The Beauty of Ordinary Things deals with some very big and painful events—Vietnam war atrocities, abortion in the era before it was legal, post-traumatic stress disorder. But you won't find any noisy Hollywood-style scenes of explosions or shootings or even barroom brawls here. The traumatic events all happen off stage, in the characters' past, and the most transgressive event that takes place in real time in the book is a single illicit, immediately regretted kiss.
That's the unique strength of this book. It looks beneath the noise, headlines and stereotypes into the quiet, ongoing ways that people deal with pain and doubt. The characters in this book need healing and help, but don't necessarily know how to ask for it. Isn't that all of us, at one time or another?
Harriet Scott Chessman writes with a beautiful simplicity and purity. The silences speak almost as much as the words. Reading The Beauty of Ordinary Things is almost a meditative experience. (Except for the part of you that wants to know what happens to the characters!). Boy, would I like to write like this.
One interesting note: This is a book that takes Catholicism seriously. Irish-American Catholicism, in fact! But it is not the Catholicism of TV drama—no child-molesting priests, no Vatican conspiracies, no alcoholic fathers stumbling home from the bar. It's got a young nun wrestling with doubts over her vocation. It's got a lapsed Catholic veteran who longs for the gentle priest-confessor of his childhood, who "smelled like cherry tobacco and who listened calmly and then told me just as calmly what to do for penance ... much more forgiving than my actual father." It presents an intimate, personal view of faith and doubt that will strike a chord with secular readers (like me) as well as religious ones.
This is a short book, about 140 pages. The downside of the length is that when I was done, I wished I could stay with the main character Benny for longer. The upside is that I went back and immediately read it a second time—something I would not have done with a 300-page work.
This reader review by Ilana DeBare, author of
Where Girls Come First: The
Rise, Fall and Surprising Revival of Girls' Schools, and former reporter
for The San Francisco Chronicle.
