Thoughts on Niall Williams, "Four Letters of Love"
A clever book beautifully written. Four letters: the letters written by Nicholas to Isabelle that never reach her; also "Love," four letters. In the Afterward the author says his book is like no other book in the Irish canon. If I were to identify the genre, I'd name it RoGodasy; the exploration of the meaning of God as a romantic fantasy. I usually stay away from literature whose plot points pivot on religious tenets, but I rather liked this God and am willing to grant Him capital letters and, lacking a satisfying generic pronoun ("Them" is too plural), masculine identity. I imagine Him in his roiling immensity perplexed by human stupidity as He offers the greatest of His gifts: passionate, unyielding, soul-scraping, totally consuming love: for art (Nicholas's father); for music (Isabelle's brother Sean); for poetry (Isabelle's father); for another person. Most of love goes wrong, partial, unfulfilled, misplaced in human life (Nicholas's father and mother, Isabelle's father and mother, Isabelle and her husband), and when we throw ourselves full-heartedly into it (Nicholas's father into his art, Sean into his music), we find ourselves on the precipice of the divine, far from human land; the joy, the immensity, the appearance of madness. So it is fitting that the most successful of human pairings (Nicholas with Isabelle) is the least described. We catch glimpses, but the light is too bright to see clearly. We are only told at the end that their love and union is inevitable, even though it breaks the presumably God-written rules of the sanctity of marriage. The Four Letters of Love reaches for the idea of an immensity that surpasses human understanding vs. the rules of an entrenched patriarchy; God vs. god.