The Sunken Cathedral: A Novel

,Glad I borrowed from the library. I could not become involved in this book. There was a lot of switching back and forth from one scene to another. Approximately half way (maybe a little less) it is revealed that everything up to this point was reflection. I could not force myself to go on - I returned the book.

This is the 2nd book I have read by Kate Walbert. This book is a great example of "literary fiction" and how certain people should not read certain genres. I have read many of the reviews on this book from places like the NY Times and on sites like this and Amazon. The normal media reviewers gave this glowing reviews but many of the readers dislike it. I thoroughly enjoyed this book for the subtlety of her narrative. Her prose is terrific and she brings out the inner thoughts and feeling of her characters. This book is not for everyone. The story is about New York(sort of) during a time of climate change(lots of storms etc.) with sense of impending doom. The characters interface, come and go so it can be hard to follow. She also uses footnotes for further explanation or to deal with a digression. It is not a long book(although the footnotes make it longer). It was also a good book about aging. For me it was a worthwhile read.

Just couldn't get into the characters.

For Those Who Like Depressing Stories

How to describe Walbert's short novel of interlaced lives of people living in New York City under the pall of sad memories and impending doom? Something like being confined to a single room in gloaming caused by an unending rain storm seems about right. This isn't to say the novel isn't good, for it is in its own special way; it is to say the novel is not for everybody and certainly not for those who like a soupçon of joy in what they read.

Walbert opens with three elderly women--Helen, Simone, and Marie--seeking to occupy their time and share by participating in a painting class led by the disheveled and not very successful artist Sid Morris. In time, readers meet Elizabeth, a renter in Marie's brownstone burdened with an incubus from her childhood, and her husband and teenage son. Later, along come the leaders of Progressive K-8, the school Elizabeth's son attends, and then Jules, son of Marie, and his partner Larry. Periodically, readers also learn about the women's deceased husbands and their lives together, much of this related in extensive footnotes. Not really ancillary to the stories but integral to understanding the melancholy of the women's lives, these are an unusual and interesting but not always welcome way to expand upon the backstories of the characters. Death and longing play a large part in the stories, as does the fear of destructive natural forces.

In case you're wondering, the title refers to the inspiration for Helen's painting in Sid's class, Claude Debussy's La cathédrale engloutie piano prelude, an impressionistic piece attempting to evoke the sense of the legend of the mythical city of Ys built off the coast of Brittany by King Gradlon. He built it for his daughter Dahut who ultimately opened the gates to flooding in a besotted fit of possession by the devil himself and destroyed it.

In fact, you might say, Walbert's novel is much like Debussy's aural attempt, except Walbert's is an impressionistic piece in words of lives in a city that will eventually sink into the ocean. It may work for some but certainly not all of us.

This is a beautifully written book, but maybe a touch too impressionistic to really work for me. (Or maybe I just identified with Elizabeth a bit too much.) It's a lovely book, but Walbert will probably never top Our Kind for me.

I really liked this. The combination of New York and using the climate and general tenor of the city for currency rather than the easy benchmarks—tech or current events—made it dreamy and contemporary at the same time, which I thought was a totally winning combination. I especially liked her gentle take on aging. And art.