Strout’s second novel inspires ‘Abide’ accessible, moving narrative

ABIDE WITH ME, by Elizabeth Strout, Random House, New York, 2006, 297 pages, hardback, $24.95

Elizabeth Strout has been fascinated with pastors’ lives since she attended Congregational churches with her parents as a little girl. In a different lifetime, the award-winning writer might have become a minister.

The Maine native most likely would have published books about theology and the pool of contemporary fiction would have been greatly diminished.

Strout’s first book, “Amy and Isabelle” was a literary sensation when it was published seven years ago. It made the Top 10 of The New York Times best-seller list and was optioned by Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Films. The mother-daughter coming-of-age tale won a Los Angeles Times award for first fiction and was a finalist for the PEN-Faulkner Award.

In “Abide With Me,” her second novel published earlier this year, Strout returned to the comfort and challenge of church life.

Set in 1959 in fictional West Annett, Maine, the book tells the story a young Congregational minister reeling after the death of his wife. The Rev. Tyler Caskey tries to hold onto his family and his congregation, bravely soldiering on, stumbling through a grief that tests his relationship with God.

“For a long time, I’ve been interested in what it was like to be a minister,” Strout said in a recent phone interview from New York, where she lives with her husband, Marty Feinman. “It has always intrigued me. I think it’s a very different kind of job than most people have.”

The writer was born in Portland to parents who were teachers, but grew up in Durham, N.H., and South Harpswell. It was in those communities that she attended Congregational churches with her parents and grandparents. Because the ministers in those congregations earned divinity degrees from Bangor Theological Seminary, Strout traveled to the historic campus on Union Street to learn what her fictional minister would have encountered as a student there in the mid-1950s.

“The librarian was very nice to me,” she recalled. “He told me the history of the seminary and found course catalogs from that time period so I could see which classes Tyler would have taken. I also talked to an alum who’d gone there, and he described what it like at that time. I loved the school.”

In her book, the author renamed the school the Brockmorton Theological Seminary, combining the name of the city where it has been located for nearly 200 years with the names of a professor emeritus and a past president.

The Rev. Dr. Burton Throckmorton was the New Testament scholar at the seminary for decades. His wife, the Rev. Dr. Ansley Coe Throckmorton, served as president from 1995 to 2001. Last year, Bangor Theological Seminary moved from its historic campus to the modern Husson College campus on the other side of the city.

“The Brockmorton Theological Seminary sat on a hill, its old stone buildings and large elms dominating the town with a kind of quiet stateliness,” is how Strout described the school in her book when Tyler returns to visit a professor. “Only the new library seemed out of place, built off to the side with a squat angularity, and the sight of it saddened Tyler, made him feel older than he was, for he would have preferred it match the old architecture instead.”

It’s those small details painted onto Strout’s large canvas about grief and the healing power of community that makes “Abide With Me” ring so true. One detail the writer included describes how even in the dead of winter, women leave their coats on in church while the men remove theirs and neatly fold them under their pews. That piece of minutiae says so much about the flock that Tyler is struggling to lead while surrounded by the darkness of his sorrow.

In “Abide With Me,” Strout vividly brings to life the deep wounds inflicted by grief and lovingly illuminates how even a challenged faith can be a healing salve when it is applied by a caring congregation.

Judy Harrison can be reached at 990-8207 and jharrison@bangordailynews.net.