OCTOBER 2015 - AudioFile
Author Kate Walbert narrates the story of many denizens of New York City whose lives intersect in various ways. For such a varied cast of characters, Walbert’s narration is too monotone and detached. She does little to vocally distinguish her characters in dialogue. Furthermore, she rarely infuses the story with any of the yearning and regret that fill her characters’ inner lives. As the story shifts abruptly between the present and the past, Walbert makes use of lengthy footnotes. These do not transition well to the audio format as they’re jarring and disorienting. Readers should seek out this novel in print. E.M.C © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
★ 03/16/2015
Footnotes enrich the text of this short, deceptively simple novel; altogether the book combines memories, regrets, doubts, hopes, fears, and mental detours including an escape from war-torn France and the past of a sugar maple tree. The result is a multidimensional portrait of two 80-something widows in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood venturing outside their comfort zone to take an art class. Simone and Marie, both French survivors of WWII, have been friends since meeting as young mothers on a Brooklyn playground. Neighbors, family, art students, and school administrators provide a supporting cast whose hopes and disappointments, routines and crises, pleasures, and fears converge to form an ode to New York City, a riff on aging, and a discourse on living with a vague fear of impending catastrophe. A keen observer of architecture, landscape, and culture, Walbert (A Short History of Women) takes inspiration from Debussy’s water music, referenced in the title and with impressionistic dabs of prose and subtle shifts of tone. Whether she is being technically exact or ingeniously playful, above or below the (High) line, Walbert’s wistful glimpse of women reaching out during their last days of independence offers a penetrating look at New York and the world, post-9/11, post-Sandy, pre–the next disaster. (June)
The Boston Globe J. Courtney Sullivan
[A] sense of a remembered world that lives on just beneath the ever-changing surface is at the heart of Kate Walbert’s stunning new novel, The Sunken Cathedral. A powerful elegy for a fading New York City and for the planet as a whole, it is also a deeply human story, full of rich and complex characters…[Walbert] writes with such precision that she’s able to pack 80 years worth of personal and world history — war, climate change, marriage, parenthood, friendship, death,grace, love, petty betrayal, and sudden violence — into a slim volume. She’s also very funny… the footnotes work beautifully…audacious…masterful.
Tom Perrotta
The Sunken Cathedral is a gem of a novel—lyrical, ominous, and unexpectedly funny. Kate Walbert has somehow managed to write an elegy for a Manhattan that still exists, and characters who—like most of us—would prefer not to think about their impending doom.
The Washington Post Ron Charles
Insightful…Like so many elements of this rich new novel, its title points backward and forward… though Walbert never allows her narrative to dissolve into stream of consciousness, she manipulates time and space as though they were as viscous as oils. And she allows the central plot to drip off the edges of this canvas. That effect is structurally emphasized by footnotes that read like little prose poems of ineffable grace... Some of these notes are long, taking up more than two pages, and some contain incidents as moving and significant as anything in the main text of the novel,a strategy that implicitly challenges what’s central and what’s tangential in our lives… Walbert’s narrative method is a gentle lesson in empathy, a reminder that it’s only artifice and egotism that give us the misimpression that we’re the central protagonist of the life we’re composing.
The San Francisco Chronicle Joan Frank
Kate Walbert’s fourth novel, The Sunken Cathedral, makes a music that is dissonant, haunting, vibrant, moving and wise. It may be her best work yet, and may spark youto go find all her prior books… Walbert packs everything into [a] series ofbraided narratives: deliciously human, memorable characters; the sensuousphysical world (‘a collection of wet smells, furtive cigarettes, coffee’); atart omniscience (though points of view alternate) shepherding a brisk pace.Best, she infuses The Sunken Cathedral(an apt, eerie image) with a sense of time’s relentlessness (figuring often asthreatening weather): how it pools and eddies, drowns or sweeps away what oncemattered — and how we respond to our arbitrary placement in it… Time isdeepened in these pages by commentaries or expansions in the form of longfootnotes — a form I’ve rarely liked elsewhere but which works powerfully here…Walbert’s past oeuvre has notably examined — in a spiky, oblique prose style —the predicaments of women. She accomplishes that here again brilliantly, butthis time her style allows easier entry, and her scope widens… Sharp, richly imagined, The Sunken Cathedral serves — like much of Walbert’s work —as a lovely manifesto: Attention must be paid.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch Joseph Peschel
In The SunkenCathedral, Kate Walbert renders an impressionistic portrayal of animperiled New York, whose residents live with the threat of weather surges andterrorism in a city that is at once mythical and real…[a] brilliant allegory… fascinating characters and theirbackstories propel the novel from serenity to angst, as each character preparesfor the coming deluge.
Ann Packer
"Kate Walbert sees in a manner that exalts the everyday into poetry and gives our deepest desires an unexpected and brilliant expression. She is among our very best writers, which The Sunken Cathedral makes abundantly clear."
The Dallas Morning News Martha Sheridan
Walbert is a writerwith the power to alter your view of the world and of what constitutes story…The Sunken Cathedral is an experience, afriend, an intellectual companion, a jewel with many facets…a collection ofobservations and impressions, a carefully curated collection of words that theauthor has polished to a brilliant shine.
NPR.org Heller McAlpin
[A] shimmering newnovel…At its heart is a wonderful pair of widowed French-born friendswho both survived World War II, married Americans, and raised their onlychildren together…Walbert has beenrightly celebrated for her ability to capture the variety and vulnerability ofwomen's lives with a combination of lyricism and brawn…In TheSunken Cathedral, she again creates multiple narrative strands whicheventually dovetail as satisfyingly as tightly fitted joints on awell-constructed rocking chair. But then she takes her remarkable technical prowess to a newlevel with long footnotes…This literal subtext forms a secondary narrativeline that cleverly reflects the way attention is so often fragmented…abeautiful tribute to a city that's continually in flux.
Tampa Bay Times Colette Bancroft
Kate Walbert not only sees vanishing women — a pair ofwidows in their 80s, the suddenly uncertain mother of a teenage son, amiddle-aged art historian with visions of a drowning city — but paints theirlives in indelibly rich and vibrant colors in her stunning new novel, The Sunken Cathedral… Walbert conjures [the] past as she embodiesthe present, in shimmeringly lovely prose embedded with jewellike details.Marie's story becomes, in essence, a love story, although the heartbreaking endof one: She is the sole survivor of a happy marriage. Walbert capturesperfectly Marie's precise sense of loss.
Lauren Groff
The Sunken Cathedral is impressionistic, a book of drifting shadows and blazing clarity; Kate Walbert has written a gorgeous and moving requiem for a people and a city that are not yet lost. A magnificent achievement.
Christine Schutt
Kate Walbert’s frightening, timely novel follows an achingly particular cast, small flames unexpectedly doused, so that the prevailing uncertainty of what it is to be alive rises like the waters flooding coasts. The insufficiencies of sheltering-in against Sudden Weather turn Who We Are Stories into Who Are We plaints, yet Walbert is wise and funny and compassionate, and she gifts The Sunken Cathedral with birds and strokes of blue. ‘Much to learn from blue,’ a painter considers, and much to learn from this ambitiously made, great fiction.
BookPage Lauren Bufferd
Walbert tunes in toa complex chorus of female characters in contemporary Manhattan, a cityrecently altered by climate change, tragedy and new wealth...The tapestry ofvoices weave a rich pattern, and the novel is strengthened by Walbert’s use offootnotes, which allow her characters’ thoughts to move freely from the presentto the past, uncovering private or previously unshared memories…TheSunken Cathedral is a reference to a piano sonata by Debussythat itself alludes to the mythical story of a cathedral that rises up from thesea. Like Debussy’s impressionistic music, the novel is poetic, full of lyricalimagery and subtle shifts of tone. Ambitious,elegiac and occasionally even funny, TheSunken Cathedral is an emotionally resonant story of people caught ina time of unease and change—and a striking portrait of the way we livenow.
BookBrowse Davida Chazen
[Walbert] gives us prose that is poetic, luscious, and utterly exquisite, while remaining both accessibleand elusive. She also litters her story with footnotes…these tidbits addextra color to an already brilliantly vibrant mosaic…I haven't read a book thisbeautifully written since Ondaatje's The English Patient…I cannot recommend it more highly.
Bustle
Walbert writes unlike anyone I’ve read before, imbuing each of her finely-tuned sentences with stunning detail. Trust me: You won’t ever have been more eager to read the footnotes in your life.
Shelf Awareness
Kate Walbert's TheSunken Cathedral paintsan elegant picture of a LowerManhattan neighborhood and its citizens, at risk from both ‘suddenweather’ and relentless gentrification.
Stacy Schiff
"What a marvelous book: one part Transit of Venus, one part Stone Diaries, one part incomparable. Actually, that's not true: she write like a female Ian McEwan."-
Washington Post
"Ambitious and impressive . . . Reminiscent of a host of innovative writers from Virginia Woolf to Muriel Spark to Pat Barker . . . A witty and assured testament to the women’s movement and women writers, obscure and renowned.
New York Times Book Review - Leah Hager Cohen
Praise for A Short History of Women
"Wickedly smart . . . A gorgeously wrought and ultimately wrenching work of art."
Library Journal
★ 04/15/2015
Simone and Marie, two elderly widows in New York City, sign up for an art class to complete an unfinished painting by Simone's husband, while Elizabeth, a tenant in Marie's brownstone, becomes emotionally paralyzed by an assignment at her son's school meant to share insights into the students' families. Reading this hypnotic novel by Walbert, a National Book Award nominee for Our Kind, feels like falling down a rabbit hole of linked stories, with connections that resemble a trail of literary hyperlinks. In a postmodern quirk, effectively employed here, the novel contains numerous footnotes, which gradually take up more and more of the page. By design, the subtext overwhelms at times, the footnotes revealing the often painful undercurrents that lie just beneath the surface of the story. There are apocalyptic overtones, with themes of drowning, climate change, and an impending sense of doom. Though the novel seems to be set in the present, it feels more menacing than our current world, with sudden, dangerous storms and terrorism drills in school. VERDICT An unconventional and unsettling novel with vivid imagery and passages of pure poetry. [See Prepub Alert, 12/8/14.]—Lauren Gilbert, Sachem P.L., Holbrook, NY
OCTOBER 2015 - AudioFile
Author Kate Walbert narrates the story of many denizens of New York City whose lives intersect in various ways. For such a varied cast of characters, Walbert’s narration is too monotone and detached. She does little to vocally distinguish her characters in dialogue. Furthermore, she rarely infuses the story with any of the yearning and regret that fill her characters’ inner lives. As the story shifts abruptly between the present and the past, Walbert makes use of lengthy footnotes. These do not transition well to the audio format as they’re jarring and disorienting. Readers should seek out this novel in print. E.M.C © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2015-03-20
An artful novel in stories from the author of A Short History of Women (2009) and Our Kind (2004). Marie and Simone survived World War II in France and came to New York with American husbands. Elizabeth, Marie's tenant, is the mother of an adolescent son. The other voices shaping the novel include Margaret, the interim head of the school Margaret's son attends, and Helen, a fellow student in the painting class Simone and Marie take together. There are men's voices, too—the painting instructor, a policeman, Marie's son—but their stories figure only to the extent that their lives intersect with those of Walbert's female protagonists. That this is a novel concerned with the thoughts and experiences of women of a certain age is, all by itself, worthy of note. But Walbert does more here than simply appeal to a demographic that is seldom represented in fiction. She situates the lives of her characters within the context of a changing New York and a changing world, and she also takes some stylistic risks with her storytelling. Marie's house is in Chelsea, but it's clear that the neighborhood she settled in as a young bride is just barely connected to the neighborhood Elizabeth navigates. Marie's home is a time capsule of another New York; the black-and-white TV set with rabbit ears is just about the only thing that separates it from the Gilded Age. Elizabeth, on the other hand, is struggling to negotiate the expectations set by other parents at her son's progressive—and aggressively 21st-century—school. Throughout, Walbert uses footnotes to move between inner and outer, past and present. This technique is especially effective in depicting Marie's childhood, a subject that she doesn't willingly discuss. And all of this is suffused with a mournful air occasioned by climate change. Strange storms haunt this novel, as does the fear that New York—the city now, the city's history—will soon be underwater. Elegant and elegiac.
