
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