JOHN BURT

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John Burt has taught American Literature at Brandeis University for more than forty years. He is the author of Lincoln's Tragic Pragmatism and the editor of The Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren. He is also the author of three books of poetry, The Way Down, Work without Hope, and Victory.

We talked to John about his first novel, A Moment's Surrender, Winner of Prize Americana (Hollywood Books International, the fiction imprint of Press Americana, forthcoming).

Tell us why Albert Bierstadt's 1868 painting Among the Sierra Nevada, California is the perfect cover art for your book.

In poetry, mountain landscapes like the one in Bierstadt's painting – think of Shelley's "Mont Blanc" or Wordsworth's episode on Mt. Snowdon in The Prelude – typically make the poet confront what no words can fully articulate, a truth before which the poet must stand in awed silence. These moments, in which the poet's language seems to fail its subject, are, paradoxically, also moments in which the poet seems not to be silenced but to break out of the limits of language. These are the moments in which what is deepest about poetry, all those powers poetry can suggest but never put into words, burst into intuitive wordless primary experience, blazing with the absolute, despite the inadequacy of language. Such moments are moments of power, but they are also moments of risk, in which the silence of awe could easily become the silence of death.

In A Moment’s Surrender, mountain landscapes provoke a related thought because they force the characters to face what they are powerless to change, the fact that life will have its destructive way with them no matter how much they may wish to resist it. Yet the very act of facing their powerlessness seems to brace the characters up, to affirm, even in the face of the limits they cannot escape, what they really are, what really matters about them, what it is of them that endures despite everything.

When Paul Bishop, needing to give Susan Corbin's young son Jack a break from his grief and fear while Susan is in the courtroom in Independence to attend the preliminary hearing of the man who murdered her husband, takes Jack for a walk outside, he is astonished by the beauty of Eastern Sierras, which rise steeply next to the town, their peaks icy and terrible, but their lower slopes mottled with the dark of Jeffrey pines and the paler green of aspens. For a moment, the sight suspends Paul's grief, and he stares at Mt. Williamson, breath held. "They have seen grief like ours many times," Paul thinks. "They aren't indifferent to it, but it doesn't change them." It's as if those mountains said to him, "We will be here. Take us as what we are. Be stayed by us. But don't look to us for sympathy." This is a moment in which he faces up to what is beyond human control. But it's also a moment of candor and in a small way a moment of courage.

Such moments show what most matters about being human even if these moments don't make being human any easier. Towards the end of the novel, realizing that it may be her last excursion with Jack and Paul before she becomes too weak to walk, Susan takes them up the slope to the Serra cross atop Mount Rubidoux. All of Riverside is spread out beneath her, and beyond the city she can see the brown slopes of Box Springs Mountain, and beyond that the snowy rampart of Mt. San Gorgonio. Hearing the bustle of the city far below her, Susan suddenly feels the blessings of the life she is reluctantly about to leave. She is afraid of death, but somehow seeing all this anonymous life going on, hearing in the distance an ambulance rushing to the rescue of someone she will never meet, Susan thinks, "Everywhere I look people are busy with their lives. And they will be going on after I am gone. And all of them will someday be gone too, and others will be busy with their living after them. And all I can do is bless them all, those who knew me and those who never will, those who are not yet born, and those who died long ago. They will never know how the thought of them has blessed me. And how I have blessed them, without their knowing."

In Among the Sierra Nevada, California, Bierstadt doesn't only depict a sublime landscape, in which the artist and the viewer confront something great but also overwhelming, something deep and powerful but at the same time alien, beyond comprehension, sometimes even life-threatening. In the foreground, Bierstadt contrasts the inspiring but forbidding mountain landscape with a grassy clearing, where elk wade in shallow water, and one fish drifts beneath the surface. He puts the sublime together with the beautiful, with a more intimate landscape, in which the artist apprehends something harmonious, affirming, and radiant with life. In that tension, what is at the human scale and what is beyond all scale are held in one field of view, and we seek to engage what is beyond life while at the same time not losing our connection to life in the here and now.

Engaging the sublime without denigrating the beautiful, transcending the world while honoring the world and the human, is something novels are uniquely qualified to do; the ability to do both of these things at the same time separates novels from lyric poetry. And I hope that I connect and honor both realms in A Moment's Surrender. There are other kinds of moments of sublimity and other kinds of moments of beauty in the book, and I want the reader to put them also alongside each other. The darkest moment in the book, the moment when Paul Bishop follows the stations of the cross in the cathedral in Gallup and suddenly feels so God-abandoned that he cannot go on, and, losing his nerve, gives up his attempt to cross the country to rescue Rachel Lake from what he believes is a temptation to commit suicide, is a moment of dark sublimity. Paul is stopped speechless in his tracks, and he knows that he will never be the same. He believes that his failure of nerve in this moment reveals the deepest truth about him, something he will never live down; Paul believes that God has seen through him and shown him what he is, what he always will be.

I intended to juxtapose that moment with Susan Corbin's breathless moment in the UCR Botanical Garden as she recovers from her first cancer treatment. As she watches Paul and her son Jack in the butterfly garden in Riverside, three butterflies land on her bare arm, silently opening and closing their wings for a long minute; that is a moment of beauty but also a moment of grief, because Susan knows she will die before the summer is out, and for the first time she has to acknowledge to herself that she loves Paul but also is too ashamed of loving him to accept his love. "Let me not make more of this moment than it is. But let this moment last. Let me make this moment last," she says to herself. "Please keep the future away as long you can."

You work in academia. Tell our readers why that’s important and how it influenced the plot of your book.

With the exception of John Williams's Stoner and Willa Cather's The Professor's House, I've always taken a rather dim view of academic novels, which are too often imprisoned by stereotypes about academia and false ideas about teaching and scholarship. And the novels written by academics themselves are sometimes the worst offenders. Academics in fiction are always either pretentious fakers or burnt-out drones. But I don't think many of the academics I have actually known were either. In academic novels, you never see English professors trying to figure out what a poem actually means. You never see professors trying to manage a class discussion without dominating it. You never see professors struggling to keep up with all the paper sets they have to grade or wrestling with what to say in the margins that might help the student do a better job next time.

Paul Bishop is a first-year writing instructor with a precarious appointment. Whatever else he is, he's a dedicated teacher who works hard at it, even under unpromising conditions. And if he does not directly resist the contempt for his subject that other academics, the administrators, and the students alike show for it, privately he understands that what he does is important and does his best to do it conscientiously.

Paul is not a very good poet, and he falls on his face as a scholar, but what he thinks about poetry is serious, a key to who he is. His ideas about poetry are of a piece with his ideas about love and with his ideas about faith. He has an idealized view of all three things, and in all three cases he thinks of himself as having failed those ideals. But for all of his failures, most of them failures of nerve rather than betrayals of principle, he never quite gives up. He may have failed as a poet, but he still reads poetry and thinks about it carefully. Indeed, thinking about poetry helps him make sense of his world. Because his courage failed him when he thought Rachel Lake might kill herself, he thinks of himself as a failure as a lover, but unlike Rachel or Tom Corbin he does not have cynical ideas about love. And for all his doubt about whether he loves Susan for the right reasons or even is the right person to love her, he in fact loves Susan deeply and generously. One of the reasons he loves Susan is that he wants to redeem himself morally as well as romantically after his failure with Rachel. But he thinks his motivations aren't pure enough to accomplish that. Without any particular hope of success, he keeps diligently working at redemption the way he works at poetry and at love. He is someone who keeps plugging away at his work, through thick and thin, and in the face of every discouragement. As many contingent faculty do.

Tom Corbin, for all his fame as a poet, imagines himself as a realist about what poetry is, and his cynicism about poetry, like his cynicism about love, is very different from Paul's ideas about both subjects from the beginning. Paul and Tom, even from the time of their bull sessions as graduate students at UConn, seem to come from different intellectual worlds. But ultimately Tom's realism is the realism of disappointment. He has learned to smell out lies, but smelling out lies is not enough to yield him a truth worth living for or making poetry of. Although he spends his career calling out lies, there is a great deal of posturing and falsity in his own poetry, and it is tempting to write him off as a showman and a fraud. (That is certainly how all his colleagues at UCR see him.) But he also has written a handful of poems that really do matter. He misuses those poems terribly — there is something especially gross about using a poem in honor of the Virgin as a tool to impress girls at poetry readings into sleeping with him. But Tom took the poem seriously when he wrote it, and he takes it seriously again in the poetry reading he gives in Reno just before he dies. Deep down, he wants to be free of his own BS, but can't figure out how to. This is why his last book, the volume he writes from the imagined point of view of Susan and publishes under a woman's name, is a moral and a poetic breakthrough for him, although only Susan understands this point. The volume may be based in a scandalous lie (since he is the very last person who could credibly pretend to be a woman), but the volume is also his attempt to fight his way back to a better kind of poetry, and to do better justice to the wife he keeps betraying in bed.

Tom is a serious but not very generous reader of his students' poems; he catches every false note, but he also misses the one good poem in the class he visits in Reno until it is too late to undo the damage he has done. He has the same kind of cynicism about love that he has about poetry; he is a disenchanted seducer, a lawsuit waiting to happen. But when he spontaneously, and to his own amazement, falls in love with Susan at his first reading in Riverside, he wants to be a better kind of person and to serve a better kind of love. He really means it, but he can’t follow through, and he is a terrible husband. His love of Susan, which is real enough, is a challenge he continually fails to meet, and despite all the bluster of his public persona his sense of his falsity causes him to despise himself.

Like Paul, Tom seeks redemption. But he knows that his recurrent drama of remorse and repentance is finally a kind of kabuki theater which doesn't even fool himself. The irony of his life is that although he is to most people, and even to himself, a huge faker (as so many male poets of his generation were), there is an underlying seriousness about poetry, and about love, and even about redemption, that he never quite betrays. That underlying seriousness, which should have redeemed him, in fact plays a large role in his death.

Rachel is the best reader of poetry, the one real poet among the group at UConn that includes Tom and Paul, and the only one whose poetry I bother to quote. But her romanticism is so life-denying that she can't live with it, never mind live up to it. Whenever she speaks there is a dark undercurrent of Emily Brontë and Emily Dickinson in what she says — almost every time she tries to explain herself to herself she unconsciously quotes Emily Dickinson. Her idea of poetry demands a gnostic self-sacrifice that is hard to square with actual living. That's why she seems to resemble other women poets of the 1960s such as Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. She is a frightening interlocutor and a scary teacher, although charismatic in both roles. She is a fierce lover, and her idea of eros is dark. She has a strong religious vocation, although it is so negative and so skeptical that it amounts to a religion of one, a religious practice that renounces salvation in the way other religious vocations renounce pleasure. As for Paul and for Tom, for Rachel poetry, love, and redemption are all somehow tangled together. Also Rachel's sensibility, like Paul's and like Tom's, is suddenly revolutionized by her discovery that her view of Susan as a hopeless Pollyanna is wrong.

One more note about the academic context of the book. I set the action at universities I thought readers would not have preconceived notions about, for good or ill. And I set the action in the 1970s rather than the present because I didn't want to have face down the widespread hostility to literary study that has been a consequence of the "theory revolution" of the 1980s. Tom's views sometimes sound a little like 1990s New Historicism, or present-day New Lyric Theory, but I intended all of the characters' ideas to be 1970s ideas.

Do you have a favorite character in the novel? Who do you enjoy writing the most? And why?

Parents are not supposed to have favorite children, but they usually do anyway. So I do have a favorite character, and also a character I enjoyed writing the most, but they are different people.

I confess that I most enjoyed writing Rachel Lake. I myself have never been much of a risk taker, and I'm certainly not most people's idea of a rule-breaker. And I can't say I know anyone who much resembles Rachel either. But I loved her bad-girl sharp tongue, and since she was capable of anything, I loved to just let her rip and see what she wanted to do. She sees herself as a transgressive teller of unwelcome truths. But she also has two enormous lies on her conscience: one she told to Paul, and one she told to Tom. And because she can barely stand the rebuke of her conscience about those lies, she responds by despising both of them.

Paul and Tom haven’t exactly played it straight with her either.

She's also not quite honest with herself about what she feels about Paul. She tells herself she has contempt for him. But she keeps coming back to confront him. And even when she is confronting him, it's clear that what he thinks of her really matters to her, no matter what she says about him. The contradiction between her intense charisma and her intense self-despising is the engine of her personality. And the fact that she's at the same time extremely reckless and extremely vulnerable made her interesting to me too. But there were things she would not let me do. I originally planned to have her successfully — though temporarily — seduce Paul away from Susan — to his intense shame and regret — and to have her succeed in telling Susan her nasty secret about Tom, which would wound her but not actually destroy her. But Rachel told me that I had to let her off the hook at the end of the novel, and that therefore I shouldn't do anything that would make finally letting her off the hook impossible. So I had her confrontation with Susan at the playground take a surprising turn that was not in my mind until I actually wrote the scene out.

I had thought of Susan Corbin and Rachel Lake as a contrasting pair. I had in mind other contrasting pairs of women in American literature, such as Priscilla and Zenobia in Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance — his underrated novel about Brook Farm, which begins as a satire and morphs into a tragedy — or Milly Theale and Kate Croy in Henry James's The Wings of the Dove. It's a little too simple to think of this contrast as that been "good girl" and "bad girl" or even a contrast between innocence and experience.

Also, strangely, one character usually seems to have light hair and the other dark hair, a stereotype which, ridiculous as it is, I could not help playing with a bit also.

But in Hawthorne's and James's cases, and in most cases of novels that turn on this kind of contrast, one character gets the author's formal moral approval and the other character gets most of the author's dramatic interest. Only the darker character gets to have a sexual identity, and only the darker character gets to wrestle with herself, as if the author's moral approval somehow thins out the author's sense of the lighter character, as if "good" also means "ignorant about life" and "impervious to sexual desire." Now Kate Croy loves, pities, condescends to, and manipulates Milly Theale, as if she were a poor little thing who needs Kate to make all her decisions for her, so that even as she exploits Milly Kate can tell herself that she has a clearer sense of Milly's interests than Milly does. But she never, until the very end of the novel, ever sees Milly as an adult or for that matter as a woman rather than a girl.

For those who don't know the novel, here's the story: finding out that her shy, wealthy, orphaned, unworldly friend Milly is dying, Kate arranges for her secret fiancé Merton Densher to pay court to Milly so that the dying girl might at least experience love before she dies, and therefore be moved to leave her money to Densher who will later marry Kate. Kate arranges things so that Densher does not actually cross lines with Milly, but despite all the fastidious limits Kate and Densher place on what they do to Milly, their plan is clearly manipulative and immoral.

Milly is, in fact, not quite the fool Kate takes her to be, and when, at the point of death, Milly learns of the plot about her, she shows her depth in a surprising way, by leaving her money to Densher anyway, since she has discerned that despite himself Densher has fallen in love with her — a fact Densher himself does not recognize until after Milly dies. Milly's act might be taken as an exquisite act of revenge, since it complicates Densher's relationship with Kate. Densher, feeling guilty about what he did to Milly, and seeking to test Kate's love of him, tells Kate that he will marry her only if she lets him renounce Milly's gift. But, in fact, what Milly's act does is not to settle scores with Kate but to redeem her, since Kate winds up renouncing both Densher and the money.

James not only gives Milly the last word, but he also reveals her depth of character — that’s why the novel is called The Wings of the Dove). At the same time, we never know Milly quite the way we know Kate; the author's admiration for her keeps Milly at arm's length. James loved her too much to give her the complexity he gave to Kate. My ambition from the beginning was to give to Susan the kind of depth and complexity this kind of book usually would give only to her antagonist, to Rachel. I wanted to see her as heroic – she faces the death of her husband, the vulnerability of her son, and her own mortal disease with courage and clarity of mind, and throughout I hope she comes off as generous and vital – but I also wanted her to be a moral adult, and conflicted and ambivalent in the ways all moral adults are.

And I wanted her to be sexual; Priscilla and Milly are fully capable of love, but only Zenobia and Kate seem capable of desire. I wanted in Susan to show that love can involve both eros and caritas, a combination Rachel cannot understand. In the book he wrote from Susan's point of view, his last book, Tom understands very well that the challenge of love is to join eros and caritas. But Tom never pulls that off personally, and the critics of his book think of his attempt to join them in his book as a weak moment relative to the darker erotic poetry elsewhere in the book.

I was strongly emotionally invested in Susan from the beginning. But for at least the first three drafts of the novel readers told me they found her too stoical, too wise, in every way too idealized. I think my own feeling for her got in the way of my ability to portray her, exactly what I had told myself I didn’t want to do. Paul sees Susan in a similarly idealized way; he admires the strength of her love for her very imperfect husband, and he admires her love for Jack. Most of all he admires the dignity and even fearlessness she has shown in her grief for Tom and in the face of her approaching death.

I shared his admiration for her, but I discovered that I could not make her plausible as a character unless I also saw her from another point of view. I didn’t want, however, to suggest that Paul's idealization of Susan was mistaken or even "only part of the story." It occurred to me that the other point of view about Susan, the point of view not compromised by Paul's love of her, might be Susan's own. To this end, I thought about how many women I know who are excellent parents but are sharply critical of their own parenting. Paul never sees Susan falter, but from her own point of view she has to fight for control of herself as a parent, and is shaken by her inability to protect her son from what is certain to come. Paul also has no idea just how strong the fear of death is that Susan is always just barely keeping down. I don't think that Paul is wrong to idealize her because she ultimately wins out over her fears. But Paul has no idea how close-run her struggle is. And Susan does her best to keep Paul (and almost everyone else) from guessing what she is feeling because she can barely face it herself. She fears losing control over herself, and suspects that if she lost control even once she would never regain it.

I hope the reader will find that the first section in which we have access to Susan's own point of view — when Susan, Paul, and Jack are just leaving Independence after the arraignment of Tom's killer in Chapter 15 — is surprising to the point of being startling. Not only does Susan not see herself in the way Paul does, she sees herself as failing to console her son in a moment of urgent need, and as paralyzed by fear of death and despair over her future. Ashamed of her failure to console Jack, Susan is shocked, as well as shamed, by the series of dark moments she goes through over the course of that drive, in the darkest of which, hitting bottom, she even suddenly comes to wish that she and Jack could both die painlessly right then, so as not to have to face what is about to happen to both of them. When Paul comes to Susan's emotional rescue, he is completely unaware of what he has done for her.

Because of his failure of nerve with Rachel, Paul doubts his ability to support people he loves when they are in trouble. He never sees that at least as far as Susan is concerned that question has been answered almost from the beginning.

With Paul's spontaneous but unconscious support, Susan regains control of herself although she is still shaken. Susan never tells Paul just how close she came to giving in to despair. But she never forgets it either. And she never forgets what Paul did for her without any real awareness of what he was doing. Given that he knows what kind of husband Tom was to Susan, it is perhaps strange that Paul admires her ability to love Tom despite everything. Her loyalty to him, her willingness to keep forgiving him, are among the things Paul idealizes about Susan. Tom, too, aware of how little he merits her forgiveness, idealizes Susan’s ability to love him too, and feels ashamed about how little he deserves it.

But Susan never idealizes her own feeling for Tom in the way that Tom and Paul both do, because she thinks of her repeated forgiveness of Tom as an oblique coercion of him. She’s wrong about this — I think — but she can't help the feeling because what she thinks has some truth although it’s not the whole truth. Like Paul, she is viciously and unfairly critical of herself, but can't leave off that criticism because it's not entirely wrong.

Faith plays a prominent part in this story. Why is that investigation important to you as a novelist?

All of the characters see themselves as being in need of redemption. Paul, Tom, and Rachel have each done something deeply wrong that they can't put behind them, something which even their attempts to come to terms with wind up entangling them with more deeply. Even Susan sees that what is best about her, her readiness to forgive, is a mixed moral blessing not only because her too easy forgiveness of Tom seems to license him to trample her again but also because there is, as she concedes in a dark moment near the end of the book, something off-key about the way she loves him.

When I think about redemption, I think about St. Paul's concept of grace. Paul's argument, later developed further by Augustine, is that we are incapable of successfully willing our own salvation because we will it with the same corrupt will that got us in trouble in the first place. Even the good we do, we do for all the wrong reasons and in all the wrong ways. Our humility is just another mode of spiritual pride and our remorse is a dramatic parade of feeling that doesn't even fool ourselves.

Hannah Arendt describes how every act of will encounters in us an opposing will that cancels it out — a concept she derived from Augustine. Willing is always engaged in an endless, chaotic struggle with nilling so that we always keep doing what we don't want to do, and can't do what we most wish to do. We want to want better things, but we can't resist wanting the bad things that we still do want although we don't want to want them. The one thing I can't do in a state of bad faith is the thing I most long to do, which is to do something that restores me to a state of good faith. Once we have destroyed our good faith, we can't really persuade ourselves, never mind other people, that we have restored it.

Think of how hard it is to regain the trust of someone to whom you have told a terrible lie. Regaining that trust is just not in your power; it is up to the person you lied to to decide whether to trust you again, no matter how well you try to behave. Now imagine that you have told just such a lie not to another person but to life itself. Whatever else St. Paul meant by "grace," the term refers to whatever might take us out of the closed circle of transgressions and never quite to authentic repentance. Grace is the spontaneous and unearned recovery of the possibility of good faith, something we are all powerless to procure for ourselves.  

This sense of being fundamentally in bad faith is what Rachel describes about herself in her despairing letter to Paul from California, which Paul thinks has to do with guilt over her abortion but which perhaps has more to do with guilt over her infidelity to him — which she says nothing about in the letter — her sense, which she later describes to Paul, of being "a liar to the bottom."

Paul's failure to support Rachel in her dark moment leaves him also trapped in a sense of being fundamentally in bad faith so that even the generous things he wants to do for Susan are contaminated by his need to prove to himself that he isn't really that bad person he had shown himself to be in Rachel's case. Paul also can't persuade himself that loving Susan isn't his way of taking revenge on Tom for taking Rachel from him ten years before. Rachel, with her usual acuity, almost immediately points out that everything Paul wants to do for Susan is a way for him to even the score with Rachel and Tom. It takes Paul a long time to think of his feelings for Susan as anything more than a way of assuaging his guilt or of taking his revenge, and indeed the moment when his feeling for Susan crosses from being a neurotic compulsion to being a genuine moral commitment is hard to pinpoint.

Tom as well feels guilt over his many infidelities to Susan, but he cannot help but see that guilt as performative, a bad faith attempt to pull the wool not only over Susan’s eyes but his own, as if infidelity and reconciliation were just parts of the sexual dance between Susan and himself. He does genuinely feel guilty, but he sees through that guilt even as he feels it; he thinks that his guilt is only the prelude to the next infidelity, the spice that will sharpen the pleasure of his next transgression.  

Finally, even Susan faces a different intractable moral problem. After her dark moment in the car coming back from Independence, she admits she loves Paul, but she is ashamed of loving him because her late husband is not yet even in his grave, and she is too emotionally used-up, and too weighed down by the prospect of death, to give herself to another love anyway. She has managed all the years of her marriage with Tom by seeing herself as the faithful wife who will rescue an unfaithful husband. To love Paul would force her to see that view of herself as a lie or as a waste. Worse than this, Susan can't shake the feeling that what she really wants with Paul is not to love and be loved by Paul but to use his love for her to manipulate him into taking care of her during her final illness, and into taking care of Jack after her death. The fact that she actually does love Paul does not persuade her that she is not using his love of her instrumentally. As the faithful wife of her unfaithful late husband, she doesn't have the right to love him in the first place. Susan, like Paul, is a better person than she gives herself credit for being.

Tom, Rachel, and Paul are all lapsed Catholics — if it matters, for the record, I am not Catholic, lapsed or practicing. Susan is not a believer at all. But she's also the only one who actually forgives anyone, the only one who tries to love her enemies, and indeed the only one who actually wins a former enemy's love. She may be intensely skeptical of Paul's interpretation of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe — although much of her dispute with Paul about that book is just her way of flirting with him indirectly — but she is the character who best embodies that book's values. That is why, Paul, after Susan's death, thinking about how her love had affected the other characters, quotes St. Paul's famous hymn to love.

I'd like to add a word about Father Ronan. Secular people often see religion as a magical explaining machine that either justifies suffering or explains it away as somehow a part of the divine plan, as Job's comforters did about his sufferings — sadly, religious people sometimes see it this way too. Or they see grace as a kind of get out of jail card that enables people to disown their past transgressions — another view that is not confined to atheist critics of religion. When Susan visits Father Ronan to arrange Tom's funeral, she expects both of these notions from him, and she instinctively, and rather unfairly, prepares to resist him. Father Ronan doesn't think either of these things. What he, in fact, tells Susan is that faith is a way of bearing suffering, not a way of explaining suffering; faith is what we do to be able to stand a world we have to face but will never comprehend. And what grace does is not to make our pasts disappear but to restore us to a world in which we have a story that is not already over. Grace is not an escape from the consequences of moral agency, but a condition of recovering agency. It's not a way of rigging the score in the believer's favor, but rather a way of starting the contest anew.

Father Ronan may seem to have walked into the book from Graham Greene, but I think his religious views are traditional ones, and not just for Catholics. His insight into how things stand between Paul and Susan, and his advice to Susan that it would be better for her to accept her love of Paul than to reject it, may be unusual — even perhaps transgressive, but why so? — but he does correctly interpret how Susan behaves when she faints on the walk outside of the church. And who, if not Father Ronan, could have told Susan that the feeling she has for Paul — but won’t admit — would be obvious to anyone who knows her? Susan's Chief Resident, Claire Wirthlin, notices the same things Father Ronan does, but Susan would successfully resist hearing about them from Claire. Susan resists Father Ronan too, but beneath it all she knows he's right about her.

What do you hope your readers take away from reading your novel? Do you imagine your readers might learn, change, and grow in some way?

It sounds silly to say this, but I want readers to come away from my novel with a renewed sense of the redemptive power of love. Love is so compromised in this book, so caught in crosscurrents and mixed motives and mixed feelings, and bound up with the worst parts of our natures as much as with the best parts. But for all its problems nothing matters more. Every character in the book undergoes what in "The Waste Land" T. S. Eliot calls "the awful daring of a moment's surrender." Sometimes they love without self-knowledge, and sometimes they become entangled in the darker aspects of love. Everyone who falls in love with Susan is astonished to find themselves doing so, as if it were something they could not imagine themselves doing, or they see themselves as doing so for all the wrong reasons. Paul and Rachel, in particular, are both astonished by what they feel for Susan. But loving Susan redeems them both, and could have redeemed Tom had he ever imagined himself to be worthy of redemption. When Susan herself loves Paul — and for that matter when she loves the others too — she has every reason to doubt that she is doing the right thing.  But however mixed the experience of surrendering to love, a lifetime of prudence could not retract it, and, whether for better or for worse, by love and love only have we existed, a fact

Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms.

Winner of PRIZE AMERICANA, look for A Moment's Surrender by John Burt COMING SOON.

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