City under siege
Kate Walbert’s fourth novel, “The Sunken Cathedral,” makes a music that is dissonant, haunting, vibrant, moving and wise. It may be her best work yet, and may spark you to go find all her prior books.
The book opens as Simone and Marie, elderly New York widows, old friends who’ve raised their kids in close proximity — both women survived terrible beginnings in World War II Europe — decide to try to make art. They’ll join a painting class, under the pretext of completing Simone’s late husband’s painting of the Brooklyn Bridge. The idea is Simone’s, and behind it, her determination to help the two stay alive: to make meaning, perhaps momentarily mean something themselves — something more than “ridiculous old women in boiled wool coats and solid pumps ... hunched with age, their hair tinted a prettier, pinker gray.”
Simone and Marie are of a vintage when all bets are off, when one’s only as viable as whatever body parts still work. In a curious way, old age stops time and flattens the playing field: No one’s looking; anything goes. Simone intends, in what time remains her, to make hay, noise, whoopee. The School of Inspired Arts is housed in a rotting building slated for conversion to condominiums (New York, like all else, in upheaval). Its instructor, the perfectly named old boho and slightly unsavory Sid Morris (“his smile a line of stained teeth”), lets the women join his class. While “wandering among [his students] like a trainer among poised seals,” Sid homes in on Simone, who is always perfumed, coiffed and dismissing no options: “What have I got to lose?”
Quiet Marie has a son, Jules, a gay man who lives in California, and a tenant, Elizabeth, a yuppified wife who struggles to make sense of what’s asked of her — by society, by her loyal husband, Peter, by her pubescent son, Ben. Ben attends an earnest, progressive middle school that Walbert has terrific fun sending up. Near Marie’s Chelsea flat (real estate, like San Francisco’s, become stratospheric in value) dwells “the movie star,” a wealthy celebrity having trouble understanding who he is: “rather, who he was because he had been someone before and now it seems he is no one, or, rather, he is only who others believe him to be.” In strange ways, his identity crisis echoes those of his neighbors. (“Who We Are” is Ben’s current class project.)
Walbert packs everything into this series of braided narratives: deliciously human, memorable characters; the sensuous physical world (“a collection of wet smells, furtive cigarettes, coffee”); a tart omniscience (though points of view alternate) shepherding a brisk pace. Best, she infuses “The Sunken Cathedral” (an apt, eerie image) with a sense of time’s relentlessness (figuring often as threatening weather): how it pools and eddies, drowns or sweeps away what once mattered — and how we respond to our arbitrary placement in it.
In a wrenching set piece, a few older women go to a Greek diner to eat the rice pudding they adore. Their tired waiter jollies “his favorite Chelsea ladies,” who secretly wonder how it is they’ve suddenly found themselves old. “[T]hey would laugh and wipe their eyes with their hands, strangers’ hands, the skin there, the bruises from their too-thin blood, the liver spots, the freckles. ... They still were flesh and blood. They stared at their hands. ... It was eternal, the trip, though they were moving so slowly they might have been going nowhere. Who were they now? Where had they been?”
Time is deepened in these pages by commentaries or expansions in the form of long footnotes — a form I’ve rarely liked elsewhere but which works powerfully here. In some ways “Cathedral” might stand as a collective mind’s interrogation of its own past and future, a slow pan backward and forward over lives and cities, objects left behind (including art); the vast tableau of stories passed along, forgotten — or still being created.
“Cathedral” also functions as an elegy to human effort (and art’s role as a witnessing chorus): generations now gone or rapidly leaving, who survived war, then labored to make better lives for their children. Yet the novel is no less an anthem for the efforts of those who follow, like Elizabeth and her family, striving (in crazy-complex contexts) to figure things out, do right, mean something.
Walbert’s past oeuvre has notably examined — in a spiky, oblique prose style — the predicaments of women. She accomplishes that here again brilliantly, but this time her style allows easier entry, and her scope widens. An irresistible tone balances tenderness, excruciation, and vaudeville:
“‘We recently lost a few of our regulars —’ [Sid says]. “‘I’m sorry,’ Simone says. “‘They left town,’ Sid Morris says.” Bada-boom. Reader, you may recognize pieces of yourself and beloveds here. Sharp, richly imagined, “The Sunken Cathedral” serves — like much of Walbert’s work — as a lovely manifesto: Attention must be paid.