The Enlightening Power of Novels in Suffering by Lara dEntremont
I picked up The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey one evening after the kids were in bed. I had sprinted through a handful of nonfiction books in the previous weeks, and I was looking forward to jumping into a novel again.
In the pages, I met Mabel: a middle-aged woman isolated in Alaska’s frigid winter suffering under the chokehold of melancholy and childlessness. She and her husband had fled to Alaska to start a new life together, all on their own. Years of strained relationships with family and friends made her feel like an outsider, especially after many years of barrenness and a stillborn. She grew tired of the whispers and looks and wanted to get away from it. She thought perhaps she and her husband would likewise grow closer through the isolation, but instead, they had only grown further apart.
When her husband accepts the invitation from the Bensons to get their help on the farm, Mabel becomes flustered and irritated. She wanted to keep her distance from everybody so that nobody could judge her or whisper about her inadequacies.
As I poured over her story, I found myself perturbed by Mabel. Don’t you realize that a big part of your sadness is from your lack of community? I thought. Community isn’t easy, but we can’t survive without them.
As soon as the words strung themselves together in my mind, I caught myself.
I am Mabel.
Depression had hung over my head for weeks at that point. I felt as if I were moving through a gray cloud and everything around me had become muted by its mist. Thoughts got lost in the cloud and couldn’t be found, so I sat before my computer each day simply staring at the blinking cursor. My children wanted me to play, but my energy dissipated into a scant dusting over my body and quickly blew away when they cried. I wept—at the food being spilled and children throwing tantrums and laundry piled on my bed. I feared this was what my life would look like forever.
Yet as I read Mabel’s story, I saw myself, and somehow her remedy when I couldn’t see it for myself.
In therapy in the following days, my counselor came to the same conclusion I had wondered about without me even telling her. “You need community, Lara,” she said. “You are built for it.”
In talking with her and reflecting on Mabel’s story, the fog cleared enough for me to see myself in her: I had pushed the community away because crippling anxiety made it feel far too dangerous to draw near to others or invite them into my home. In doing so, I made room for a great darkness to fall over my life. As Kelly Kapic writes in Embodied Hope, “The flame of the individual faith weakens when it is alone, but in the true community the fire of faith illumines the night,” (p. 127). I needed others to help keep the flame of my faith burning.
As Mabel puts her hands into the tilled earth to plant potatoes for her husband who has badly injured himself, she finds herself reflecting through tears on another hardship in her life: Her stillborn baby. Yet she again rallies herself together, blots her tears, and reminds herself, “she had survived then, hadn’t she? Even when she had wanted to lie down in the night orchard and sink into a grave of her own, she had stumbled home in the dark, washed in the basin, and in the morning cooked breakfast for Jack,” (p. 188).
While Mabel didn’t have her husband in those moments in her life, she had another family helping her limp along. Two of the Bensons, Esther and her youngest son Garrett, stay on Mabel’s farm to help her get the crop planted and care for her husband. When she lifted her tear-streaked, dirt-covered face, Garrett awkwardly offered his sleeve to wipe her tears as Esther took Jack for a walk to strengthen his muscles. Though she feels as if she’s rallying herself, she has a scaffolding of others likewise holding her up.
In the last pages of the book, Mabel and her husband are thrown into another season of grief. As she sobs silently, she “knew that she would survive because she had once before,” (p. 376). She looks over to her husband, who she expects to walk away from her pain as he had every single time in the past, yet he sits down beside her and they cry together. Her and her husband grieve and persevere together.
With tears in my own eyes, I saw my own desperate need: To not just rally myself but take hold of those around me. I wanted to pick myself up and press through, to pride myself on having done it all on my own, yet my weak limbs couldn’t hold me up anymore. As I collapsed, I reached out for family and friends, who took hold of me in every way—in comforting my heart and providing for my physical needs.
My husband came home from work to hold the screaming child. My in-laws built a play area outside to put my three toddlers in so I could more easily take them outside on my own. My friends helped me write a list of activities to do with my children to keep them from screaming so much. Along with that, each of them comforted me and assured me I was not weak for reaching out.
As my local community drew around me, I was reminded of a greater reality: Christ brought me through my own dark fogs over the years, and he would do it again. He brought me through the grief of two miscarriages, severe post-partum depression, my grade 12 year in which all my friends abandoned me, and more. While Mabel took courage in herself, I was reminded of the courage found in my Savior, who promises to never lose me (John 6:37–39; Heb. 13:5).
At the beginning of the book, Mabel contemplates suicide. She decides to walk across the thin ice and let nature sweep her away. Yet she travels across the ice both ways and never does the ice shatter and the river take her under. As she crosses to land again, Mabel looks up at the horizon, and the author describes these thoughts: “It was beautiful, Mabel knew, but it was a beauty that ripped you open and scoured you clean so that you were left helpless and exposed if you lived at all,” (p. 9).
Like nature, I’ve discovered that beautifully crafted novels have this same power. As the author writes the very words we couldn’t articulate or were too afraid to even piece together in the secrecy of our minds, we cry and feel seen.
As they describe the wonder of nature and the wildness of the wilderness, we feel awed and reverent. As they spin a tale of forgiveness and reconciliation or good defeating evil, hope feels much more tangible. We are torn open, but even as we are, we are reminded that another soul on this planet knows the depth of this pain and yet can see hope within it.
As believers, I believe even secular stories can stir our faith. We know that all truth, beauty, and goodness first come from God and is given to his creation as a gift of common grace. As we feel and see these realities within a novel, our eyes are drawn upward in worship to him, even amidst our suffering. He granted us the novel to enlighten our darkness and crafted the beautiful words to cause our hearts to stop and feel something again. As Sarah Clarkson articulated with such loveliness in This Beautiful Truth:
For beauty comes to us all in moments that unravel our cynical surety as our hearts seem to come apart at the touch of some odd slant of light on an evening walk. Or we hear the strained thread of some beloved old music that seems to break the spell of doubt. We read a novel, a story of someone who forgave or fought or hoped, and we feel something stir to life as precious, as fragile, as urgent as a newborn child within us. We are encountered by beauty, and suddenly the story of our grief seems to be the passing thing—that faint ghostly illusion that one day will melt the beams of great, inexorable love. My deep belief is that beauty has a story to tell, one that was meant by God to speak to us of his character and reality, meant to grip our failing hands with hope. (pp. 22–23)
Good novels take us on a journey—much unlike ours yet also much like it. They grip us with beauty, tell us of the truth, and give us hope that goodness is there too. This is the enlightening power of storytelling. Stories take the same fibers of suffering that entwine around our lives yet weave them away from us at a distance so we can see the greater tapestry they are a part of. We see all the individual colors and where one thread knots into the other, whereas with our own suffering we become too familiar with our own aches, longings, and sadness to see where it began.
As we crawl through the dank valley of black rocks, heavy mist, and icy winds, we can’t see beyond it. We look up, but the clouds swarm together so we can’t see the sunlight; we look forward, yet we can’t see the end; we look backward, and all we can see is the path we’ve been on. Yet novels beckon us to climb up the steep mountainside of someone else’s valley, and once we reach the top, they lift their arms out and show it to us from the peaks. Suddenly, it becomes easier to understand our trials a little bit better.
This is what The Snow Child did for me, and maybe another novel can do the same for you. It takes being willing to search for the beauty and the knowledge of God’s greater story to discern the truth, beauty, and goodness he’s given to another by his common grace. They cast light into our darkness and fog so we can see a bit better and take hold of the hope that is in front of us.
Lara d’Entremont is a wife and mom to three from Nova Scotia, Canada. Lara is a writer and learner at heart—always trying to find time to scribble down some words or read a book. Her desire in writing is to help women develop solid theology they can put into practice—in the mundane, the rugged terrain, and joyful moments. You can find more of her writing at laradentremont.com.