Noah's Wife

by Lindsay Starck

Genres: Family Life; Literary Fiction; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

In the tradition of Daniel Wallace’s Big Fish and Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child comes a gorgeously written, brilliantly introspective, fable-like novel reimagining Noah’s Ark for our modern times.

When young minister Noah and his dutiful wife arrive at their new post in the hills, they find a gray and wet little town where it’s been raining for as long as anyone can remember. Noah’s wife is determined to help her husband revive this soggy congregation, but she soon finds her efforts thwarted by her eccentric new neighbors, among them an idiom-wielding Italian hardware store owner, a towering town matriarch, and a lovelorn zookeeper determined to stand by his charges. Overwhelmed, Noah’s wife fails to realize that Noah too is battling his own internal crisis.

Soon the river waters rise, flooding the streets of the town and driving scores of wild animals out of the once-renowned zoo. As the water swallows up the houses, the telephone poles, and the single highway out of town, Noah, his wife, and the townspeople must confront not only the savage forces of nature but also the fragile ties that bind them to one another.

Full of whimsy and gentle ironic humor, Noah’s Wife is a wise and poignant novel that draws upon the motifs of the biblical flood story to explore the true meaning of community, to examine the remarkable strength of the human spirit, and to ask whether hope can exist even where faith has been lost.

Release date: January 26, 2016

Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons

Print pages: 384

Sample

In the beginning it was not raining, but it is raining now—

 

and steadily.

It has been raining for so long that even though it has not

always been raining the townspeople begin to feel as though

this is the case—as though the weather has always been this

way, the sky this gray, the puddles this profound. They feel,

sometimes, as though the sun has never risen over their town at

all, not ever; that its very existence is nothing but a rumor: a

product of the same sort of fallacy and telescopic inaccuracy

that had everyone thinking for so long that the world was flat

or that the constellations were arranged in patterns.

“There are no patterns!” they say to one another now—

and darkly. “There are no stars. There is only the rain, and the

clouds.”

They divide their lives into two sections: the time that came

before the rain and the time that will follow it. But after a

while the rain soaks so thoroughly through their consciousness

that they begin to feel as if there is no time but the present.

“Today is the only day!” says Mauro to his neighbors when

they enter his general store.

“You mean—there is no day but today,” they say. They propel

their arms in circles to rid their sleeves of rainwater.

In the beginning they had all believed that it would end

because whenever it had rained before (as it rains everywhere),

it had always ended. After a few weeks, when it didn’t stop, they

tried to find a scientific explanation for it. At first they congregated

in the library to seek counsel from written accounts

of great rains of the past, and rotated the rabbit ears of their

television antennae in a vain attempt to find a weather station

that would illuminate their situation. As the rain continued, the

transmission of their televisions and their radios grew worse

and their sense of isolation increased. They turned the damp

pages of their books, and when they met on the street they

exchanged theories about the rain as some sort of meteorological

quirk resulting from a change in the winds or the tides. Later

on, as the vitamin D drained from their blood and a damp

despair seeped deep into their hearts, they decided that there

was nothing that could explain it and so they stopped trying.

“It is not something to be explained,” they say to one another,

philosophically. “It is merely something to be endured!”

They endure.

What is more: they take pride in their endurance. They strive

to see the rain as something that sets them apart, makes them

stronger, wetter, wiser. “If this had happened to anyone but to

us,” they remind each other, “those people would not have been

able to bear it. They would have left long ago.”

Thus staying becomes the quality that singles them out. Staying

becomes the symbol of their strength, their response to

clouds hanging heavy and low, the mantra that they mutter

when they find their outlook to be especially gray. Sometimes,

on the days when they believe they cannot bear it any longer,

the rain seems to let up—but the clouds never scatter, and a day

or two later it has begun to fall again in earnest.

The water pours down roofs and rushes through gutters and

falls in silver arcs from the eaves to the ground. It collects

between the cracks in the sidewalk and then spreads in pools

across the pavement. The townspeople postpone school picnics

and town parades, put away their bicycles, carve ditches through

their lawns, take baseball bats to knock the rust from their cars.

They purchase special light boxes from a mail-order

catalog because the description promises that the bulbs will cheer them

by simulating the sun. They look at the sky so often that they

become experts on the many different shades of gray. They collect

ponchos and rain boots and wear them with self-conscious

style. They learn how to walk two abreast on the sidewalk while

carrying open umbrellas. The trick is in the tilt: a slight movement

of the elbow toward the side of one’s body so that the

spokes do not collide.

“How lovely the streets look with the color of all the

umbrellas!” says Mrs. McGinn to her neighbors with a fierce

and dogged optimism. “How pleasant it is not to have to water

our lawns or wash our cars.”

In short: they adapt. They are, in fact, surprised to find how

fluid their lives are. They are surprised to discover how easy it is

to make these alterations, how simple it is to shift their daily

habits to fill the empty spaces and restore balance. Weeks

become months and years. By the time the new minister arrives

in town with his birdlike wife, it seems as if it has been raining

forever.

“There really is a certain beauty in it, isn’t there?” exclaims

the wife, examining the jeweled drops that cling to the windowpanes.

She looks attentively to her husband.

“My cup runneth over,” says the minister, watching the water

topple out and over the edge of a brimming rain gauge. His

voice is hard and bright.

“There are good days and there are bad days,” explain the

townspeople—and this is true. There are days when they wake

full of pristine joy, when the town outside their windows

seems cleansed of trash and filth and old muddy dreams. But

there are also long hours of mildew and frustration; there are

moments when they lash out at their friends with bitter words or

threaten each other with strong resentful shakes of their spiked

umbrellas.

They are not always happy, or at peace. They miss their shadows.

Sometimes when they step outside in the morning the first

drop of rain on their plastic ponchos echoes in their ears

with the resounding toll of a funeral bell. Sometimes when they

return home in the faint gray light of evening, they cannot bear

the hoarse whispers of their rusted wind chimes and they cannot

bear the sight of the water steadily rising in their rain gauges.

They despair; and they are sick of despair. With swift and sudden

anger they take up the shining cylinders and they hurl the

water into the grass and they fling the gauges with great force

toward the concrete, standing and watching while the glass

shatters and breaks. At the moment of impact they feel something

crack within their very souls and then they go inside—repentant—
to find a broom to sweep up a pile of pieces that are jagged and clear.

In the rain, the wreckage shines like diamonds.