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Author Topic: Elizabeth Strout, ABIDE WITH ME (2019)  (Read 75 times)

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Offline agate

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Elizabeth Strout, ABIDE WITH ME (2019)
« on: March 25, 2021, 08:36:58 pm »
Elizabeth Strout, ABIDE WITH ME (2019)



It is rare to come across a book about a member of the clergy that does not disclose the author's religious stance, but this may be one such book. At its center is a Congregationalist minister, Tyler Caskey, who has had the bad luck to have married an enchanting woman who was perhaps too headstrong and opinionated to have been the best choice for the spiritual leader of a small Maine town's flock. Then the wife died, leaving him with two young daughters. The younger child is chiefly in the care of Tyler's mother, and Catherine, who is 5, is beginning to present some worrisome problems in her kindergarten.

Or at least they are worrisome problems in the eyes of the kindergarten teacher, the school psychologist, and the school principal--the three of whom summon Tyler to a conference at one point, and the scene is one of the best in the book in its gentle parody of a particular type of pseudo-psychology that was being promoted at the time (1959).

The character of Tyler is a bit of a puzzle. In many ways he is the quintessential Protestant clergyman--perhaps too trusting and naive for this world, overly scholarly, but well schooled apparently in the art  of saying tactful, soothing things to the people he deals with.

I wonder at the dénouement, though. After Tyler has stood in front of his congregation, unable to deliver his sermon and with tears streaming down his face, we are asked to believe that he will find comfort in the response and care shown for him by some of the church members and be reabsorbed into their community, just after a vicious campaign of gossip has been waged against him.

I'm not sure that the author has made this remarkable turn-around entirely believable, but the story is well told and absorbing, and the dialogue between Tyler and Catherine sometimes poses difficult questions about the God whose Word Tyler is preaching.
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