268. Before You Know Kindness
Rating: ☆☆☆☆
Recommended by: Lisa Stock
Author: Chris Bohjalian
Genre: Fiction
429 pages, published August, 2005
Reading Format: Book
Summary
Before You Know Kindness is a multi-generational saga focused on the McCullough and Seton families. Every summer Matriarch Nan Seton, an avid sportswoman, hosts her two granddaughters at the family compound in New Hampshire. Twelve year old Charlotte is an only child striving to fit with the teenagers in her midst and whose father, Spencer McCullough, is a true believer spokesman for FERAL, an animal rights organization. Her mother Catherine, daughter of Nan, is a lifelong flirt who is tiring of her marriage to Spencer of not eating meat (not necessarily in that order). John and Sara Seton (a public defender and therapist) are parents to 10 year old Willow Seton and a Patrick, a young toddler. While family dynamics are at play and everyone is distracted, a violent event occurs that turns the relationships of everyone upside down and strains the fabric of every family.
Quotes
“As Jeremy Bentham had asked about animals well over two hundred years ago, the question was not whether they could reason or talk, but could they suffer? And yet, somehow, it seemed to take more imagination for humans to identify with animal suffering than it did to conceive of space flight or cloning or nuclear fusion. Yes, she was a fanatic in the eyes of most of the country. . .Mostly, however, she just lacked patience for people who wouldn’t accept her belief that humans inflicted needless agony on the animals around them, and they did so in numbers that were absolutely staggering.”
“Sara knew that behind its locked front door no home was routine. Not the house of her childhood, not the apartment of her husband’s. not the world they were building together with Willow and Patrick. All households had their mysteries, their particular forms of dysfunction.”
My Take
Even though some readers have characterized Before You Know Kindness as slow, I found it to be a page turner. I was particularly interested the character of Spencer McCullogh is fiercely dogmatic in his support of animal rights, sometimes to the exclusion of human beings, especially his wife and daughter. When tragedy befalls Spencer, he is forced to reconsider his life and his relationships. I believe the title of the book comes from the following poem Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye, which really sums up the central theme of this well-written, engrossing book.
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and
purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.
