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Health & Fitness

Book Review: "All Shall Be Well..." by Tod Wodicka

A review of Tod Wodicka's funny, sad, strange novel, "All Shall Be Well; and All Shall Be Well; and All Manner of Things Shall Be Well"

“All Shall Be Well; and All Shall Be Well; and All Manner of Things Shall Be Well,” by Tod Wodicka, is a lovely novel with a terrible title. Once you’ve read the novel, though, you won’t want to change that title – it is one of the many odd elements of this sad, strange book that works. Not a detail is wasted in this novel, Wodicka’s first, and that is no small feat, for the book teems with stunning details of modern and medieval history. In lesser hands, this story, these details, these characters, would be off the rails by the second chapter. But this book, and all of the impossible details, will move you.

The opening of “All Shall Be Well…” is unsettling. We begin in italics, addressing an eight-year old girl named Hildegard who has been buried alive in a medieval religious ceremony – she has been given to the Church because she is the youngest mouth to feed in a family of too many mouths, offered as an acolyte so that she never has a chance to sin. Faint rays of light and snatches of music filter through cracks in the walls, comforting and confusing the scared girl; people come and go outside her crypt: praying, laughing, seeking miracles. The acolyte begins to see in the endless dark, she hears the bells of the monks, and she is, if not happy, comfortable: “You pray that they will never let you leave.

The italics stop, and in roman type we meet the narrator, Burt Hecker, who has been overseeing a re-enactment of the childhood of the medieval saint Hildegard von Bingen. Burt, to put it mildly, is a mess. He has cobbled together a life based on the principles of medieval re-enactment, which means he dresses in a tunic, refuses to eat food or use items that are “out of period,” and spends most of his time in a mead-induced fog. He, like the Hildegard he imagines, does not want to leave the gauzy comfort of his medievalism. In the endless dark, there is no painful light of reality.

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The story unfolds slowly, largely because our narrator is speaking to us through his fog. The chronology is often confusing, a deliberate touch that demonstrates how Burt cannot and does not operate in real, logical time. Nearly catatonic with grief from the loss of his wife, Kitty, to cancer, he has sold the family’s home, a Victorian inn in upstate New York, and is now traveling in present-day eastern Europe, searching for his estranged son, Tristan. Woven through this quest story are Burt’s memories of his wife and children, memories that become harder for Burt to bear as he gets closer to finding Tristan and closer to acknowledging the truth of his own behavior.

The family Hecker, we learn, suffers from too much history. Kitty is the daughter of Lemko immigrants; her mother, Anna, dresses only in traditional Lemko costume and devotes her energy to preserving the traditions of her people, a Carpathian ethnicity nearly wiped out in the 1940s. Despite their shared penchant for re-enacting, Burt and Anna do not get along: “Our histories clashed,” observes Burt. As a young boy, Tristan studied medieval music as a way to connect to Burt; he picked up his grandmother’s Lemko folk instruments when he severed ties with his father. June, Burt’s daughter, spent her childhood obsessed with the futuristic Star Trek as a reaction against Burt’s mania for the past. As a grown woman, though, June works in geology – like the rest of her family, she cannot resist the pull of the past, but she does it on her own terms, concentrating instead on the inanimate, the scientific, the precise.

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Immersed as they are in historical details, the surviving Heckers cannot set aside their shared past, and so cannot cope with each other in the present. Tristan and June were forced to bear the burden of their mother’s illness and death with little or no help from Burt, who disappeared deeper into his mead and his medieval persona as Kitty worsened. Their resentment and anger have made them cruel, not only to their father, but even to those people who try to offer them love. By the time the family reunites in Prague, we are protective of Burt’s fragile, new self-knowledge. Forgiveness and redemption are possible, but only if they can each abandon their endless, obsessive re-enacting of the past.

Language is this strange novel’s greatest asset: Wodicka stretches the meanings of words and tries on new combinations of phrases, and in so doing, he gives us a lightness that nicely balances the story’s heavy themes. In a motel: “The man behind the counter mumbles what can only be a warning or a curse, emitting a low garlic apocalypse from beneath his mustache as he hands us our key.” In Germany: “Many of the homes had metal porches aflame with flowers, frozen explosions of them, vines pouring up and down the walls like vegetable smoke.”  In a car (not driven by Burt, of course): “The window wipers smear stars of exploded insect into gray frowns.”  These flourishes, flights of fancy from Burt’s mead-addled brain, punctuate the narrative without overwhelming it.

The interminable title is a quote from the fourteenth-century Christian mystic Julian of Norwich; Eliot fans will recognize the line from his Four Quartets. It is a prayer, not a promise, and it reflects Julian’s gentle theology, unusual for her time: she preached that sin was a natural part of the soul’s maturation process. We sin, Julian believed, because we are naïve and ignorant, not because we are evil. We make mistakes, we hurt each other, and we learn from our mistakes – we cannot gain self-knowledge, cannot grow closer to God, without making the mistakes that teach us painful lessons. All shall be well, we hope, we pray, but only if we embrace the real, hard lessons of the past and carry them into the future.

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