Australian book reviewsBooksReviewThe new work by the author of The Trauma Cleaner is a complex, affirming and deeply humanist project, though at times uneven
There’s a moment towards the end of The Believer where the author tries to reckon with the election of Donald Trump as the new leader of the country in which she was born, and with which she still maintains strong ties. Krasnostein is in New York on the day after the election, visiting the home of one of the people whose portraits make up this book – a young Mennonite woman (“Like Amish, but not”) who has moved, with her family, from rural Pennsylvania to the Bronx, in order to spread her faith. Krasnostein is trying to understand what such a life might mean, but she is distracted: what she is feeling, on this day, is a “radiating shame for actually believing” that the election result could ever have been otherwise, in a country so deeply divided by inequality and irreconcilable worldviews. “I am trying,” she writes, “to get closer to the possibility, at least, of a more perfect union.”
The italics are Krasnostein’s own, and they are telling. So too is the phrase “more perfect union”, which of course comes from the American constitution, but in this particular context points to what is at the very heart of The Believer. This is a book that tries to understand what might unite us, what we might hold in common in the meanings that we make from the world and its materials, even when the beliefs that underpin them are so different, even diametrically opposed.
The Believer weaves together six portraits of people who believe deeply, often passionately, in ideas that sit on the fringes, far from the mainstream: Mennonites and creationists, but also ufologists, ghostbusting paranormal investigators, a Buddhist “death doula”, and a woman graciously accepting an unjust punishment for a crime. It is a book, Krasnostein explains, about people “holding fast to faith” in such disparate ideas, but also about the distance “between the world as it is and as we’d like it to be”.
What’s most striking about Krasnostein’s dealings with, and portraits of, these people is her compassion – a quality which will come as no surprise to readers of her 2017 juggernaut The Trauma Cleaner. Even when they are espousing ideas that seem “unfathomable” and even offensive, Krasnostein’s project is always to try to understand them and what it might be like to live as they do. In this sense, it is a deeply humanist project, and one that feels timely, too. Krasnostein’s writing is lyrical and stylish, and imaginative in a way that often feels invigorating. It is filled with lists – of jobs once held, wished-for things, esoteric topics of conversation covered in a single visit – and flashes forward that inject a sudden pathos into the lives she describes. Her metaphors too are frequently startling – a hairless cat “feels underhand like an enormous dried apricot” – but do occasionally stretch so far as to break: the pauses between a man’s words are “like stopping by woods and seeing, between the dense distribution of trees, only clear paths that are all the same path.”
The idea of a composite portrait is ambitious, and it also allows Krasnostein to work with echoes and repetitions, resonances across the text. It’s a poetic structure, and one that works by accrual. (The “combination” of the six stories, Krasnostein writes, “is the seventh note”.) So too does Krasnostein take care to include the moments where her subjects express sentiments to this end, such as where a ufologist talks of the importance of “finding all these little stories” that might “build up into a big matrix of stories”.
In this, The Believer certainly is effective, and one of the pleasures of the book is noticing the moments in which the stories interweave or chime against each other. It does make for some unevenness, though – not all of the characters or their narratives are as compelling or intriguing as those that really shine here; nor is Krasnostein’s project of understanding able to be achieved equally across them. The fragmentary nature of their telling too can be disorienting or even somewhat dissatisfying, impeding as it does at times a sense of narrative progression within each individual story.
This too is complicated by the way in which Krasnostein is positioned within the book. She is, of course, active as an interviewer – sitting in on an exploration of an allegedly haunted hotel, attending the “living wake” of a woman who is terminally ill – and it is her emotions, her imaginative leaps that animate the text. Every now and then she includes a small piece of personal information, usually family history or a childhood memory. But these are only ever momentary and fragmentary, and what they therefore offer are only glimpses or hints. The project of this book is obviously one where the author should not be front and centre, but there’s something frustrating, even unsatisfying, about the slightness of these glimpses nonetheless.
Despite this, The Believer is a fascinating book, and one that asks big questions – about connectedness and separation, certainly, but also about love and grief, resilience and faith, and all the ways in which we situate ourselves within the world. And it is informed always by a sprawling curiosity and deep humanity, which make it an affirming, and deeply moving read.
The Believer: Encounters with Love, Death and Faith by Sarah Krasnostein is out now through Text
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