Today’s post is about Scarlett Peckham’s The Lord I Left, and its treatment of desire and faith. (And parentheses.) Here’s the cover and description adapted from the author’s website:

Buy links, and CWs at the author’s website. Some of these themes are discussed in the blog post.
This post also contains discussion of the full plot of the book, including events that take place at the end.

When I first read this book, I was immediately struck by a strange feature of Henry’s 3^rd person POV chapters: a large number of parenthetical asides. And almost all of his chapters – and none of Alice’s –  contain passages like the following: 

“I haven’t a taste for them,” he said. (A lie.) 

pg. 35

Did he not enjoy counseling, worshiping, preaching? 
(He did! He did!) 

pg. 47

Of all the things. It was a sacrilege to put an altar in this place. A fake church in a house of sin. What kind of person would- 
(He would. He would.) 

pg. 49

Nor was it her fault that all he could think about was sneaking away and up to Alice’s rooms to hold her hands and pray with her. (To hold her hands.) 

pg. 144

“You look…” (Enchanting.)

pg. 163

Henry was not yet over the disorientation of imagining Alice being courted or – (stop!) – and fumbled to form words.

pg. 186

I read the book back in February, and then put it aside intending to return with a more careful eye. I especially wondered what was going on with those parentheticals. What kind of thoughts were they meant to represent? In whose voice? And to what purpose? My memory from the first time reading – which shaped how I initially conceived of this blog post – was of a self-consciously stylized prose element, one that promised an interpretative key to the text. On closer examination, I assumed, these parentheticals would turn out to be the voice of Henry’s anxiety, or an expression of his hidden desires, or a kind of internal manifestation of the voice of his God, or of his conscience.

However, as I reread The Lord I Left this week – this time maniacally cataloging and tagging all 47 parentheticals in an AirTable spreadsheet – I quickly realized how difficult these parentheticals are to classify. Very little unites them: 3 are in first-person

(We won’t be compatible, however, and I will not do what you ask.)

pg. 134

7 are in second-person

(Yes. Phrasing it as a question will not excuse your intellectual dishonesty.)

pg. 163

21 are in third-person

(He had. Nay, he still did.)

pg. 70

and 16 are undefined. Some are truncated statements

(Because you-)

pg. 75

some also contain italics

(Liar, he’d dutifully accounted to himself as he’d done so.)

pg. 5

Parentheticals occur in response to dialogue, action, and thought; they both ask questions and answer them; they express moods as varied as desire, self-reproach, prayer, honesty, and sarcasm. Their frequency doesn’t linearly increase or decrease over the course of Henry’s narrative, though they do disappear for a while. By the time I reached the end of the book, I was pretty sure these parentheticals were not something about which my spreadsheet (aesthetically pleasing as it was) would be revealing any great truths. 

Despite their refusal to line up neatly into a coherent narrative, though, the parenthetical breaks in the text still form a whole: they define Henry’s speaking voice, shape his character, and echo the novel’s key themes of sacred space and internal contradiction. In fact, their very alternation and inconsistency is arguably key to their textual effect. Given that all the parentheticals take place in Henry’s POV, their sheer variation creates the impression of a man divided, in turmoil. They alternate between the convictions of a preacher who knows he wants to follow a religious path, and the desires of a man who knows he wants things condemned as sinful by his church. 

Of course, Henry is also on a trajectory to better self understanding. And while I didn’t find the linear progression I sought from these parentheticals- becoming more declarative, say, or decreasing in frequency – they do have an overall movement. Parenthetical statements are present in every one of Henry’s POV chapters from 1-27, disappear entirely for chapters 29-35, and then reappear in the final chapter to behave in slightly different ways. 

The section of the book where the parentheticals are absent is all about Henry’s growing certainty: first that he wants to sleep with Alice and then, eventually, that he wants to marry her, even if that means losing his position as Lord Lieutenant. They drop away to reveal a Henry who knows his mind “utterly and without hesitation” (232) and progressively feels “more certain of himself” (252) . As the couple enthusiastically verbally consent to their first intimacies together, the narration tells us “the answer was yes, he was certain, so certain, no parenthetical” (227) – the only time this narrative feature is directly referenced. Instead, when Henry feels moved with desire by his experience with Alice, he repeats a verse from the Song of Solomon “in his mind” without walling it off behind punctuation. 

Yet once Henry reaches his HEA, the parentheticals return: a fact that is somewhat confusing given their role of denoting uncertainty. There are four in Henry’s final POV chapter, which depicts Alice fulfilling his request to recreate Mary Magdalene’s anointing of Jesus’ feet. Alice asks if he is ready for them to begin their role-play, and the parentheticals respond (He was. He was.) I would argue that this parenthetical is subtly different from any of the previous. It’s the only instance where Henry’s parentheticals respond to someone else’s dialogue, and it’s one of the few times they’re used to express a desire that Henry also then verbalizes. They form a lovely bookend with the last parenthetical of the book: Alice asks Henry “Shall I wash more of you?” which is followed by (Yes. But not yet, my love). This is the only instance in which Henry uses parentheticals as a direct address to someone else. The parentheticals return, I think, because Henry is fundamentally the same man he was – still introspective, still self-examining – but he’s willing to put those things he kept separate out into the open, and even into dialogue, with the woman he loves. 

The parentheticals do more than lend texture to Henry as an introspective character fighting inner battles. They also echo a more subtle theme in the book about the use of space: to hold contradictions, or to keep people apart. The novel starts with a description of Henry visiting Alice’s place of work – the house where she is apprenticing as a whipping governess – and his shock, not only at seeing a mock chapel for patrons with interest in religious kink, but also at the realization that this is an interest he shares. Much of Henry’s ensuing struggle is to reconcile the fact that his religion and his sexual desire share space – in the church where he kisses Alice, and in the whipping house where they reenact biblical scenes – but more importantly within himself. This is a book that deliberately does not ask Henry to abandon his religion even as he marries a whipping governess, because his struggle is to allow faith and desire to coexist in the same spaces. 

Towards the end of the novel, Henry writes of his personal journey “I burn for two things: I burn for grace, and I burn for the natural pleasures of the world that God has made. My faith resides between these impulses, and will never be perfected.” (252). This journey Henry evokes – of containing faith between two contradictory impulses – resonates in the textual act of containing a diverse range of thoughts, words, moods, and grammatical persons between two parentheticals. It’s also an important moment of expansion: this journey is about religious faith for Henry, but it certainly does not have to be about that for the reader (and wasn’t for me). The parentheticals serve as a reminder that we all seek spaces that welcome the cohabitation of our contradictions. 

Ultimately, as I reached the end of my reading, these parentheticals said more than I realized precisely because they didn’t display the set patterns I was hoping for. Their contradictions are their meaning. As someone who consumes books and writes about them, I deeply enjoy the process of making meaning out of what I read. But texts don’t have plainly discoverable secrets lying in wait to be found, just as they can’t be squeezed and prodded and made to fit preconceived interpretations either. The very act of reading is about generating something from what the text is willing to give you, and what you are able to take from it. Both of those have limits – maybe a little bit like the walls of a parenthetical – but inside them is a back and forth that makes each reading of a text its own creative process. And, in a way, sitting with the contradictions of the parentheticals, letting them speak to me as a reader in the way they wanted to (rather than in the order I wanted to impose on them), was a part of figuring out what they meant to me. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading a bit about it too.