[Image: “Study for Frieze of Prophets,” 1890-92, John Singer Sargent, courtesy National Gallery of Art (Corcoran Collection, gift of Miss Emily Sargent and Mrs. Francis Ormond, sisters of the artist). Public domain.]
This is a second swing at a first impression of Michael O’Brien’s most recent fictional work, a work that I am calling a meditation rather than a novel: By the Rivers of Babylon. If the last discussion I started was too long and messy to engage, or even to read: well, that’s because I ought never to have posted it in such a wild unpruned state. Draft and learn.
By the Rivers of Babylon is important to a discussion of contemplative realism because it seemingly seeks to instantiate several of contemplative realism’s key ideals: a belief in the existence of grace and of good people; reverence for the human and quotidian; presencing the natural and the supernatural, the horizontal and the vertical, with a lively feeling for each phenomenon’s proper weight. Yet in my opinion, there are places where the book falls short of the mark. The work’s spiritual worth is undoubtedly high. Yet there are places, and more than a few, where its artistic craft fails to live up to its spiritual worth.
Now, many believing readers are in a habit of mind wherein they would say: Well, what more do you want than spiritual worth? The rough-hewn edges of a pure truth only add to the value of that truth. I respond that this depends on the range of human and divine values being sought in the given case. It’s true that the virtue of art does not prescribe formulaic rules. There are times when the choice to leave a work’s human limitations on display, or even to foreground them, is right: times when that rough, sketchy surfacing may even serve the work’s deepest purpose.
Other times, you are looking for more polish. Finesse. Je ne sais quoi. Getting the balance between rough and smooth right is key to making a work … work, for the receiver.
It’s impossible to illustrate where I’m coming from in this particular case without getting more personal, and more specific, than I’d especially prefer to. And as I said before, this personal element of my response is why I’m trying to work my thoughts out in this low-pressure space rather than seeking to publish a more traditional review: “Time yet for a hundred indecisions / and for a hundred visions and revisions,” and all that. So here we go.
I am a cradle Catholic who has stayed Catholic by choice rather than by default. There was a time, though, when I was absolutely not at all sure that the wholeness of vision represented by Catholic teaching was even remotely true to a blurry, indeterminate, but not the less heavy burden I carried around, which I then called “the real world.” I could see where any number of specific teachings followed the contours of observable reality to exactness. But somehow I was still losing the forest for the trees.
I thought, to the extent I was thinking very clearly, something like this: Well, yes, I grant you [the whole of the 1992 Catechism], but then what if what we’re looking at when we look at so much doctrine is just the roots or grubby underside of a larger picture? What if there’s, I don’t know, an inversion that could take place here, a Copernican revolution, where we could come around to the other side of the world and see an equally natural yet still lovely wholeness but from a different and brighter angle: a world filled with light and free of all these tangled complications, which right now seem so byzantine and so unnecessary? Why not come out from underground and just bask in the warmth and let things grow?
[Picture the thinker of these thoughts in a grey-and-white school uniform with saddle shoes and a ponytail, standing in the midst of library stacks next to picture windows that reveal an indifferently maintained football field of half mud and half dead grass, and you’ll have the tone of the scene about right. In one hand she’s got a copy of Alice McDermott’s Charming Billy and, in the other, O’Brien’s Strangers and Sojourners.]
The trouble with some kinds of intense light is that they can burn you just as easily as they can warm. Ignoring the complexities, the subtle understructures of things, in favor of a false simplicity will just involve you in further complications—which you’ll be that much less equipped to deal with if you don’t want to see what they consist in. This is the flavor of intellectual and spiritual risk I was running around the time I first came across examples of O’Brien’s fiction. I needed examples of how a person might look closely, unflinchingly, at the complex existential mess of human experience—in full knowledge of how, and why, a choice to stay simple and whole as you walk through that mess will result in accusations that you are no longer able to see what is around you with any clarity—and take its full measure, and acknowledge its complexities, and choose to stay simple and whole anyway.
O’Brien’s fiction provided me with some gentle examples of characters who could do this, at a tender stage of development when tougher ones might have discouraged me totally. His willingness to let some things stay rough—in the sense of complicated—where some works more committed to aestheticism might smooth those same things over, his unironic commitment to paint shadows shadowy and lights light, played a significant role in helping me learn to do the same.
I lay all this out to make it plain as air that, when I critique a passage in O’Brien’s work, I am not doing so from a place of ingratitude or resistance to his project but, rather, from sympathy and a place of desire to see it succeed.
That said, By the Rivers of Babylon did not entirely succeed for me as a convincing rendering of a well-known scriptural story’s underground roots. Here’s an all too brisk summary of where aspects of the story stopped working for me:
When the young prophet-to-be Ezekiel begins to move from child to adult, the whole psychological substrate of that transformation is only patchily accessible to us as readers, even though Ezekiel is narrating his own life to us in the first person. We are left to guess at matters that, as a human individual (even of the ancient world), Ezekiel is in a position to be aware of, however broadly. As any character matures, we might reasonably expect to see errors and lapses followed by course corrections and reversals, where Ezekiel’s virtues seem to spring fully formed out of nowhere. He does face some temptations, but apparently without sin. This counts as a superhuman surprise of character. It strains the reader’s credulity. If it is meant to be, as I don’t discount it may be, the illustration of an extraordinary grace, that grace’s granting and acceptance is not sufficiently accounted for or rendered believable. I don’t mean it would be preferable to have such extraordinary grace narrated in the superficial terms of the youth-group testimony (“I was STRUCK all of a SUDDEN with the REAL TRUTH” — eesh, I mean, we all go through it, and the shallow language can coexist with some deep truths: but hopefully the shallow expressions are not the ones we would choose to immortalize). But I do mean that it would make some sense for us to see Ezekiel struggle more and make breakthroughs—like people do—or, alternatively (or even additively), for us to be shown others’ surprise about his uncommon responses and reactions. I will say more about particular cases of this later.
The issue of whether this work is meant to be straightforward historical-scriptural fiction, or instead a historical roman a clef with discernible allusions to and deliberate implications about our own contemporary moment and milieu, is not sufficiently clarified—particularly as regards the internal religious politics of the imagined Jewish community (Catholicism?) and that community’s relationship with the then-dominant Babylonian culture (North America?). As a result I was frequently distracted by questions of whether I was meant to be receiving a given character, element, or situation straightforwardly as presenced, on the literal level—or whether I was, instead, meant to be mapping that character, element, or situation on to a variety of other possible historical and/or contemporary analogues. I still don’t really know the answer to this.
A sub-issue of the above point: Ezekiel as a character so rarely seems to feel angry, no matter what degree of injustice he is witnessing or enduring. He is surprisingly willing to be patient and humane with regard to his oppressors’ flaws. I have known a few people who can really do this; my admiration for their spiritual maturity is deep and nearly unbounded. But they also surprise me continually with this aspect of their character—which is why I think this surprising aspect of Ezekiel is underplayed in the drama, to say the least. It also feels at times a little too much like an object-lesson, like: Here is how to respond when you are wronged, and … well, how to respond when you are wronged is a difficult matter to prescribe for. All that can be said about anger as an acid that corrodes the vessel in which it is kept, and all that can be said about how ressentiment over what one cannot control can function as an excuse not to address one’s own weaknesses and flaws which one can to some degree control: all of this is undoubtedly true. Yet sometimes the correct response when you are wronged is, still, to resist being wronged: to refuse to permit the wrong to be repeated, or at least to attempt to refuse. And when we cannot achieve this, when our attempts fail or are thwarted, when we feel most powerless and helpless and outraged—at such times, most of us cannot just skip straight forward to the cosmic-wholeness-of-forgiveness part of the story. That the Ezekiel we are shown here could so easily do this made him feel a touch too exemplary for credibility. It also returns us to the question of whether we are really getting the full arc of Ezekiel’s human formation and development, or whether some aspects of that are being held back from us as though we were too delicate to endure them. It also speaks directly to an issue dear to my heart—which is whether the fiction writer can make improbably good characters, the kind we meet once or twice in a lifetime if ever, feel not only probable but at all possible to believe in, to a reader, on the page. I very much wanted Ezekiel to feel like a real person—as the first chapter blazons the work’s intention to show us, though at great distances of time and culture, his reality and that of his society. But without this outsized docility of his being first marked or noted as unusual, and then duly accounted for, it’s hard to experience this aspect of him as deeply, robustly real, existing in a real though distant world that corresponds meaningfully to the same experiental world of which we’re aware.
The work’s clear desire and attempt to honor and give presence to the quotidian life and dignity of its characters is in tension with the character of Ezekiel’s deep, almost painful awkwardness around most women—an awkwardness whose potential for humor is only glancingly acknowledged and which, as a result, infuses many scenes with a labored over-delicacy which distracts from their substance. Later scenes of romantic tenderness sometimes telegraph a slightly cringing quality (though I fully acknowledge it may be only this reader who is cringing). This is not in keeping with other love stories in O’Brien’s work; we might speculate that the awkwardness could have to do with a felt overstep in giving a biblical character a happy marriage, but if so, then that sub-level of development would have been better kept out of this work altogether. Scripture itself is not squeamish as regards happy marriages. Again, this is not a call for a level of physical detail that would be intrusive. But when a scene between adult romantic partners gives a feel of middle schoolers at a dance swaying hand-to-shoulder with balloons between their bodies, I can’t help but observe there may be such a thing as too much distance, as well as too little. Either write a love scene, or choose to suggest it by means of such well-noticed omissions (not double-gloved avoidances) as can be more effective than any direct rendering.
[Continuous with the above point, insert predictable 21st-c.-female-reader thing about how the story really contains no female characters who appear in their complete humanity, as people with thoughts and feelings and preferences which are not directly referred to the no doubt important men and children in their lives, or who have meaningful agency with regard to narrative direction. So commonplace and predictable that it’s scarcely worth developing, this point: but as above, I again observe that it is not true of Scripture itself and therefore need not be true of scriptural fiction either.]
Diction is occasionally pitched too low but, much more often, strung far too high. Where this occurs, it results in a prose line that feels occluded, dialogue that feels stilted, and narration that holds the reader’s hand and feeds the reader responses far too carefully. As a reader, I rather prefer to feel trusted.
Overall shape of dramatic arc, and this is maybe the most serious of the critiques I have to level: This story’s shape is necessarily predetermined by the originating text to which it is responsible. It’s also beholden to an apparent overarching sense that the character through whose organizing consciousness we receive the story can be allowed to do and say nothing whatsoever that could reflect ill on his later legacy. In other words, he can’t sin, removing a major possible driver of narrative development and potential reversal. And those characters who can sin can only do so boringly, in all the ways of which history is most groaningly full. Now, I have no qualms about depicting sin as boring. Most human sin is crashingly boring in its banality and predictability and barrenness. But when the nightmare of history is among very few possible drivers of forward action in a narrative, and when the end is well known from the beginning with little tension as regards how we get from A to Z, the whole story feels over-responsible and over-determined. There’s very little incursion of lightness of heart. There’s very little incursion of surprise or unpredictability. There’s essentially no real suspense. Sequence does not amount to narrative, and yet here sequence seems to be called upon to do narrative’s work.
Angels and ministers of grace defend us: that list is almost longer than my whole original draft. Oh well; let’s move on to what did work well and what might, for the right reader in the right season, redeem the book entirely. This is just the same thing I said before:
At its best, this fiction does evoke that feeling of continuous reality: that the humans of the past were as human as we are. And, by the principle of reciprocity, we are as human as they are—at least as capable, at least as liable, for both good and ill.
And “its best” is well represented by the late callback to an early passsage, which both presences and functions like an unexpected welling-up of a clean underground spring, toward the end of the book—yet which does not have its full effect unless the reader has first struggled through muck and dust and blood with Ezekiel. In a passage like that, we get the feeling of how and why having a pure mind might be a good thing, and that keeping or losing it might be a matter of real moment: The image its clear mirror can catch and receive and reflect back to you, at your moment of keenest need, might be the very thing that rescues you from total despondent bewilderment and restores you to life. If the mirror were besmirched, the image would be lost. But to the desperate character, the image is mercy, is life.
We need all such examples of narrated mercy we can get. By the Rivers of Babylon is such an example. It is a flawed fiction, as fiction; but it is one that takes us deep, sometimes despite itself. Its achievement, as I see it, may be in giving flesh to the thought that it is not necessarily any one single action we take, but rather who and what we choose to become in the supposedly irrelevant and often boring but never insignificant moments of life, that will transform us into the kinds of people who could take significant action if called.
Even so, perhaps the book is better thought of as an intriguing experiment: not long on technical gloss or polish, but still worth a believing reader’s time—as an aid to meditation, an extended act of Ignatian imaginative prayer, a unique and highly personal piece of devotional art in prose.
As I said, I don’t think By the Rivers of Babylon quite works as a novel, in the strictest technical sense. That doesn’t mean it lacks other values, even deeper values. Nor does it mean there aren’t readers who will find it nourishing. Are you one of them? Maybe consider picking up a copy, the better to decide for yourself.
"a belief in the existence of grace and of good people; reverence for the human and quotidian; presencing the natural and the supernatural, the horizontal and the vertical, with a lively feeling for each phenomenon’s proper weight."
Thank you! That is the clear and succinct definition of contemplative realism that I have been seeking (and pestering you for) for a long time. And if historical fiction is permitted within that definition, as it must be if By the Rivers of Babylon is a candidate, then I would claim that my own historical novels also fit, which is a reflection, I confess, that I find quite comforting.