Maybe you’ve heard about Niall Williams. There’s a movie adaptation of his novel Four Letters of Love. Another novel, This is Happiness, was "The Late Show Book Club" pick for November, chosen by Stephen Colbert and his wife, Evie.
But Williams' most recent novel is Time of the Child. It’s set in the same Irish village of Faha readers were introduced to in This is Happiness.
It’s 1962. For a small Irish village, modernity is still always catching up in Faha. There are motor cars and wireless radios and telephones, but the town is small. Life moves slowly but word travels fast—about most things.
Dr. Jack Troy knows this because he is the town’s doctor. He knows everyone — and we come to know specific idiosyncrasies of everyone he treats in his practice — and everyone adjacent to those patients.
Troy is a buttoned up, quiet, private man. His wife died years before we enter this story.
We learn that after his wife died, he loved someone else — a woman name Annie who was ten years his senior. But he could never bring himself to tell her his feelings. It was all too much for him at his age —and at hers.
The mystery of why we write our destinies a certain way and fail to act is something that moves through this novel. But when we reach the end of the story, we are left with the idea that things have gone precisely as they should.
As adults, two of Troy’s three daughters have moved away from Faha. Only Ronnie — his oldest daughter — lives with him. She is a writer. She writes down everything. She also works hard to keep the home for her father and help him with his practice as much as she can.
He worries that his daughter will never find love —or leave the home.
“Why does no one love my daughter?” he asks himself.
She is as enigmatic and private as her father is. She once loved a boy named Noel Crowe who moved away from the village. However, nothing could break the bond she has to the life she knows in Faha.
We meet a lot of other folks in Faha, including a 12-year-old boy named Jude Quinlan. He is a self-possessed young man on that long, thin rope between boyhood and manhood. His father drinks heavily. His mother is quite anxious.
In one heartrending scene, Jude happens upon a van where people are unloading toys — prizes for a Christmas fair. He agrees to help with the unloading.
He was a boy who didn’t have much when he was growing up. For him, “carrying everything from the van ... was as close as he would get to handling any of these things.” And yet we learn that he “had no resentment or bitterness.”
The other thing, the one that only occurred to him years later when he would recall what happened that day,” writes Williams, “was that what he was carrying out of the van that December morning was his childhood.”
These are the sorts of lines that we encounter when we read Williams. They’re not overly sentimental. But they describe the sorts of truths about ourselves we just know in some vague way — and a way that is too scary to hold up to the light and examine too closely.
And the night that this happened was auspicious for other reasons, too. Jude is about to find something else out there that will change the lives of the doctor and Ronnie and even his own.
A baby. OK. It’s a baby. Jude finds a baby. At Christmas. And again, it’s not overtly sentimental.
I mean, caring for a baby is no easy thing any time— let alone in the village of Faha in 1962.
This isn’t even the most dramatic thing that happens in the town during that Christmas season.
People take ill — some gravely. People have only meager belongings. Rain falls intermittently and there is a sting of cold you’ll feel while you read that isn’t altogether unpleasant.
If you are someone who writes in your books, get that pencil ready.
The interior monologue of any character here could cause swoons: “Sorrow is the longest thing in life, and going back, the preferred way of an old mind.”
Elsewhere, this: “The morning after intimacy is its own country. You go softly there. That country has its own code, its own custom and language, which is more tender, shyer and kinder than the one that applies when people are in ordinary daylight.”
And finally highlight this: “The word love, said aloud, had the character of a swung thurible, the frankincense of it everywhere.”
This is from a section in the book where we could have easily been talking about forgiveness.
Niall Williams’ novels are not the stuff of fairy tales with happy endings. His characters are simply people who have come to a point in the road where they have to give some thought, not to what comes next, but to what has already transpired — and to accept it and own it and keep moving forward with the hope that the blue smoke of that incense will reach us the rest of the way.
Niall Williams is the author of Time of the Child.
