As It Is In Heaven

From Barnes & Noble

The Barnes & Noble Review
Sometimes the best works of fiction are uncategorizable. There are some readers, for example, who would shelve Niall Williams's As It Is in Heaven squarely in the romance section, while others would just as certainly place this follow-up to Four Letters of Love next to the works of the best magical realists. The proverbial "they" might consider devising a new category for books like this one: Call it Something for Everyone, the shelf that would hold those all-too-rare novels that combine touching romance, spirituality, and magic with good, old-fashioned storytelling.

As It Is in Heaven is the tale of 28-year-old Stephen Griffin, a schoolteacher who lives with his ailing father, Philip, in County Clare, Ireland. Diffident, insecure men whose lives have been hobbled by the early death of Stephen's mother, the two live in a kind of self-protective cocoon and let life pass them by. Then Philip's doctor confirms what he himself has long suspected: He has cancer and will soon die. In the first of a series of magical "deals" with God, Philip buys time so that he can live to see his son happy and cared for.

Meanwhile, Stephen happens upon a visiting orchestra and falls madly, irrationally in love with an Italian violinist named Gabriella Castoldi. Far more sophisticated and worldly than he, Gabriella seems an unlikely participant in the great romance Stephen imagines...and yet spiritual and metaphysical forces conspire to bring the two together. Their ensuing relationship is complicated, tempestuous, and ultimately profound.

It's a romantic, movingstory,but one that might seem rather ordinary were it not for Williams's lilting prose and the kind of deference to magic and coincidence that characterized some of the early works of Alice Hoffman. Take, for instance, the scene in which Stephen walks along the sea and realizes that Gabriella will, in fact, come to him, just as surely as his father will slip away. "Clouds blacked the stars. The sea was in the air and spat saltily at the back of the house, but Stephen did not care and walked down to where the land fell away to the rocks and the waves. His heart was racing. He felt as if, out of the infinite vastness of the unknown, a hand had reached for him, and he had been given new grace." Or this moment of reflection — "It was a micro-season of happiness, a blissed-out moment of abandoned candlelight, and Stephen Griffin could sit at the table in the brief pleasure of knowing: This is joy, this is the richness of things, the brimming sense of the impossible becoming real." The brief chapter in which Stephen flies to Venice in search of the fleeing Gabriella will put a reader in mind of the old Truffaut film "The Story of Adele H." Half mad with desire and obsession, after ten days of searching, of saying "her name at shops and fish stalls...and damp candlelit churches," Stephen almost dies of pain and disappointment.

But there's more going on here than simple romance, thanks in part to the cast of charmingly offbeat characters who inhabit this colorful Irish town. In addition to Philip, who is the kind of father Frank McCourt could only have dreamed about, there is Nelly Grant, the greengrocer, and Moses Mooney, a blind musician, who has sensed that love is coming. The jealous administrator at Stephen's school is the closest this book comes to an "evil" character, although her disapproval of Stephen clearly stems less from meanness than from jealousy that Stephen may in fact get what everyone wants (i.e., a great love). These are simple, down-home characters, but they take on a poetic importance. Add to that Williams's tendency to write homiletic metaphors — Philip, for example, is a tailor, and so Williams sees his life in tailor's terms: "Philip made a few short tugs, as if teasing the cloth for weakness, the way life does a man" — and you begin to get an idea of why this book will have widespread appeal. Of course, there are probably some readers who will find Williams's novel a tad on the hokey side, what with his tendency toward fortuitous coincidence and the fact that people not in physical proximity tend to "speak" to each other, but those readers miss the point: As It Is in Heaven should be read as a parable. Like a great gothic love story, albeit one with more fully drawn characters, it is less about a specific romance than about emotion in general — huge, sweeping emotion in a series of dramatic locations. It may not have the bleakness of vision, the portentousness that characterizes the great Irish writing of this century, but As It Is in Heaven is as much a tale of love and loss as anything James Joyce ever wrote. And one thing's for sure: It's a whole lot more crowd-pleasing.

—Sara Nelson

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Williams, a gifted Irish writer, was known only for nonfiction until his first novel Four Letters of Love reaped a chorus of praise (including a PW Best Books accolade) a couple of years ago. Now he has tried to repeat the trick, but unfortunately the freshness that leaped from the pages has become mere practiced calculation. His hero, Stephen Griffin, is a dim young man declining into premature senility as a history teacher, whose life is transformed by the rather improbable arrival of a beautiful but deeply unhappy young Italian violinist, Gabriella Castoldi, to play a concert at a little West Ireland hotel. Griffin is struck dumb with passion; since symptoms of magic realism abound, smells of white lilies and a general glowing aura convince those around him he is in love. Gabriella, emerging from an unhappy affair, decides to stay on in Ireland; Griffin meets her again and they have a fling; she goes back to Venice and finds she is pregnant; he follows but cannot find her; she comes back; finally, they carry out the wishes of an old blind seafarer (shades of Under Milk Wood's Captain Cat) and build a beautiful little music school by the sea. Williams is a felicitous phrasemaker, and he conjures up some lovely poetic images of weather and seascapes. Passages about the ineffable beauty of music and the emotional impact it can have are touching. But the sense of delighted surprise that was so constant in Letters is notably absent; the story is far more rigidly structured, and the characters, from Stephen's poor dad dying of cancer and trying to give his money away, to a chirpy lady who keeps a greengrocer shop and knows what fruits to sell for all ills of the heart, are tired clich s. There are pleasures here for those who enjoy the equivalent of a beautifully photographed, sad movie, but Williams had seemed capable of much more.
Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Having lost his mother and sister in a car crash at an early age, Stephen Griffith is so deeply reserved that he practically disappears into the woodwork. But then one day he spots violinist Gabriella Castoldi in performance and is transformed by an overwhelming love. Gabriella, who came to Ireland with a boyfriend and promptly fell out of love and refused to leave, isn't quite as bowled over by Stephen but is glad enough to launch a liaison. On this slender strip of a story, Williams constructs a whole, top-heavy novel. After Four Letters of Love (LJ 7/97), Williams's thoughtful and enchanting debut, this second work comes as a shock: it's a sticky, sentimental mess, terrifically overblown and portentously yet conventionally written. Buy only where soppy love stories flourish.
— Barbara Hoffert

Irish America Magazine

For the reader who likes a good, passionate love story, with swirling prose and a scenic Irish backdrop...

Meghan O'Rourke

...[A] book about trying to read the messages we find in the world around us, and about the fractured moments in which lives notably, fatefully, intersect. Williams proposes that it is empathy and the willingness to work at the business of living that redeem us....The novel's less portentous moments demonstrate the author's ear for language and easy, confident gaze.
— The New York Times Book Review

Kirkus Reviews

An appealing romantic tale about the love of an introverted schoolteacher for a beautiful Italian musician: from the Irish author of several popular nonfiction books as well as the highly praised novel Four Letters of Love (1997). In a wistful voice that's somewhat reminiscent of William Trevor's understated stories of modest lives in crisis and conflict, Williams fashions a compelling narrative that evolves from the separate consciousness of several thoughtfully dreamy souls. Lanky and nondescript 30ish Stephen Griffin is a history teacher whose self-effacing loneliness becomes transfigured by his fascination with Gabriella Castoldi, a violinist who falls in love with Ireland while performing there and settles not far from Stephen's hometown. His father Philip is a widower dying of cancer but still mourning the accidental deaths of his wife and daughter long ago—and "bargaining" with God to allow him enough life to help his son through the passion that Philip intuitively recognizes as the reincarnation of his own romantic devotion. The vacillating interrelations, intimacies, and disappointments of these three are neatly related to the lives of people they variously encounter, including a kindly Indian doctor unavoidably estranged from his own family and a preternaturally wise greengrocer who believes in the healing powers of fresh produce. There's a lot to like—and more than a little to gag on—in this whimsical story, which is both enriched by stunning metaphor ("trees stiffened in the long arthritis of brutal weathering") and burdened with treacly summarizations ("Stephen and Gabriella loved and lived in a sweet innocence and ate their meals and listened to musicand played chess"). Williams's faux-naive prose draws you in, all right, but his penchant for homiletic simplification and touchy-feely sentimentality may make you begin enraptured by the tale's clarity of folktale and finish stupefied by the formulaic smugness of pop fiction at its most fulsome.