"Jennifer Haigh has quickly become one of my favorite writers. She has a gift for creating living characters: they’re multidimensional, flawed, and they talk and think like real people. And a gift for bringing a quick and expansive intelligence to complicated questions.

All of this is present in “Faith.� It's one of the best books I’ve read in a long time, the kind of book I would have liked to discuss in reading group. I’m reluctant to summarize the book lest I make it seem cliched or trivial or melodramatic. It is none of these things. To the contrary, it depicts -- with honesty, wit, integrity, and empathy -- people in moments of crisis.

The basics of the book are these: A Irish Catholic family in Boston. Three children, from two different fathers (one of them simply his young wife and child). One of the children, Sheila, becomes fed up with family and church and leaves Massachusetts entirely. One son, Mike, becomes a cop, then a successful real estate agent and marries a non-Catholic who basically despises the Church. The third � quiet, intelligent Art � becomes a priest. The world turns, the family does what families do. And then one day, Good Friday, Art is accused of abusing a young boy and forced to leave the parish while the matter is looked into.

In bare terms like these it does indeed sound like it's filled with stereotypes: Irish Catholic. family, one son a cop, another a priest, dad a heavy drinker with a quick temper, children abused by priests, etc., etc. In someone else's hands a story like this might easily be melodramatic and filled with easy moral questions about Good and Evil. In Haigh’s hands, though, the apparent cliche is the jumping off point for a serious exploration of tradition, religious identity and belief, the complex push-pull of family, what we owe one another. Her characters are so solidly constructed, so rich, that we inhabit them, feel their conflicts and longings, understand at some deep level what made them who they are and why they do what they do.

Sheila, the narrator, is the perfect vehicle for this kind of role. She’s smart, compassionate, self-aware, an astute observer of others, conflicted about her relationship with family and church, and she has a sense of humor: “The Bible offers four accounts of the life of Jesus, told by four different writers: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. God’s Beatles� My own version of the story [is] a kind of fifth gospel. The early pages borrow heavily from other accounts. The miracles and revelations will come later, the stories never before told.�

These "stories never told" are the ones we're reading now. The book opens with a flashback introduced by these intriguing words: "Here is a story my mother never told me." The jump to the "present" is announced this way: "Most of you have heard, by now, what happened to my brother, or a version of it." The identity of the "you" in this construction doesn't matter; it's merely whoever the reader happens to be. The "story" comes to us via Sheila's own thoughts and experiences, as well as what she later gleaned from talking to others. It is through her that we learn about the family: her mother’s early life and betrayal, her father’s volatility and � later � descent into dementia when his memory "was like a doctor refusing new patients,� what priests represented in her family as she was growing up, how it was that Art became a priest, what kind of priest he was (an uneasy one: male parishioners, unhappy about having to go to church at all, made him feel “irrelevant, tolerated out of politeness like a spinster aunt." With the women,"though, "he had more success. About their concerns he understood even less, but their company was at least not adversarial. They mothered him. A cough or sniffle at the pulpit prompted a dozen worried inquiries. He was given hand-knitted scarves and sweaters, herbal teas and vitamins and once, an electric space heater�), how members of the family and others (and she herself) respond to the accusation, and, yes, whether Art is guilty or not. The culture within the church. Haigh brings all this to life.

I don't want to say anything more about the plot. There are a lot of excellent reviews of “Faith� here on GR. (I feel obliged to point out that I am not a Catholic.In fact I'm Jewish, though I did live for a while in Boston.) Instead I’d like to share some excerpts that I think capture the tone � including the touches of humor that church-doubting Sheila brings to the story � and nuance of the book.

There’s a scene � it takes place early in Art’s career � when Art is observing a group of older priests and listening to their comments: The three old boys had known each other for years; they’d developed a crude, jocular rapport more suited to a fraternity house than a rectory� For Frank Lynch and his ilk there had been no Roncalli [that is, Pope John XXIII], no aggiornamento [modernization]. The Vatican Council had simply never taken place� For Art it was like being trapped at the table with three aging comedians, each trying to upstage the others.

This question of generational change comes up more than once in the book. Old themselves, they seemed not to notice the congregation shrinking and stooping around them, the young families leaving, the Communion lines shorter each year. At daily Mass the pews were mostly empty, dotted with gray heads. Unconcerned, the council reminisced about the old days, the elaborate church festivals, the parish high school so overenrolled that an entrance exam was needed to keep classes a manageable size. This tension between what was and what is is central to the book -- just as the church is trying to define itself in changing times, as a young priest Art struggles to find out who he is apart from the job.

As I noted, Sheila has a strained relationship with her family. She loves them all, of course, but there are limits to what she can stomach: “I had driven up from Philadelphia for a long weekend—my second visit in a month, a lifetime record. I could tolerate my family in little sips, but this was a toxic—perhaps lethal—dose.�

Elsewhere: “My father is a man of shameful habits. My mother is lace-curtain Irish. She will settle for correctness, or the appearance of it; but in her heart she wants only to be good. The space between them is crisscrossed with silent bridges, built of half-truths and suppressions. The chasm beneath is deep and wide� She saved her sweet talk for the Virgin. With Dad she swapped insults and epithets.�

And this little gem: “Religion was necessary the way marriage was necessary. People—male people in particular—were animals, dull-witted and violent. Left to themselves, they would fuck and fight and rip each other apart.�

Haigh hasn't disappointed me yet. I've yet to read her earliest books, and I just downloaded a short story she wrote some years ago. I'll certainly be watching for her next book."

"This was a brilliant novel from a writer at the peak of his powers, and possibly the sharpest fictional representation of the art of filmmaking I've ever read.

While I was impressed by the narrative ingenuity and moral clarity of Kehlmann's previous novel Tyll, I was initially skeptical, doubting that Kehlmann would have anything new to say about the Faustian tale of tormented artists being coopted through serving totalitarian dictatorships (especially the Nazi regime).

But he handles this material so deftly and cinematically, perfectly gauging the tone and perspective of every scene, depicting situations of moral ambiguity with admirable restraint and surgical wit. Lest this sound like a dour and worthy slog through well-trodden history, it's extremely playful and ironic, with some hilarious and cringeworthy comic scenes, while others are expressionistic in their uncanny horror.

The originally left-leaning Austrian-born filmmaker G.W. Pabst, most famous today for Pandora's Box starring Louise Brooks, was a failure after filming a Hollywood bomb in 1934. Going back to Europe at the outbreak of war in 1939, he was stuck inside the Third Reich, where he agreed to direct three (largely apolitical) films for Joseph Goebbels' propaganda ministry. He considered the last of these, The Molander Case, filmed in Prague in 1944 and completed as the Red Army liberated the city, to be his lost masterpiece. (The fate of these film reels, lost in a rucksack on a westbound train, provides the framing narrative, with a stunning last-minute reveal that never felt contrived.)

In Kehlmann's imagining, Pabst is a passive protagonist, both a puppet of historical forces whose destructiveness he cannot fully grasp, and a victim of his own moral blindness in his compulsion to make art. Pabst recedes from the center of the novel's series of vignettes-- Kehlmann describes him through the eyes of those who orbited around him: his alcoholic wife Trude, his Hitler Youth son Jakob (an entirely fictional character), his obsessive love Brooks, his reclusive star Greta Garbo, and his long-suffering assistant.

Elusive even to himself, Pabst rationalizes the compromises he's making, at least when compared to card-carrying Nazis like Leni Riefenstahl. And while he has perfect control over the films he's making, he's oblivious to the consequences of his own actions in real life and turns a blind eye to the darkness of the waters he was treading."