We Sinners, a review

I just finished reading Hannah Pylväinen’s 2012 debut novel We Sinners. Of course, it caught my attention by the title alone, and the description that it was about a large family (9 children) in a Christian sect.

The book is very well written and flows easily. I would recommend it to people who like books driven by characters. It reads like a collection of short stories, each one focusing on a single character in the Rovaniemi family (all written in the third person). The children are considered one by one at the key moment when they are ready to choose between staying in the restrictive religious life in which they’ve been raised or leave it. If they go, they don’t quite face an Amish shunning, but pretty close.

The book is decidedly stacked against the sect. This doesn’t surprise me, as Pylväinen made the choice to leave her fundamentalism when she left for college at Mount Holyoke, and the book is most probably her MFA thesis. But what I’m really missing is the case for the religion– at least for some of the children. All I really learn about the sect is that they do not participate in modern culture: t.v., dance music, movies and alcohol. However, the children, in public schools and public universities, aren’t actively kept from these things. They don’t have a uniform or live particularly anabaptist lives.

It does seem a very high value to have lots of children, as many as you can, but this is also portrayed as a dreary, trapped sort of life. The religious life is portrayed as impoverished, culturally and financially. The kids who stay in drift away, are sad or frustrated, or simply swallowed up in a bland life about which there seems nothing much to say. Their chapters close quickly and suddenly, and they mostly don’t reappear.

I don’t think this is all the author has to say on the subject. Her review of “Breaking Amish” for The Wall Street Journal offers a moving plea for a more full appreciation of what is offered by fundamentalist families like the one she grew up in, and a rich sense of what is lost. What is lost is not just close family ties or the approval of parents, but a world view. She writes:

In leaving the church when I was in college, I soon saw I had not stepped into anything else. My admittance into a dubious form of atheism merited no special membership. Atheism seemed, if anything, a community that eschewed community, that strove to preserve the strength of the individual. Thus I clung to anything that might provide stability—a boyfriend, school friends, professors. But these relationships, good as some were, were largely transient—friendships that swelled and faded in response to the changing mileage between us.

This isn’t to say the world has not been kind to me in its own fashion, that I have not found my own freedoms valuable—but it is a lonely place, bound to nothing but what I bind myself to. And I find myself worrying, always, that these ties will not be lasting enough.

I would suggest that what she calls “a dubious form of atheism” is in fact the larger liberalism in which most of us live, that focuses on the individual and choice (i.e., freedom) as the highest values. There is no doubt that the characters in the book who go into the world seem to have easier, more pleasant, successful lives, although they are also in a state of grief and anxiety.

The book takes on, in the end, a large question, maybe the largest: “How, then, shall we live?” This question is asked in Ezekiel 33:10, and alluded to in Romans 6:1. It’s the core question for believers of all kinds (“Knowing God, how then shall we live differently.”) But it’s really the core question for everyone. Whether the goal is happiness, success, love, fulfillment, connection, purpose, the question is the same. In this way, the book has a lot in common with Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, about which I recently wrote.

This book doesn’t pretend to have answers, which is very nice. It could certainly offer more depth to the discussion, or maybe more sympathy and understanding of the beauty and purposefulness of a life within the tradition. But maybe it’s best to see this book as a debut, as an introduction. I look forward to reading more and seeing what she figures out and what stories she tells.