Nial Williams's Four Letters of Love and "It is what it is." Or is it?

One of the great joys for any reader is discovering an author you have never read before but soon realize that you want to read everything he or she has ever written. A few years ago, I was listening to The Habit podcast with Jonathan Rogers. Rogers always asks his guests at the end of the interview: “Who are the writers that make you want to write?” It is a great question. The guest that week (I forget who it was now) mentioned Niall Williams. She described him as “an Irish Wendell Berry.” Berry’s writing has been formative for me for over two decades, so I picked up Williams’s book, This is Happiness. It shot near the top of my all-time favorites, and I am making my way through all of his books, trying to limit myself to reading only one per year, so they last. 

I read his first novel, Four Letters of Love, this past month. I can’t say the title drew me in; it sounds like a Nicholas Sparks’ story. But after reading three of his books, I trusted Williams’s storytelling and his characters. The plot follows two families attempting to endure the reality of unmet expectations - in their jobs, in their marriages, and in their children. 

Four Letters has a great opening paragraph. 

When I was twelve years old God spoke to my father for the first time. God didn’t say much. He told my father to be a painter, and left it at that, returning to a seat amongst the angels and watching through the clouds over the grey city to see what would happen next. 

The narrator is a boy named Nicholas Coughlan. His father, William, takes God’s suggestion to heart. He quits his job as a civil servant and begins to paint. He leaves home for months at a time, sleeps in abandoned barns or out in the elements and paints abstract canvases. For several years, Nicholas and his mom live off of buttered toast, a few vegetables from the charity of the local grocer, and wait. His mother rarely leaves her room. The first summer his father returns, Nicholas is filled with hope. When he accompanies his father to the train station to pick up the first paintings he assumes, “they would all be sold in a week, we’d have carpet in the hall and a red car in the garage.” (16).

When they arrive home, his father places the paintings in the sitting room. Nicholas looks for a moment and then leaves the room. He tells us, “what brutal compositions they were, all black above, splashed, dribbled with brown, stippled blue then purple, washed across with a wave of white…they were the paintings of a demented child; I could make out nothing in the furious nexus of coloured curves and lines and after a few moments looked no more.” (20). His mother takes one glance and returns to her room. Rarely leaving, except to clean the house while Nicholas is at school. She dies a few years later of depression, leaving him alone with his father.  

On the other side of Ireland, on a small island with no cars, the master of the one room schoolhouse, Muiris Gore, and his wife, Margaret, have two children, Sean and Isabel. Sean is a musical prodigy but a seizure leaves him bedridden and mute. Margaret becomes his full-time caretaker and Muiris, quits his attempts at being a poet and wallows in the loss of Sean’s future with whiskey at Coman’s pub after class each day. Isabel was with her brother at the time and blames herself for his episode. She is sent to boarding school, in Galway, but remains a “prisoner of what she had done” (29) to her brother.  

Four Letters explores the perennial question of whether the lighting of love’s beginnings can endure the long smolder of reality. The courtships of both Nicholas’s and Isabel’s parents are described with the playfulness and insanity of someone familiar with love. But they are not unique. Their marriages begin with what all marriages do - the impossibility of truly knowing the person you are committing your life to and how all the unforeseen circumstances to come, will shape them. Each courtship is consummated by a love letter, as if feelings written down have some magical power to abide. 

**Semi-spoiler alert 

As you read, you assume Nicholas and Isabel will somehow meet, but it takes three-fourths of the novel to find out how. Nicholas follows his father to the coast during one of his week-long painting frenzies. That week, lightning of a different kind strikes. Nicholas’s father finds his stride and paints a series of masterpieces with a “style running through all of them, the same underlying vision of mornings and evenings, light struggling to spread out to stay against the onrush of dark, the shimmering and answering reflections of air and water…they were…slivers of the sea we were leaving behind” (134). He finally lives into God’s call. But tragedy in this story, as often in life, is relentless and on their way home all but two of the paintings are destroyed. 

Meanwhile, on the island, Isabel’s mother, in a desperate attempt to win her husband back from his descent into self-pity, enters one of his old poems in a contest. One John Flannery, William Coughlan’s former colleague at the civil service, was on the award committee for the poetry contest. He visits William and Nicholas one afternoon, looking for a painting to give to the winning poet. He marvels at William’s work and takes one of the two remaining paintings of the sea. Muiris’s poem wins the contest. The painting becomes the centerpiece of the schoolhouse on the island. The two families are now connected. I won’t give the whole story away or why the book is titled Four Letters of Love, but at its heart, Williams’s story invites us to wrestle with the question: Why does life go the way it does - is it fate? chance? providence? Is there meaning and purpose to any of it or is it all random? 

Nicholas’s father is not a church goer. He tells Nicholas at the beginning of the story, “God, Nicholas, does not live in red-brick churches in the suburbs” (17). And yet he is willing to quit his job, forfeit any financial means for his family, and commit his life to painting because God told him to. He is sure that there is a plan (often, unseen) in all of it. “There is no such thing as chance. Of this my father seemed more or less certain, choosing to view the haphazard chaos of his life simply as order of a different kind” (175).

Contrast this with a conversation that Nicholas has with Isabel’s father, Muiris, near the end of the book:

He turned and looked at the older man, “How do you know what to do? How do you ever know?

“You don’t, I don’t,” said Muiris, coming forward. “You ask for prompts, I suppose, don’t get any and then just pick one thing or the other. Anything can happen. It’s all chance.” (260) 

William and Muiris have two divergent views on fate. They see the “haphazard chaos” of their lives and come to different conclusions. William believes there must be some meaning to it all. Muiris only sees the chaos. But their beliefs are not as far from each other as they seem. Both, ultimately, arrive at resignation. Whatever is going to happen, is going to happen. William believes in some god out there working through all things, but this "god’s" ways are so mysterious that they are beyond any help. And are often cruel. "Time does not pass, but pain grows; this is the condition of life, my father maintained" (181). 

Last year, I officiated the funeral for a long-time member of our congregation. I visited her a few times before she died but I did not know her well. Before the service, I met with her family and they told me that one of her favorite sayings of late was, “It is what it is.” I’m sure you’ve heard that phrase. Or seen it on a meme or t-shirt. I understand the sentiment. Whenever something happens that we neither like nor can control, someone will say “it is what it is.” The implication being, you can’t do anything about it so just accept it or deal with it. So it goes. 

“It is what it is,” seems, at first glance, not far removed from the Serenity Prayer that people in 12-step groups often use. It reads, “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.” The prayer acknowledges that there is much in life that we have no control over. This sounds similar to, “it is what it is.” But is it? 

Pastor Scotty Smith, who writes daily prayers, once wrote this prayer, using the Serenity Prayer as an outline:

“Lord Jesus, acceptance of things (and people) we can’t change isn’t acquiescence; it’s wisdom and freedom. It’s not shrugging our shoulders in resignation; it’s lifting our hands to you in worship and waiting…Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace; Taking, as He (Jesus) did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it.” – You haven’t promised us “nirvana” in this world; but you have promised us yourself in the middle of our hardships and heartaches. Because of your sufferings on the cross, all evil, suffering, and hardships have an expiration date. Hallelujah!

“It is what it is,” leaves out God. And hope. And the promise of redemption. The Serenity Prayer is directed God-ward. This makes all the difference. 

I remember David Powlison musing in class during a lecture about how Psalm 88 is, by all accounts, the darkest of all the Psalms. It concludes, “You have taken from me friend and neighbor— darkness is my closest friend” (Psalm 88:18). And yet, Psalm 88 is a prayer addressed to “the God who saves” (88:1). It has a God-ward trajectory. This means it is not complete despair. The circumstances are beyond the Psalmist’s control and his understanding. He does appear to have the agency to change anything. But he still trusts that God can. He prays and he waits - even as his heart is bleeding out onto the page. People don’t pour out their heart to “chance.”      

The problem with Nicholas’s father’s view of god in Four Letters of Love is that his god is an absentee landlord. His god is not personal, not involved, not known or knowable. William’s god is as useless as Muiris’s fatalistic shrug, “it’s all chance.”                 

I acknowledge that much of life often feels like “it is what it is.” I don’t pretend to have any clue how the providence of God works. I certainly don’t think that the Biblical vision is that God cruelly creates a complicated puzzle of our lives and then leaves us to try and read “the signs” to fit together all the pieces. I also know that the short pithy sayings, “everything happens for a reason” or “just remember that God works together all things for good” are often well-intended but often cause more harm than good. Usually they are attempts to make sense of situations that don’t make sense. We long for control. 

The Serenity Prayer, unlike “it is what it is,” is not resignation. Or at least not resignation to fate or meaninglessness. It is resignation to the will and goodness of God. And God, above all else, is good. 

I know that in the midst of one of life’s tragedies, “the haphazard chaos, invoking a catechism from several hundred years ago might sound a lot like, “don’t worry, everything happens for a reason.” But we hold on to this ancient faith because it has proven sufficient for those who have gone before us. There are two questions and answers in the Heidelberg Catechism that I often turn to. I offer these in the spirit of Psalm 88, not as a simple, superficial or trite answer. But to keep our confusion directed in a God-ward trajectory.  

27. Q. What do you understand by the providence of God?

A. God's providence is

his almighty and ever present power,

whereby, as with his hand, he still upholds

heaven and earth and all creatures, 

and so governs them that

leaf and blade,

rain and drought,

fruitful and barren years,

food and drink,

health and sickness,

riches and poverty, 

indeed, all things,

come to us not by chance 

but by his fatherly hand. 

28. Q. What does it benefit us to know

that God has created all things

and still upholds them by his providence?

A. We can be patient in adversity, 

thankful in prosperity, 

and with a view to the future

we can have a firm confidence

in our faithful God and Father

that no creature shall separate us

from his love; 

for all creatures are so completely in his hand

that without his will

they cannot so much as move. 

To put it another way, here is another nugget from David Powlison. Dr. Powlison told the story of how one of his professors in seminary would often say, “The Christian life is like a yo-yo.” This doesn’t sound all that helpful. Up and down. Up and down. Then he would add, “The Christian life is like a yo-yo in the hands of a man (Jesus) walking up the stairs.” Up and down. Up and down. But always, ultimately, going up.  

April’s read - Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders