DEARLY BELOVED SYNTHESIA FULL
Thankfully, each June, Charles and his mother packed the station wagon with canvas totes full of shorts and white sneakers and escaped to her parents’ square, damp summer house on Martha’s Vineyard, which was full of rag rugs, needlepoint pillows, and dogs. If he had seen Charles with so much as a paperback, he would have assigned Charles an essay to write or a problem to solve. He never took a comic home, because his father did not believe in leisure or in letting one’s mind run free, without purpose. Charles’s mother hid her romance magazines behind a bucket under the kitchen sink, and Charles fell on the comic books other boys brought to faculty parties, gorging himself as quickly and stealthily as his contemporaries emptied the cocktail glasses the grown-ups left behind. Inside it was stern, angular, and choked with books, each chosen deliberately: a collection of translation, biography, and historical analysis his father would one day bequeath to the library-a legacy of edification. Their shingled, sharp-roofed Victorian house was painted grey with brown shutters. At the dinner table, just before pushing back his chair to retire to his study, he often said, “ Obligations are the fuel of life, Charles.
DEARLY BELOVED SYNTHESIA CRACKED
“Societies fail,” his father told the freshmen year after year, “when men are rewarded for seeking pleasure instead of responsibility.” His tweed jackets rasped as he cracked notes on the blackboard his comments on papers, written in gaunt handwriting in deep blue ink, were direct and critical. His father was the head of the Classics Department at Harvard, where he taught seminars on the Romans and Greeks. On both his mother’s and his father’s side, Charles Barrett was descended from old Boston families. The Dearly Beloved is a gorgeous, wise, and provocative novel that is destined to become a classic. Against the backdrop of turbulent changes facing the city and the church’s congregation, Wall offers a poignant meditation on faith and reason, marriage and children, and the ways we find meaning in our lives. In The Dearly Beloved, Cara wall reminds us of “the power of the novel in its simplest, richest form: bearing intimate witness to human beings grappling with their faith and falling in love,” ( Entertainment Weekly, A-) as we follow these two couples through decades of love and friendship, jealousy and understanding, forgiveness and commitment. James’s escape from his desperate circumstances leads him to Nan and, despite his skepticism of hope in all its forms, her gentle, constant faith changes the course of his life. Nan grew up in Mississippi, the devout and beloved daughter of a minister and a debutante. James, the youngest son in a hardscrabble Chicago family, spent much of his youth angry at his alcoholic father and avoiding his anxious mother. How then, can he fall in love with Lily-fiercely intellectual, elegantly stern-after she tells him with certainty that she will never believe in God? And yet, how can he not? Their personal differences however, threaten to tear them apart.Ĭharles is destined to succeed his father as an esteemed professor of history at Harvard, until an unorthodox lecture about faith leads him to ministry.
They meet in Greenwich Village in 1963 when Charles and James are jointly hired to steward the historic Third Presbyterian Church through turbulent times.
This “moving portrait of love and friendship set against a backdrop of social change” ( The New York Times Book Review, Editor’s Choice) traces two married couples whose lives become entangled when the husbands become copastors at a famed New York city congregation in the 1960s.Ĭharles and Lily, James and Nan.
“This gentle, gorgeously written book may be one of my favorites ever.” -Jenna Bush Hager (A Today show “Read with Jenna” Book Club Selection!)
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