what we read: Sipsworth and Time of the Child: A Mouse, a Baby, and Much To Discuss

Title: Sipsworth

Author: Simon Van Booey

Title: Time of the Child

Author: Niall Williams

From the publishers, brief descriptions of our two reads:

Sipsworth

"Following the loss of her husband and son, Helen Cartwright returns to the village of her childhood after living abroad for six decades. Her only wish is to die quickly and without fuss. She retreats into her home on Westminster Crescent, becoming a creature of routine and habit: “Each day was an impersonation of the one before with only a slight shuffle—as though even for death there is a queue.”

Then, one cold winter night, a chance encounter with a mouse sets Helen on a surprising journey. Over the course of two weeks in a small English town, this reclusive widow discovers an unexpected reason to live."

Time of the Child

"From the author of This Is Happiness, a compassionate, life-affirming novel about the Christmas season that transforms the small Irish town of Faha.

Doctor Jack Troy was born and raised in Faha, but his responsibilities for the sick and his care for the dying mean he has always been set apart from the town. His eldest daughter, Ronnie, has grown up in her father's shadow, and remains there, having missed one chance at love – and passed up another offer of marriage from an unsuitable man.

But in the Advent season of 1962, as the town readies itself for Christmas, Ronnie and Doctor Troy's lives are turned upside down when a baby is left in their care. As the winter passes, father and daughter's lives, the understanding of their family, and their role in their community are changed forever.

Set over the course of one December in the same village as Williams' beloved This Is Happiness, Time of the Child is a tender return to Faha for readers who know its charms, and a heartwarming welcome to new readers entering for the very first time."

First, A Bit of Background

In a departure from our usual routine, we took a field trip to the University of Minnesota, where we met in the recently renovated Pillsbury Building in honor of one of our esteemed members, Shirley Garner. A long-time professor of English at the University, Shirley was instrumental in helping to make the stunning renovation of this building a reality.

Also, due to heavy-duty March schedules all around, we combined our March and April reads into a single session. After welcoming home our good friend Vickie and killing a fair amount of time as we waited for our people to find parking on a crowded campus, we dug in.

Insights and Opinions

+ One of the main drawbacks to reading and discussing two books at once is also one of the unexpected advantages. On the downside, we slip quickly past one of them to get to the discussion of the second one quickly. On the upside, we find the parallels between them, the common themes that unite otherwise very different stories. On this day, our discussion definitely fell into the second camp.

+ Linda felt that Sipsworth and Time of the Child are perfect companion novels. Both feature a character late in life, adrift without purpose. And then both characters are given a tremendous gift after everything else seems to have passed them by. Unwittingly, and in some ways against her better judgment, Helen Cartwright takes on the care and feeding of a common field mouse, which she names Sipsworth. Gradually, simple maintenance becomes much more until we find them watching TV together on the couch. In Time of the Child, Dr. Jack Troy has spent a lifetime caring for the sick in his small community with little money or friendship to show for it. All he has is the company of his daughter Ronnie, whose future happiness he fears he has destroyed through his discouragement of an early suitor. But the unexpected delivery of an abandoned baby to his door reignites a fire he's lost long ago. In both cases, the choices made by these main characters take them someplace other than they had planned, and both in satisfying ways.

+ After reading Sipsworth, Vicky reread the opening pages and was struck by the similarities between Helen and the mouse. Helen has lived in her house for three years now, but it's still empty and she knows no one in the village. And the mouse is also in a strange place, found in a box of someone else's junk. He becomes an effective metaphor for Helen -- he's transplanted, he's unimportant, until suddenly he is.

+ The structure of Sipsworth, in Margy's opinion, is something special. "It's so in the moment. There are no flashbacks. We don't know much about Helen. We don't know how her son died. It's just day by day and then we have a few days when it's just blank." Simple, straightforward sentences carry the reader forward. This structure gives the reader a deep dive into Helen's reality and highlights how absolutely alone she is, until through her own unexpected actions, a community starts to rally around her.

+ One of the few memories Helen returns to often is one of being trapped in a well when she was a child. We wondered about the significance of that memory. Why does the author want us to know this? How does it color Helen's world, even more so than the unexplained death of her son and whatever it is that happened to her husband? This led to a bit of a side conversation in which Liz recounted surviving a tornado and Chris shared a story about being trapped in a malfunctioning elevator, and how those are things one never forgets.

+ Jocey pointed out that Helen's story at the beginning is the common tale of the old woman, a creature who is invisible and of no use to anyone anymore. The village has ignored her for three years. It's only through her own forays into heretofore unvisited places in the village, to get what she needs for Sipsworth, that she makes connections and the community begins to rally around her.

+ Turning then to Time of the Child, we immediately set about pointing out all the ways in which these two novels are completely different. While the prose in Sipsworth moves along at a spare and simple clip, each of Williams' sentences is a world unto itself. His Faha world is almost entirely internal. There is little dialogue since nothing in Faha is ever uttered but is only implied, through a look, an absence, a shoulder raised, and the occasional "Oh, now." Williams is a deep and unstinting observer of human motive and, throughout his prose, finds ways to communicate the deepest truths without words ever being exchanged.

+ Time of the Child is best savored rather than just read. There's no way one can read it quickly. Every sentence requires concentration. Liz said: "Every sentence is so deep and so carefully written, I feel like it must be exhausting to write like that. It's all so slow and so beautiful." She admitted to occasionally skipping over a paragraph, feeling the need for a break. Chris said the book routinely put her to sleep, three pages being her limit. Vicky pointed out that that's not necessarily a bad thing, stating her opinion that sometimes we place too much emphasis on plot and story. Chris said "He's such a good writer, you want to stop after every sentence and think about it."

+ Williams' constructions are surprising and delightful. Very early on in the work, on page 14, he describes the moment in which Dr. Troy and Ronnie leave the church after morning services. "Circumvention was a preferred way in Faha, so, between the doctor's care and the church gate, those parishioners who wanted a word did not gather, but stood sentry in by the wall or on the fringes of conversations in which they played a non-speaking part. These were always women. Although invisible to Church and State, it was women who knitted the country together, and in Faha, on Sunday morning after Mass, you could see the needles."

+ There was some comparison made between Time of the Child and This is Happiness, another Williams work we read for an earlier session. Both take place in the same community and feature many of the same characters, which is apparently Williams' intention as he continues his writing career. Both Chris and Liz found Time of the Child to be a more compelling read as the stakes in Child are higher.

+ Both Sipsworth and Time of the Child deal, in their own ways, with the pain and joy of aging. At the close of Child, Dr. Troy has these thoughts: "Only through the birth of a child, he thought, is the lure of death conquered. It was a statement worthy of his father. And he recalled then the fantastical notion of the old man, who, in his last year, claimed that the purpose of aging was to grow into your soul, the one you have been carrying all along. Yes, Jack Troy thought. The one you had as a child." We can all learn from these words.