Child of These Tears opens on a world that is, like ours, in flux. 

Many competing claims to space and place, many differing points of view, and many languages meet in Hartfield Falls, a New England settlement of English villagers that is raided by Native American warriors. More than a few inhabitants, including young children, are killed, while others are taken captive and marched toward Canada. Sarah Baker and her daughter Constance are among the captives. Along the road Constance and her mother are separated. But while the girl is rescued by French trappers and handed over to a peaceful Mohawk tribe, Sarah is returned to Hartfield Falls to watch her husband John spiral from what appears to be a post-traumatic mental illness. 

Child of These Tears 

by Molly McNett

Slant Books
200p $19

This is merely the beginning of the novel’s dramatic arc, shaped more by the process of recovery from trauma than by the trauma itself. And nature’s impressive power to recover its own is as much on display as grace’s transformative and revivifying efficacy. 

Molly McNett’s story displays the difficulties of translation, the irreducibility of meaning, and the frustrating limitations of human nature and society. She achieves her best effects by fully honoring the perception of her characters, taking them at their own word, instead of defaulting to the posture of helpless uncertainty and unresolved doubt that hampers the achievements of so many contemporary novels. McNett’s text has authority in that sense, the courage of its characters’ convictions, even as its author dissolves into the background: nowhere absent yet everywhere invisible, applying Flaubert’s advice (“An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.”) to good effect. 

In an online launch event for the book that was later released as a podcast episode, McNett opened up about her faith journey, from her Protestant upbringing through connections with Jewish family members to a fascination with contemporary mystical and contemplative writers, including Thomas Merton and Simone Weil. She also described an aspect of her writing process that has a kinship with her character John Baker’s journaling process. From a little shelf of books, Baker collects quotations, which he copies down; copying leads to meditation; and meditation leads to a further search for quotations. 

Though McNett’s shelf is no doubt better supplied than Baker’s, McNett hews closely to historical realities, choosing to record with her characters’ eyes rather than with her own. This ocular shapeshifting continues masterfully in McNett’s renditions of other characters’ private journals, published broadsides and often testy or anxious correspondences (of which the invented 18th-century titles alone are a pure delight). 

Narrating John Baker’s search in particular, McNett successfully captures something real that is not often confessed to by lovers of books: the feeling of futility when, through your searching of texts, you arrive at the reason for that search and discover that it was always, though unconsciously, some sort of self-justification project—innocuous, perhaps, but not entirely innocent. To reveal the moment when the flaw in John Baker’s logic becomes as obvious to him as it is to the reader would be to spoil one of the novel’s major character transformations, though not necessarily the most moving or compelling. 

For me as a reader, the most compelling transformation takes place in the fictional soul of one Simon Floquart, S.J., a priest who is less an unlikely Christ figure than that still rarer subspecies of literary phenotype: a believable saint. Floquart is a man of inner contradictions: greedy, impatient, comfort-seeking; understandably (but also perhaps a little excessively) preoccupied with the twinges and aches in his own emotional scars, but also idealistic and genuinely contemplative; and still more, when it comes to the point, capable despite his flaws of actively willing another’s good at his own expense. 

The way in which McNett traces, in scalpel-sharp, deftly handled detail, exactly how God’s providence uses not only Floquart’s virtues but also his weaknesses to save both his own soul and that of another character demonstrates not only exquisite fictional craft but tremendous spiritual insight. 

The “good priest” as a narrative archetype is, perhaps, enjoying a certain revival at the moment. This revival benefits us all the more to the extent that it reveals how a person need not be ordained to the priesthood to embody some of the traits most fitting to that role and most fully blazoned forth by its faithful fulfillment. 

There is also a kind of consecration to the way in which Sarah Baker carries her griefs, a burden as heavy as a crossbeam. We see a kind of shepherding take place when Nistenha, a Native woman, tends to the material and spiritual needs of Constance, in every way from combing the little girl’s untended hair to teaching her the words of hymns and the Mass. Father Floquart’s later, decisive role in Constance’s fate is prepared for and made possible by these less obvious sacrifices. The vivid reality of this spiritual connection is made tangible in a moment of startling revelation toward the end. 

Because it so profoundly evidences the a fortiori reality of the spiritual over the material—both are necessary and real and deserving of our respect, but how much more the spiritual than the material—and because of its use of polyphonic, or multiple-voiced, narrative strategies, McNett’s novel has often, and rightly, been compared to George Saunders’s astonishing and innovative Lincoln in the Bardo. There are even structural and phrase-level similarities, in particular one repeated, antiphonal line of quoted internal monologue that quite closely samples the voice of that novel’s own lost child. 

But the book’s epigraph from the writings of a Carthusian monk reads, in part: “One by one I shall forget the names of individual things. You who sleep in my breast are not met with words.” The “you” here is of course God. The novel’s revelation that our efforts to articulate our experiences of reality are at once deeply necessary to our own souls but also totally needless from God’s perspective is at once a gentle rebuke and a backhanded encouragement: a vital perspective-taking for all of us wordy creatures, as well as a spur toward better speech and better writing. 

This incisive insight, and the novel’s travel among many languages, recalls to mind not so much Saunders’s legacy as Jon Fosse’s. Fosse, the recent Nobel laureate whose acceptance speech reached for a description of his lifelong hope to use language “to say the unsayable,” frequently meets the same mark not only in his magisterial Septology but also in his many shorter fictions and plays, which carry the minimalist influence of Beckett, Brecht and Ibsen—not Christian writers, but existentialist ones, whose immediacy and urgency have nevertheless found new purchase in teaching Christian writers anew the importance of the unvarnished candor with which this faith’s narrations began. 

In making space for multiple voices, faithful candor and authentic Christic imagination, McNett’s novel, like Fosse’s, travels a good distance toward making the unsayable sayable.

This article appears in April 2026.

Katy Carl is editor of Word on Fire Luminor and writer in residence at the University of St. Thomas–Houston. She is the author of As Earth Without Water and Fragile Objects.