The Sunken Cathedral

by Kate Walbert

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

Synopsis

From the National Book Award nominee and author of the acclaimed, New York Times bestselling A Short History of Women, a deeply moving, "lyrical, ominous, and unexpectedly funny" (Tom Perrotta, author of The Leftovers) novel that follows a cast of characters as they negotiate one of Manhattan's swiftly changing neighborhoods, extreme weather, and the unease of twenty-first-century life.

Marie and Simone, friends for decades, were once immigrants to the city, survivors of World War II in Europe. Now widows living alone in Chelsea, they remain robust, engaged, and adventurous, even as the vistas from their past interrupt their present. Helen is an art historian who takes a painting class with Marie and Simone. Sid Morris, their instructor, presides over a dusty studio in a tenement slated for condo conversion; he awakes the interest of both Simone and Marie. Elizabeth is Marie's upstairs tenant, a woman convinced that others have a secret way of being, a confidence and certainty she lacks. She is increasingly unmoored-baffled by her teenage son, her husband, and the roles she is meant to play.

In a chorus of voices, Kate Walbert, a "wickedly smart, gorgeous writer" (The New York Times Book Review), explores the growing disconnect between the world of action her characters inhabit and the longings, desires, and doubts they experience. Interweaving long narrative footnotes, Walbert paints portraits of marriage, of friendship, and of love in its many facets, always limning the inner life, the place of deepest yearning and anxiety. The Sunken Cathedral is a stunningly beautiful, profoundly wise novel about the way we live now.

Publisher: Scribner

Print pages: 224

Sample

The Sunken Cathedral

I

The water rushed the low bank, its first destruction the unbinding of the strange bound sticks that had for years appeared along the West Side Highway bike path, sticks crisscrossed atop stones stacked in ways that suggested they meant something to someone. In an instant the water broke it all down, the detritus swiftly clogging the already clogged drains as the river rose—fast, there was pressure there, volume and shifting tides, currents, swells—over the West Side Highway bike path, flooding the recently resodded Hudson River Park, the roots of its sycamores and maples, ornamental cherry and dogwood too shallow to grip. The trees toppled and bobbed, knocking in a surging logjam the limestone foundations of the once tenement art galleries, the red-brick churches and garages, and too numerous to count glassy condo towers—each a flimsy envelope leaking carbon, heat, cooled air in summer. Now, capable of resisting nothing, their glass panes pop and shatter like so many bottles lobbed to the sidewalk, the ones that remain reflecting the darkening sky and the tempest of the day and the rising swirl of water as the higher, richer tenants stand in black silhouette.

Helen puts her hands into the rush of water. She knows it is unstoppable; ridiculously unstoppable. Too soon the famous buildings will buckle and go under just as easily as she did a little girl at the great waterfall at Great Falls. She went under in her daisy two-piece, her hard, pale body tight and smooth as the water that knocked her breath out, Great Falls too rough, her mother had warned. She could still hear her mother’s warning somewhere far away, distant as church bells.

She had known all along, her mother was saying.

What the hell had they been thinking? her mother was saying.

What the hell had any of them been thinking?