You know you’ve read a book that captures your imagination
when you find yourself starting to pray for the characters in Mass.
I caught myself doing just that Sunday morning. I spent a
good part of the prayers for the faithful thinking about Sophie Wilder and
Charlie Blakeman, the main characters in Christopher Beha’s What Happened to
Sophie Wilder.
Don’t read this post if you think you might read this book,
because I want to talk about the ending. Sister, I’m sending you the book, so
click away now because I want to hear your opinion of it without prior
information, which is how I read it, other than the mention of it in a blog post by D. G. Myers, which is what inspired me to buy it.
Here is what Myers says on his blog (talking about Paul Elie's NY Times article about the paucity of novels in which religious belief figures chiefly in the dramatic action):
"There is no possible stipulation, however, which can explain Elie’s neglect of Christopher R. Beha’s extraordinary What Happened to Sophie Wilder. I’ve called the novel a modern saint’s life. It has everything Elie is looking for—the living language of religious faith, a distinct and conclusive personal transformation under the influence of the Holy Spirit, the acceptance of religion’s explanatory power, a commitment to the established Church instead of the Do-It-Yourself religiosity that so many Americans seem to prefer, an ethical quandary that is directly caused by Christian faith, an emphatic and unembarrassed Roman Catholic character, and best of all, it is entirely contemporary in its setting—but its author is young and not yet famous (he will be), his publisher is a small house (not like Elie’s own Farrar, Straus & Giroux), and it does nothing whatever to confirm the trend away from novelistic belief which Elie is at such pains to illustrate. Even worse, Beha’s novel may be part of a countervailing trend toward anew Catholic fiction, which rejects the literary Catholicism of Flannery O’Connor for predecessors like Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh instead."
In his Commentary article, Myers suggests Beha, who is an editor for Harper's Magazine, may not want to be known as a Catholic writer, even though Myers posits Sophie may be a saint (not sure I'm buying this). He writes this (talking also about the main character in William Giraldi's Busy Monsters):
"Despite this difference, Charles and Sophie have something profound in common. They are what James calls sick souls. They are, in Othello’s language, “Unreconcil’d as yet to Heaven, and Grace.” They are intimates of evil and the failure of love. They are afflicted by man’s fallen nature — their own sin and other people’s — and find no peace in the knowledge that man, created in the image of God, reflects his glory. As Charles puts it, “Our species swam laps in a cesspool,” which leaves him with “the pressing need to get monastic, take a vow, wear a robe.” His language is comic, but his need is not. Both he and Sophie are in need of redemption, and both Busy Monsters and What Happened to Sophie Wilder are odysseys of a soul in search of redemption."
Want to read it, too? Then come back and tell me what you think. . .
After that introduction, I was superexcited when the book
arrived, and since I hadn’t read anything captivating since before Christmas, I
dove in right away. At first I was a
little disappointed – the characters seemed shallow, typically disenchanted,
hip artistic types, and the story not as literary as Myer’s recommendation made
it seem. But as I read on, I found myself becoming attached to Sophie and Charlie (not Giraldi's Charles),
especially after they left school. Charlie has been holding a candle for Sophie for years, and when she reappears, he gets a chance to step away from his dissatisfying life and to make some something out of her story of conversion and loss.
Initially, I was a little unconvinced by Sophie’s conversion –
it seemed too much like Merton’s. Was it brought on by the beauty of the books
she had been reading at Aunt Beth’s, an aesthetic conversion, as Charlie thinks
at first? By the time she became
involved with Tom’s father, I was persuaded that her conversion was true and
deep, perhaps partly because she can see holiness in others, whereas before her
conversion, other people were all potential storylines: “She had come to find
in these short morning ceremonies something more practical in place of the
sublime, just as she had come to see the holiness in Father Seneviratne, even
though he admitted that his path to the priesthood had been directed by earthly
concerns.”
Or is this because she is using her imagination now to
create a new version of her story? In the beginning, Charlie and Sophie are
drawn to each other through writing – they create dramatic story lines for the
people they see walking about the town – and they create their own version of each
other. Beha's book has Charlie telling Sophie’s story
based on what she had told him on a few long walks. How much does he contribute
to the story of what happened in the last days of Bill Crane, Sophie's father-n-law?
I’m still not sure what I think about this book, partly because I think some of the story needs more development, but mainly
because of what happens in the end.
Is Beha another Graham Greene? Is Sophie a bit like Henry Scobie in
The Heart of the Matter? She despairs because she doesn’t repent of her sin?
Is the conversation with Charlie about beauty a clue? Sophie
tells Charlie she gave up writing because she came to agree with Augustine that
“Beauty comes from the fair and fit.” She
claims that she no longer cares for the “self-contained work of art”: “A work
whose purpose is to be beautiful gets trapped in circularity. It can’t ever
succeed in that goal.” Has she tried to hard to make her life a work of art?
When Charlie counters that beauty is a real need, she
responds with this line from Kant: “Two things fill the mind with ever new and
increasing wonder and awe: The starry heavens above me and the moral law within
me.”
She says this when the two of them are at her parents’ home
in the country. Earlier she had told Charlie about a time during a blackout in
New York City when she was surprised to see the stars. They renewed her faith in something bigger than herself. Her invitation to
Charlie to come to the house ended with “you can see the stars here.”
So she has the starry heavens.
A few lines later she tells Charlie she can’t marry him
because in the eyes of the Church she is still married to Tom. Thus, she seems
to be acknowledging the moral law within her.
“God couldn’t possibly want you to suffer for the rest of your life when
you didn’t do anything wrong,” Charlie says. Sophie responds, “You may be right
about that, too. I can’t know what God wants. I only know what I promised.”
But when you find out what has happened and what will
happen, you wonder what she means here and even more when she quotes Eliot,
saying, “I’m not going to change my mind. . . . because I do not hope to turn
again.”
She had wanted to save Bill Crane as he lay on his deathbed,
but in the end she believes Bill brought “her into the fire with him.” Ironic that
Crane is so bitter – a devil figure? - considering he may have sacrificed his
entire life to protect his son’s innocence.
So what to make of the ending? Is Sophie’s faith real;
she just couldn’t forgive herself? Or she despairs because couldn’t accept relativity in the moral
law? Is Charlie’s version of her choice the real version? If Charlie’s version
is wishful thinking, does it suggest that faith is impossible? Or the exact
opposite: and that he is the one that has been saved by Sophie’s sacrifice,
because he recognizes that “she couldn’t know until the very last page if she
had been redeemed.” Metaphorically speaking or not?
Are we supposed to question both endings because both are written by storytellers? Art lets us choose our own ending? Is Charlie given a new start by Sophie's reappearance - and the telling of Sophie's story is partly his redemption, even if it is only a redemption from the murky life he had been living?
Here is the catch when reading a book that deals with faith,
(and I think Myers is right about why we don’t have a Flannery O’Connor
or Greene, or Percy, or Murdoch, or Waugh, etc., for this generation): it’s
hard to not to judge the characters on the basis of how well they live their
faith. I feel a little like the book
club members O’Connor complains about: I want a book that makes me feel good
about faith and life, almost more than I want a book that is true. And really, Charlie's accidental stop at Regina Laudis makes you think that's what the ending is going to be: sweet and comfortable. But it's not. This book leaves so many unanswered questions –
questions that can only be answered by letting the imagination roam.
It’s a thought-provoker, to be sure. Wondering what others
think…
(Looking for the links, I found other good remarks: background on the genesis of the book from the NYT, Sam Sacks' honest review that notes some flaws, Gregory Wolfe At the Wall Street Journal, Beha on writing, and another, not so glowing, but good review here and some good questions and comments on symbols.)
