Book Club Recap: The Dearly Beloved by Cara Wall
Some books get a lot of hype whether they deserve it or not. Some books don’t get almost any hype, and boy do they deserve it. The Dearly Beloved is one of those books— richly imagined, deeply thought out, and marvelously written.
Still, our book club dissected it thoroughly. And here are our thoughts.
An Effective Prologue
There are few things as controversial as the use of a prologue. Writers love to use them (there’s something so mystical and inviting about writing them, isn’t there?) and agents and publishers hate when they’re used. So the rule of thumb is, don’t, for the life of you, use a prologue!
But things are not so black-or-white.
Prologues are not inherently bad, nor should you avoid using them at all costs. They can and should be used, but only if they serve a certain, very specific purpose, and that is—to create narrative drive.
It is that purpose that often slips from perspective, so writers will often write one to:
slip in information that the reader needs so as to understand what’s going on;
create an atmosphere;
impart their authorial view on some topic;
show off beautiful sentences and/or interesting take on an issue;
The thing is, we shouldn’t be writing a prologue just because it sounds pretty, or because we need it to slip in information, and we’re not skilled enough to sprinkle that info in a chapter.
Prologue is a prism. It gives the reader a filter through which they’ll gauge every single thing in a book.
In The Dearly Beloved, the prologue shows James shutting himself in his study after his friend, Charles, had died, and Nan—James’s wife, reflecting on whether or not she should call Charles’s wife, Lily. Ultimately, she decides not to call her, because that’s the last thing Lily would have wanted.
It is this curious piece of information that creates narrative drive—why would Lily not want to be consoled? What type of relationship do they have? Obviously James and Nan care deeply about Charles and Lily, so how come they’re not running over to offer their condolences and support Lily through her loss?
As I read on, this piece of information stayed with me like a filter I was gauging things through. As the author went back in time, introducing each character separately, I kept the end result (the prologue—the constellation of their relationship in the moment of Charles’s death) in mind, constantly thinking about how they ended up there.
This is the function of a prologue. Without it, reading about these four characters—who and what they were like before they’d met—would have been context-less and irrelevant, however well-written. This prologue, though, created enough curiosity to carry us through long, seemingly tension-less introduction.
Although, this is something we didn’t all agree on. Which leads me to the next thing.
CHARACTERIZATION… or A LONG EXPOSITION?
As I mentioned before, after the prologue, in PART ONE, the author goes back in time, introducing each of the four characters separately, and then telling us a story about how each of these couples met (James & Nan; Charles & Lily). Some of us found this section of the novel riveting. It was a definition of a ‘character-driven’ literature—an exploration on how these people were shaped through varying degrees of nature vs. nurture.
How, for instance, introverted Lily became even more introverted as she lost her parents at the age of 15. How she became almost autistic in her avoidance of people.
How James, born with a pro-active, go-getting personality, suffered being brought up in a family of an alcohol-addicted war veteran, in a neighborhood that’s on the margins of society.
How Nan, born with a sweet, obliging demeanor and brought up in a Minister’s family in the South, was shielded from anything foul or challenging in the world, but her life also lacked depth because of it—how her faith had never been tested.
How Charles, born a conformist, with a steady and calm character, was subdued by a dominant father, until he found God—and a non-believing wife.
How each of these couples formed—pieces of puzzle sometimes clicking nicely, and sometimes not fitting at all.
And then, the two couples meeting as well, each person’s nurture and nature bringing different things to the table, allowing for a creation of a unique amalgam of relationships between the four. And as unique as the result of this amalgam sounds, doesn’t it perfectly model real life? Doesn’t it perfectly depict how each of us is created by various ways our nature vs. nurture meet, and how complicated our relationships with our dearly beloved are?
Add to this an additional filter—that of faith. Each of these people have a different type of relationship with God. Some believe, some want to believe, some are called to believe, some don’t believe at all. This adds an additional layer of conflict and tension between them. And over time, as they change, as their relationships, circumstances, and attitudes toward God and faith change, the mosaic keeps shifting and fluctuating in mesmerising ways.
I, for one, found this to be so engrossing I couldn’t put the book down. But there were some of our members who disagreed. They felt that the story in this section (roughly the first 40% or even more) was all backstory. That the author got away with what basically reads like a huge info-dump, and that for them, the story picked up in the last third of the novel, when Lily and Charles’s son is diagnosed with autism. Which brings me to my next point:
WHAT IS THE STORY HERE?
The autism diagnosis is where the plot picks up for sure. We finally have external events happening (as opposed to character-driven exploration that we were reading thus far): Lily is advocating for her child, Charles is lost in his grief over his son’s diagnosis and ensuing crisis of faith; James—ever the go-getter—is out and about to open a school and create an environment for his friends’ child; and Nan is learning to support Lily in a way that works for Lily.
And this is where the disconnect happened—and where the book club cleaved apart in opinions. Half of us loved the first part of the novel better than the latter part, and half of us could barely get through the first part of the novel, but sailed through the last third. The difference in pacing was conspicuous. The book was a slow waltz, and then it suddenly became a cha-cha-cha.
It seems that there were two stories here:
First, a story about these four people, two couples, and how they connected with each other, and with their faith.
Then, a story about a mother dealing with an autism diagnosis in 1960s, and her husband’s and their friends’ efforts to help the child (Will) have a meaningful life.
If you’re looking at the first story, then the first part—the long exposition on who these people are, separately and together—isn’t backstory. It’s the crux of what the story really is.
If you’re looking at the second story, everything up until the birth of Lily’s autistic child is backstory.
Regardless of whether our members were in the first-story team or the second one, we agreed that it would be best if the author stuck with one or the other, to avoid breaking readers’ expectations.
As writers, we must constantly be aware that, no matter how layered, we should be writing ONE story, and one story alone. Choosing one out of multiple viable (and equally riveting) options is one of the hardest things a writer can—and must—do.
It’s like deciding what you want to be when you grow up. You could be an astronaut, a doctor, a lawyer or a cashier. But you can only be one of those things.
This duality of the story the author was telling also affected…
THE STRUCTURE OF THE NOVEL
As already discussed, the book opens with a Prologue.
After the prologue, PART ONE covers pages 3-139; thematically, it covers introducing these four characters, how they paired up, and their early marital years.
PART TWO covers pages 139-229, showing the two couples meeting and their relationships with each other and God.
PART THREE covers pages 229-335, starts when Jane Atlas (what a character, that one!!!) dies and shows Nan’s struggle with infertility and Lily’s unintentional pregnancy, and everything that comes thereafter.
Epilogue brings us back (or rather, forward) to the moment just after Charles had died, showing their relationship and how the guarded, introverted Lily perceives James and Nan after all this time.
There’s a significant void—time-wise—between Part Three and the Epilogue (which coincides with Prologue, time-wise). One of our members posed a question if this was jarring. I can only offer my personal perspective here and say, that having the prologue in mind, I did expect the author to show the years leading up to Charles’s death (at old age), so as we approached page 300 and we were still watching them in their early thirties, I was curious (and worried) about how the author will make it all fit.
In other words, I noticed the gap—I worried about it—and therefore it jarred. I think this happened because the author focused on the story about Lily and Charles’s autistic child in Part Three, making it the new crux of the story, which disallowed her to use these pages to ease us into these couples’ old age (and this was probably due to the fact, that these years were rather uneventful for them—so maybe a stronger plot was called for? Like in Claire Lombardo’s (another Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate) The Most Fun We Ever Had—where the return of Violet’s child is the tightrope getting us through the novel).
Some members also said that epilogue didn’t ring completely true—it felt a bit out of character for Lily, a little saccharine even, given what we’d seen from her throughout the book. And a shock, given that Nan didn’t feel comfortable even calling her to offer her condolences in the prologue (which temporally coincides with the epilogue). Maybe this would have been clarified if the author had covered more of the events since their childbearing years and their old age.
THIRD-LEVEL EMOTIONS
One of the hardest things in writing a book—especially in (Literary) Women’s Fiction, where everything hinges on feelings—is writing emotions effectively. In order to evoke emotions in a reader, the writer needs to go deep, deeper than in other genres. In fact, they need to go three-levels deep.
The first level are surface-level emotions: those that are an immediate response to stimuli. This is the obvious emotion that all of us would feel in a certain situation. For instance, a man gets stuck in a traffic jam, and he’s frustrated. If you’re a writer writing this man, of course you’d write out this emotion, as it is a normal, expected one. But it’s precisely because it is expected that it doesn’t engage the reader much. Of course he’s frustrated.
So you need to go deeper. Not all of us would be frustrated for the same reason. And the reader is not reading this book to see what an average person would do, but to see what this exact person, with her constellation of nature vs. nurture, amped by her special circumstances would do. The reader is assuming there is a reason (story-relevant reason) why the writer put him in the traffic jam. And that reason surely isn’t to show us he’s frustrated, because, Duh! So here, the writer needs to go deeper. They need to write why this person is frustrated.
For instance, he might be frustrated because he’s late for an important meeting. That’s not the same as being frustrated because he’s an Olive-Kitteridge or Man-Called-Ove kind of a person.
Now that the writer has established what he feels (surface-level emotion), and why he feels it (deeper-level emotion), the writer could go even deeper by showing an unexpected emotion, but (and here’s the trick) still an emotion that makes perfect sense.
This—third-level emotions—is where Cara Wall excels.
Example: In this scene, following her parents’ accident, Lily is with her uncle Richard, in front of her house. Surface level emotions are clear: shock, sadness, pain.
Uncle Richard was a big man, tall, who wore blue-and-white-striped shirts and kept his grey hair in the same buzz cut he had been given in the army. His stillness was as big as his being, and even then, tangled in shock, Lily realized this was why he was sitting with her, rather than anyone else. Not just because he had been first to the hospital, or because he was the oldest man and only lawyer in the family. But because he was solid enough to feel real while everything else in the world dissolved. (second-level emotion: she is comforted by his presence, but also feels manipulated by it).
“Want to go in?” Richard said, finally.
Lily shook her head. — (emotions: It’s too painful to go inside, maybe even scary, and somehow definite).
”All right. It will be here tomorrow.” He looked over at her. “It’s your house,” he said. “It will be until yoy don’t want it to be. We’ll leave it unlocked, and we won’t go in it much without you.
Lily looked at him.
“So you can come here for privacy,” he said. “But you’ll live with us.”
It was then that Lily started to cry, because the offer to live in someone else’s house made her feel completely and utterly alone.“ — (the unexpected emotion: Uncle Richard has just offered a perfect set-up. She keeps her house, goes there whenever she wants some privacy, but she is offered a home, a place where she won’t be lonely. Yet that is exactly what makes her feel lonely the most—the fact that life goes on, and her parents don’t).
This is more like five layers of emotions, not three.
Here’s another example, from when James’s mother invites Nan for dinner the first time. We can infer the surface-level emotion—what anyone would feel in this situation (excitement, anticipation, nervousness):
On the appointed Saturday, his mother nagged him and his brothers to move the furniture, handed his sisters brooms. Together, they cleaned the entire house from top to bottom. James tried to tell her Nan wouldn’t go in the bedrooms, wouldn’t look behind cupboard doors. — (emotion: frustration, annoyance, but with a hint of gratitude.).
“Yeah, Ma,” his brother Alfie said, “She’s already met Jamie—she’s not expecting a palace.”
James’s mother flicked him on the shoulder with her dishtowel. “I want this house to look respectable,” she said. — (mark here that James could feel anything in return: from gratitude for his mother trying so hard to shame for where he comes from.)
James wanted her to get up off her knees and stop scrubbing the floor with a wooden brush, to get out of her housecoat and slippers, because he didn’t want to see how much work had to be done to make him respectable enough for Nan. —(third-level emotion: he is frustrated because he is ashamed.) It was not much and he was afraid. — (even deeper-emotion: he is not only frustrated because he’s ashamed, he’s also afraid that the circumstances of his upbringing will be the dealbreaker for the girl he loves.)
WRITING ABOUT FAITH — WITHOUT PREACHING
One of the things we all agreed was done extremely well was the way Cara Wall handled the issues of faith. This whole book is an exploration of what faith means, or rather—what it means to different people; how it appears in people’s lives, how it changes and evolves over time, how it comes into people’s lives and how it disappears. What tests it, and what holds it steady.
This was, no doubt, a book about God and faith more than anything else; a thorough examination of what it is, and how it can affect people.
Just like Wall’s characters, our members come from all different sides of this spectrum. There are agnostics among us, non-practicing believers, and ‘Bible-belt’ people. There are people who are deeply committed and living their faith, and there are those who lead very secular lives. There are Christians, Protestants, Jews… and yet, none of us felt irritated by this book, or forced in any way to change our beliefs.
How is this possible?
As one of our members said, Christianity in books is usually presented in one of two ways: from the side of believers, we have Christian literature glorifying faith in often saccharine ways. From the side of non-believers, Christianity is often thoroughly demonized. In other words, the faith is shown in either black or white: either as utterly positive or completely negative.
All these books share one thing—they’re telling you what to think about faith.
And it’s not just a matter of writing about faith—it’s also a matter of writing about any subject that has a tendency to be polarizing; any controversial topic.
Sometimes, it’s great to make a point about some things. But sometimes, it’s even more resonant to explore different sides of an issue without implying which angle is the ‘right’ one (according to the author).
And yet—we’re writers, we live to uplift our voices. We write precisely because we have something to say. So it is extremely difficult for us to withhold our worldviews.
So, how did the author manage to find a middle ground? How did she manage to explore the topic of religion so deeply and thoughtfully, without it feeling like preaching either pro or contra?
I believe (pun not intended!) it’s because she didn’t force her opinions on us. She showed us four characters, each of them grappling with matters of faith in different ways: there were absolute believers (Nan), converted believers (Charles), reluctant believers (James) and non-believers (Lily)—just like there are among our members. And the author didn’t choose one of their beliefs as the right one, as opposed to others.
She didn’t favor any of their opinions—she explored them all equally, with the same studiousness and an enviable level of objectivity.
If the author herself has a preference, we have not picked up on what that preference is.
Which teaches us a valuable lesson; one so needed and powerful, given the deeply polarized state of the world today. We don’t have to agree on everything, not even the topics we feel most passionately about—such as our deepest beliefs. But we can still respect each other’s opinions, and allow each other the space to think differently.
Definitely a much-needed insight to end the recap with! And also, a reminder of why I love this book club so much, with all its different members and their dissenting opinions, that somehow end up turning into something harmonious after all!
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