William Trevor's "FAITH"

William Trevor’s “FAITH,” is the type of short story I imagine most New Yorker cosmopolitans would read for a paragraph, yawn, and skip in favor of Anthony Lane’s witty movie reviews. Myself, first read, I had to fight through sleep/boredom to get from one word to the next. The tone is dry, the language very formal, and the character’s emotions subdued; an interesting contrast to the manic, highly subjective, slapstick nature of Saunders’ story last week. In “Faith”, even striking character revelations are couched in language most readers under eighty find off-putting: “Conversation with Hester was often like that; Bartholomew was used to it, Details withheld or frugally proffered made the most of what was imparted, as if to imbue communication with greater interest.” This detail exposes an important aspect of Hester’s nature – her inclination towards concealment foreshadows and deepens the reader’s later understanding of her religious devotion – yet the narrator’s language, more than illuminating this aspect of her personality, obstructs the reader’s experience of the character.

To be fair, this language is absolutely consistent throughout the story and does match the consciousness of the two main characters: the adult siblings, Hester and Bartholomew. For example, the story opens with a description of Hester: “she was a difficult woman, had been a willful child, a moody, recalcitrant girl,” which, sets the story’s tone, while also juxtaposing starkly with the description given of her younger brother, Bartholomew’s “delicate good looks – fair hair, blue eyes […] lithe ranginess.” Essentially this story is an asexual love affair between these two siblings in the face of “the unexpected death of their mother, [and] their father’s [death] a mercilessly slow one.” Contemporary literature is filled with trivially unhappy married couples, and Trevor’s story of these two very different siblings is refreshing (less like a glass of water and more like a long jog) in the nuance of understanding shown between this brother and sister.

Take in consideration a moment of tension in their relationship: Hester, unemployed after nursing their parkinsoned father to his death, has found a small, desolate church soon in need of a priest and wants an uncertain Bartholomew to take this position. This leads to a quiet moment where the narrator describes that “since their childhood [Bartholomew] had resented, without saying it, her interference, her indignation on his behalf, her possessiveness.” Yet, instead of breaking into a pouty temper tantrum, he has “forgiven what she couldn’t help, doing so as natural in him as scorn and prickliness were in her.”

Same with Hester. During a road trip to visit Oscary, the church that later becomes their home, Hester reacts to Bartholomew offering money to the mechanic that tweaks a small trouble with their car by saying, “it was as it always had been, she was thinking, Bartholomew offering the man money when it hadn’t been asked for. The soft touch of the family, their father had called him, and used that same expression, laughing a bit, when Bartholomew first wanted to become a clergyman.” This softness clearly annoys the “brusque” Hester, but she doesn’t bicker with her brother, instead, concluding, “Bartholomew’s vocation suited him; it completed him, and protected him, as Hester tried to do in other ways.” This is just a glimpse of the authentic, developed relationship between these two characters, and their dynamic, so mature, so filled with unspoken dissatisfaction but perceptive empathy, is the most successful aspect of the story.

The plot, not as successful as the sibling relationship, nor as parched as the language, is about faith, abandoned and withheld. Bartholomew’s decision to take the priest position at Oscary doesn’t increase his faith but coincides with the death of it. It starts as doubt: “the clatter of the shoe on the linoleum when it slipped from his grasp brought more. Sensations of confusion lingered while he sat there, then were gone.” Bartholomew’s epiphany, therefore, starts because of an immediate awareness of the physical world, and becomes what he describes as “an eruption from his half-stifled impatience with the embroidery and frills that dressed the simplicity of truth, with the invasive, sentimental stories, that somehow made faith easier, and the hymns he hated.” Here, the impetuous for Bartholomew’s abandonment of the Catholicism is the dressed up, rituals, and showy part of the religion, the part opposite of the simplicity of his human sensations. (Nice foreshadowing of pending trouble at Oscary is shown with the car’s small tink during the sibling’s first ride to visit the church.)

Whereas Oscary ignites doubt in the brother, it seems to embolden a religious devotion in Hester, not previously shown in the story. The first mention of her religious piety comes casually in the middle of the story: “Belief was part of Hester, taken for granted, a sturdy certainty that brought her confidence.” We see this casualness become more like devotion through Hester’s physical interaction with the church. The narrator says of her, “The church was hers, she considered, for she had found it and brought life to it, making more of it than a mere outward and visible sign.”

Then, just as casually as Bartholomew’s spiritual doubt is placed in the story, Hester’s impending death is told to the reader. These twists could have given the story a despondent tone, and to some extent Bartholomew’s crisis does, but Hester takes a different note. She says, “How tidy it is![…] Living for your while, then not being there anymore. How well arranged!” (That’s one way of looking at it.) And while, Bartholomew’s continues “his deception of her and of his scanty congregations would one day assault his conscience,” the narrator notes “the intensity of [Hester’s] faith, the sureness of her trust, was unaffected by the pain suffered.” The brother loses his religion, the sister loses her life, and the story ends with a beautiful moment of Bartholomew, in his dead sister’s bed, and feels “the mercy of her tranquility seeming to be a miracle that was real, as it had been in the instant of death. Heaven enough, and more than angels.”