Scribner, 2015.
Three Stars
The Sunken Cathedral is a beautiful series of linked character studies, loosely tied together with themes of identity and a vague but impending environmental disaster. A group of people living in modern day New York struggle to find their place in life, while they interact with each other. All of the characters’ lives are painted with an impressionist’s brush, capturing emotions through experience. Debussey’s “Sunken Cathedral” is evoked repeatedly as the musical version of impressionism, while the title of his song also foreshadows the flood that is to come.
While the writing was lovely, I think the exploration of each character would have worked better as separate short stories. Each life had its own interesting details, but it was hard to care about a character who is only introduced at the end of the novel or within a lengthy footnote. They needed to either be given their own story or cut altogether. Rushing through the histories of strong, resourceful women such as Marie, who survived great tragedies, does a disservice to her and to real women like her.
The footnotes themselves were frustrating and superfluous – they should have either been woven into the text or left out. Simone and Marie lived long lives; they survived World War II and started new lives in New York. Walbert seems to be saying we should pay more attention to the stories of the past, yet these stories are relegated to long, uninteresting footnotes. Meanwhile, Elizabeth is obsessed with exploring the family histories of her son’s classmates, which makes me feel like there may be some postmodern connection between the footnotes and the class papers – but the connection just doesn’t quite make it.
Each character suffers from a disconnect between their interior and exterior worlds – a sort of existential anxiety. It goes hand in hand with the themes of aging and loss, and the reminder that we should be learning from the past to avoid making the same mistakes. It seems the population of this fictional world have not learned, leading to the environmental disaster that casts a shadow over the novel.
The best parts of this novel were the impressionistic imagery and language; however, the characters and plot lacked development, which is why I think I would have gotten more from it had they been separated into a series of stories. I felt disconnected as a reader, not drawn into the abstraction of the plot. The themes Walbert has chosen lend themselves well to artistic metaphors and various interpretations. There were no meaningful connections and nothing redeeming from the characters’ lives – but there easily could have been. All of the elements of this novel should have been great, but it just didn’t pull together and eventually it finished flat.
I received this book for free through Scribner and Net Galley in exchange for an honest review.
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