I am a huge fan of Elizabeth Strout’s writing but not of
this book, mostly because I found the main character so unappealing. Tyler Caskey is a great orater and the pastor
of a church in a small New England town.
A year after the death of his wife, he appears to his congregation to be
functioning, but in reality he is floundering.
His younger daughter is living with his mother, and his older daughter,
who is in pre-schoo,l would be better off there as well. Tyler sends her to school with virtually no
food, her hair a tangled mess, and wearing the same clothes as the day
before. When the child begins to act out
at school, due to grief and confusion, Tyler becomes a parent in denial, just
as he was formerly in denial about his wife’s health. Admired for his magnificent sermons delivered
without notes, he soon faces increasing backlash from his parishioners as his
life tumbles out of control. He is in
over his head at home and unable to offer advice to his parishioners, causing
him to question his calling from God.
Unlike Strout’s character
Olive
Kitteridge, who is blunt to the point of meanness, Tyler is a
coward, and I found his failure as a father hypocritical and difficult to
forgive. The book does contain one
conversation that I particularly enjoyed, in which a woman has been coerced
into phoning Tyler about his daughter’s latest behavior unbecoming to a
minister’s daughter. The woman makes it
clear that she did not want to make this call while at the same time getting
her point across very effectively. This
is just one of several wake-up calls for Tyler that he chooses to ignore—until
he recognizes that his job may be in jeopardy.
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