As It Is in Heaven

Love is not easy, especially if you find the woman of your dreams and then lose her - as Philip Griffin and his son Stephen each discover in turn. Stephen is just a boy when his mother and sister are killed in a car crash, and his father never recovers from the accident: he wasn't involved but is consumed by grief, his only desire to be reunited with his wife. Before that happens, though, Philip wants to ensure the happiness of his son, Stephen - now a grown man. '"As it is in Heaven", Niall Williams' tale of love and tragedy, will leave you in tears' - "Tatler". 'A bitter-sweet novel about passionate love giving way to commitment, grief to a sort of healing' - "Irish Times". 'A tender and sober novel with a faith in romance that is absolute' - " Daily Express". 'Delicious coincidence and tragedy, as extraordinary lives unravel and intertwine' - "Guardian".

It seems right that the lovers in Niall Williams's As It Is in Heaven hail from Italy and Ireland, those sentimental favorites among nations. Williams won kudos and laurels, fans and fame for his first novel, Four Letters of Love, and his second finds him once again illuminating a simple love affair with his own special brand of fine and even brave mawkishness. Dubliner Stephen Griffin, though possessed of a "thin and long" body, is stunted emotionally by the loss of his mother and sister in a tragic car wreck. That is, until one evening he ends up at a tiny concert hall in County Clare, listening to the Venetian beauty Gabriella Castoldi play the violin. Williams writes with fairy-tale breathlessness of the audience: "The room was balmy with delight. And when the people sat again for the slow and romantic melancholy of the Puccini, they were pillowed on a deep and heartfelt gladness.... Stephen looked at the woman whose name he did not yet know and his heart raced." Such mauvish passages abound. Here is an author who never met a bold pronouncement on the subject of Love that he didn't, well, Love. At one point, for instance, Stephen "heard the victory of Love over Death." What makes Williams's writing work--to the degree that it does work--is the way his fuzzy, myopic generalizations are coupled with keen observation: "Stephen danced like a man who had been given wooden legs. They flew out in sharp angles and measured air like a pair of pincers." A stack of suitcases is "an Italian hilltown." At its best, this gentle magical realism reads like Mark Helprin without the irony. And like Helprin, Williams is in thrall to the glamour of geography. Stephen and Gabriella pursue each other through Clare and Kerry to Venice and back. The course of true love never did run smooth, but the bumps here prove none too discouraging. --Claire Dederer