If you are a cynical sort (and who isn’t, these days?), the concept of a novel set around Christmas may fill you with a particular squeamishness and fear of holiday cringe. Predictable festive narratives have been fed to many of us throughout our lives, so it’s only fair to feel some wariness.
Yet, despite their treacly reputation, there’s the possibility that these tales might just turn you into a slobbering lump of humanity, suddenly possessed by all the best of the so-called Christmas spirit, ready to do — and be — just a little bit better.
Take these two new novels, over which, I’m not ashamed to admit, I wept my share of cathartic tears.
TIME OF THE CHILD
By Niall Williams
TIME OF THE CHILD (Bloomsbury, 287 pp., $28.99), by the Irish author Niall Williams, offers a moving father-daughter story. It’s the lead-up to Christmas in 1962 in the fictional Irish town of Faha, where it rains almost constantly (and where Williams has set two other novels). Dr. Jack Troy and his eldest daughter, Ronnie, are spending their days much as they have since the death of Jack’s wife and Ronnie’s mother, Regina: They go to Mass; they go to dinner; Ronnie assists Jack with the upkeep of his household and his surgery. But they are also holding core truths from each other — in Jack’s case, his unspoken feelings for the now-dead Annie Mooney, with whom he might have found a second chance at love if only he’d acted soon enough; for Ronnie, a future writer, it’s an interior world shared only with her notebook.
Since Annie’s death, Jack has become more and more melancholy, and at a pivotal Mass on the first Sunday of Advent, he realizes “he had lost his love of the world.” It’s “a desperate diagnosis for a father” and a doctor. He continues his work in the small town, but with a sense of obligation, not joy.
Then, on the night of the Christmas Fair, he revives an unbreathing baby who’s been found outside the church wall. Ronnie becomes deeply connected to the child, experiencing newfound happiness in the role of mother, and Jack, in love with both the child and his daughter’s jubilation, begins to plot his own ill-advised scheme to allow Ronnie to keep the baby.
The failure of humans to communicate honestly and clearly, despite loving each other intensely is a well-trodden plot device, but it feels revelatory in Williams’s skilled hands. He not only tells the story of a doctor, his daughter and a foundling who changes them, but he also develops the whole of Faha around them, each character in the small town a living, breathing being with quirks, desires and their own human import. (The boy who finds the baby, Jude Quinlan, deserves his own novel.)
Williams also plays with story itself, skipping forward in time to reveal future tidbits about certain characters, then falling back into the now of the novel, a narrative approach that lends the world and its characters a feeling of perpetual existence.
Perhaps the most heartwarming thing of all is how the reader is welcomed into Faha’s world. When I cried, it was because, with his careful and compassionate depictions of people, place and time, Williams reminds us of the humanity in all, of the vitality of a community that comes together, and of the power in revealing our vulnerabilities to others.
BRIGHTLY SHINING
By Ingvild Rishoi; translated by Caroline Waight
BRIGHTLY SHINING (Grove, 182 pp., $20), by Ingvild Rishoi, translated from the Norwegian by Caroline Waight, is an emotionally packed little gem that’s been a best seller in Europe for the past few years and is now finally coming to the United States.
In the Oslo neighborhood of Toyen, two sisters live on the brink of chaos, their world precarious because of their alcoholic father and his constant troubles. The story, which begins at the start of the Christmas season, is told from the perspective of 10-year-old Ronja. She’s tough in the way of children who grow up parenting themselves, but even through her grit, she remains ever hopeful, especially compared with her 16-year-old sister, Melissa.
At the start of the novel, Ronja is alerted by a friendly caretaker to a job listing for a Christmas tree seller. If her dad is hired, it would be a lifeline for their family. The income would mean bills could be paid, the girls could feel proud of their father and maybe the family could even have a real Christmas, complete with a decorated tree. Melissa doubts their dad, who is their solo parent, can do it, what with the pull of the neighborhood bars and his crowd of drinking, peer-pressuring friends. “I don’t want to dream like that,” Melissa says.
But their father surprises everyone and gets the job. He wakes early and comes home straight after work; they eat spaghetti every night together as a family. Alas, the holiday honeymoon must end. When their father starts drinking again, Melissa takes over his job so the sisters can still have something of a holiday. Lonely at home, Ronja starts to hang out at the tree stand, too.
If, from that, you expect a happy holiday fable of smoothly overcoming the odds, you’d be wrong. In Rishoi’s world, consumerism and corporate villainy are acknowledged and even briefly turned on their heads, but, like alcoholism, they prove larger obstacles than any one well-meaning person can fight alone. As the story unfolds, your heart aches for the girls — but also for all of us in this world we’ve built, where money too often means more than kindness.
And yet, there are small joys to be found, and a dose of Christmas magic is delivered too, with an assist from the “finest Fjord spruce in Enebakk” and a devastating storm that sweeps through the town. Is this heavenly enchantment, or simply people coming together and doing their best, despite the odds, and without any guarantee of success? Or maybe these are one and the same, the true magic being our ability to keep hoping, keep caring, in light of everything else. As the caretaker tells Ronja, “Miracles do happen. Sometimes there just isn’t any other way out, and that’s when a miracle happens.”
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