Brandon TaylorIn 18th century Puritan New England, two men fall in love.
After many nights spent cruising the docks for the company of seamen, the kind, gentle doctor Arthur Lyman witnesses Nathaniel Whitfield preach the Word. Arthur is so struck by Nathaniel’s passion he decides to move his wife and child from Boston to the small town of Cana. Nathaniel welcomes Arthur’s family into his flock — the two hundred souls who were awakened during one of his sermons, an event regarded widely as a miracle, and which led to the founding of Cana — but Nathaniel soon finds himself inexplicably drawn to Arthur as well. In “All the World Beside,” Garrard Conley — author of the bestselling memoir “Boy Erased” (2016) and an Arkansas native — imagines the depths and reverberations of this affair in a time and place that can only understand their love as sin.
Though Nathaniel and Arthur’s clandestine relationship sets the novel’s plot in motion, the story features an ensemble cast of characters, primary among them: Catherine Whitfield, Nathaniel’s wife, who is overwhelmed by a debilitating depression that leaves her sleeping most hours and craving silence; Ezekiel Whitfield, their sensitive youngest child who is drawn to beauty and squirms under the expectation that he will one day become a preacher like his father; and Sarah Whitfield, their strong-willed daughter who makes her family’s physical and spiritual wellbeing her responsibility despite her youth. As Nathaniel and Arthur oscillate between resisting and embracing their love for each other, struggling to reconcile this love with their faith in God, their families bear the burden of their confusion and become a target of the town’s gossip mill.
As a historical novel, “All the World Beside” doesn’t convey setting to the reader through conventional means. Rather than heaping on period piece details or reproducing the stilted language readers might associate with literature and letters written in the 18th century, Conley instead drew from diaries kept at the time to create a formal yet direct narrative voice that may surprise readers with its modern feel. The novel does feature a few choice objects — an ornate wooden clock festooned with cherubs; a salve made of juniper berries, beeswax and mint applied to a wound; and a splintering white cross in the center of town — that anchor the reader’s sense of place through their specificity. But these objects populate the novel’s scenes like props for a play with a minimalist set design, and, like a play, the novel is propelled largely by dialogue-heavy scenes that carry the urgency of the characters’ pressing concerns.
While much of the novel’s narrative tension comes from the long shadows of secrets kept, it struck me that many of the scenes are actually moments where characters are being honest with each other. They confess to and confront one another, they admit their hopes and fears, their wants and needs, and the novel thickens its plot not through the drama of lies but through the difficulty of honesty. Repeatedly, in moments where characters remove the masks they wear in the world, they are described as appearing like strangers to each other.
In one pivotal scene, Catherine and Nathaniel directly address his relationship with Arthur and the impact it’s had on their families, and though Nathaniel’s admission is defamiliarizing and causes her pain, Catherine also “feels closer to him than ever.” Here, truth does not offer resolution; it reveals an anguished tangle of emotions and makes the beloved an other. But it is through these revelations that the characters, given the clarity to see themselves and each other more wholly, grasp for grace and show love they couldn’t otherwise.
Of course, this grace and love cannot fully save them in the end. What makes these characters strange and the revelation of truth difficult is the Puritan world they live in. A world that thrusts restrictive expectations upon them and forces them to wear their masks in the first place. Facing judgment from outside and within, they make decisions that cause harm to themselves and each other. Still, the novel itself, a product of the 21st century and written by a queer author, does not pass judgment. The narrator roves between each character’s point of view with a sense of compassionate neutrality, allowing the reader to understand them better and join in that compassion. The result is a moving, sincere novel that asks difficult questions about the mysteries of faith and love in a hostile world and generously gives the reader a wealth of space to fully feel them.
Recently, I met with Conley over a video call to talk about his influences, intentions and hopes for “All the World Beside,” which came out Tuesday via Riverhead Books. You can purchase the book here.
“All the World Beside” by Garrard Conley
What drew you to this period in American history as the setting for your first novel?
I grew up in a small town in northern Arkansas, in the Mississippi Delta, where there were about 100 people and they all had one place to congregate, which was the church. The community that we were in and many of the emotional experiences I had growing up in that kind of environment formed the writing of “All the World Beside.”
I started all of this because I had conversations with my father in his study. You know, he has all these old books lining his shelves — he’s an unusual Missionary Baptist preacher. He reads a lot and pretty widely for someone like him. He had all these 18th century texts from Jonathan Edwards and all these ministers who were very popular back then. And they were in many ways responsible for the Great Awakening, which was this historical period that really shook up Protestantism and made many other expressions of devotion the staple in churches.
When you have in a Baptist church someone calling on people to come down the aisle to be saved … or in Pentecostal churches where people are screaming and crying and having an emotional reaction to things, many of those things can be traced directly back to [the Great Awakening]. So I was really interested in continuing the journey I began with my first book, “Boy Erased,” which looked at the origins of conversion therapy and also the origins of a kind of fundamentalist thinking that I grew up with.
My target in my writing is fundamentalism in any form, a black and white perspective that does not allow for the growth of the human spirit. I think a fundamentalist worldview is of the Pharisees … It is a very anti-Christ sort of thinking in my opinion and it can exist in any religion or even outside of it. And so, to me, the subject of the book is growing up in one of those places [a fundamentalist small town]. But what I found in writing the book was the joy of connection and the small, seemingly insignificant moments when people turn toward each other out of love, rather than away from each other out of hate.
As a queer lapsed Catholic raised in the South, I found it refreshing to read a contemporary queer literary novel where the characters’ belief in God was a given. And I admired how deeply you portrayed the different and singular ways each character wrestled with their faith, how that then impacted their actions in the material world of the story, and vice versa. So, to ask a broad question, how did writing this novel change your understanding of the relationship between the material and spiritual world?
Wow, I love the philosophy we’re bringing in. A big subject in the book is this battle that often occurs between the head and the heart. It’s been in philosophy since its origins. Obviously, religion and sexuality can be mapped onto some of that conflict. Fundamentalist religion often tells you that you must believe these things, even though everything inside of your body is screaming out that this is wrong. We tend to have this dichotomy, especially in America, between what we think we should do and what we actually want to do. And the Puritans are at the center of that.
So this book was the kind of map to my own understanding of faith and of Christianity. It’s a wrestling with those demons and angels that I grew up with. I wanted to honor the idea of the queer Christian as it exists today … In going around and speaking about “Boy Erased” and trying to do the activist work I’ve done in the past 8 years, I’ve encountered a lot of people who come up to me and say, “Thank you so much for not attacking my religion or my faith. I’m a queer Christian.” … There aren’t many books that are written that allow for the seeming dichotomy between being queer and Christian to exist. [But] there’s nothing incompatible about it, because faith of any kind, especially the Christian faith, is full of almost miraculous, unbelievable things … Why is queerness and Christianity an impossible thing that we cannot reconcile? Why is your view of God so narrow that you can’t invite everyone into that world? So that’s what I wanted to do. It’s called “All the World Beside,” but really it’s about recentering many of these people who feel left out.
You’ve billed this novel as the “queer ‘Scarlet Letter’,” but I also wanted to ask how you see this book in relation to queer literary tradition? Are there any queer novels that you looked at for inspiration or models, or that you feel this novel is in direct conversation with?
The [queer novel] that really appealed to me for my own craft reasons was “Nightwood” by Djuna Barnes … It challenged my desire to map on the identity markers we used today onto the past. As a post [World War I] book written by a lesbian who didn’t really describe characters as such, she just gave us the characters and we just saw them making out with one person and making out with another. And I think in some ways that’s how I would love to write, without these labels that seem to define us and constrict us in some ways. I was really compelled by that kind of necessity.
I would also push back a little bit on “The Scarlet Letter” not being queer … Hester Prynne, on her dress, has to have what was supposed to be an ugly “A” to represent adultery, and instead, she uses her art to create this mark of shame into something that is absolutely beautiful, that everyone in the town wants to wear, even as they pass her on the street and won’t look her in the eye. To me, that’s a metaphor for how art can save our lives and how even the most shamed among us can use that mark of shame and transform it into something beautiful. And that’s pride, right? That’s pure pride, to say, “I am no longer bound by your shackles. I’m excited to be a fag, come at me.” To me, that’s the spirit that I want the book to live in. My characters have to be bound to the historical, but they get as rebellious as they can.
One thing I love about the novel is how richly complicated all the characters are, and their very specific and odd ways of seeing and being in the world. Were there any characters who came more easily to you and were there some who were more difficult to write?
You can see the challenge all throughout the book. What felt like a mistake to me at the beginning of the writing process was that they all sort of contradicted each other. Each character, when you left one, you almost entered another perspective that, if it didn’t challenge the earlier section you’re reading, it certainly drew it in a different light. That kaleidoscopic nature felt very splintered for me in the early drafts, but at a certain point I decided I’m not gonna actually fix that because it’s not a bug. It’s what the book is … life is like this. I’m not sure it’s entirely successful, but even if it doesn’t quite work, I was trying to do something that I felt was true to the texture of reality.
Given the current political moment in which state and local governments fueled by a conservative religious fervor, like here in Arkansas, are trying to restrict and censor queer books and stories in libraries and schools — not to mention all of the trans bans they’re trying to pass, too — what do you hope a novel like yours can offer readers? And what are the limitations of a novel?
Visibility is a tough thing because I received some of the most love I’ve ever received after “Boy Erased” became popular. And then I received some of the worst stuff I’ve ever seen in my life that triggered me a lot … So I think there’s always a cost to everything that you want … even your dreams and maybe especially your dreams. But within that, I think that the only way to move forward as a society seems to be telling the truth. Not when it’s convenient, but when it’s inconvenient. That’s when it matters. If you are a serious artist with truly moral concerns, you must be saying things that aren’t convenient to say.
I believe that the truth is still more powerful than lies, even though it’s hard to see that, especially with the Internet, it’s very hard to understand what the truth is. But I do believe that the search for the truth as an artist and the ability to say that truth when you find it is the only thing that puts you among your great forefathers who came before you. Even if I’m a completely inferior artist … I want to be a part of James Baldwin’s legacy. I want to continue something these greats did, even if it’s in a small way, because at least you can die knowing that you did that, whatever the cost is. Both on the right and sometimes on the left, there’s a lot of silencing that goes on and you just have to refuse to be quiet. We’re being told that a genocide is not happening. We’re being told that it’s just complex. I mean, it is complex, certainly. But we’re also being told to ignore what we’re seeing right in front of our eyes.
I lost almost all of my friends and most of my family whenever I wrote “Boy Erased.” I’m not saying that there wasn’t a great value in writing it, but I didn’t see that value until it started. Like a book that almost no one read and didn’t really change anything? Like, probably it wasn’t worth it. But then I did get an email from a kid that was 16 that said he read my book. Because the parents wouldn’t let him read it in his house, he read it in a library and he didn’t want to kill himself anymore because he read it. And I thought, OK, well, never mind. Screw all the rest of that stuff because this kid’s still alive. And it does help to remember that, but being a writer’s lonely and you don’t know how it’s going to actually affect the world. And that’s where faith comes in. Stories still matter. You have to have faith that when your book goes out into the world, it is found by the people who need it most.
Any last things that you want to say about “All the World Beside” or that you want readers to know?
I hope that no matter where you come from politically or in your own life experience, that you keep an open mind to this book because it’ll never be what you think it is, because it was a surprise to me, honestly. I hope that people, even though they might have heard things that they disagree with or feel like there’s a narrow view that I have, realize that books can be better than the people that write them. And that’s what matters to me.
Garrard Conley will speak about “All the World Beside” in Batesville at Lyon College — his alma mater — on April 4 at 4 p.m. More info about that here.
