The Sunken Cathedral: A Novel - Couverture souple

“The Sunken Cathedral is a gem of a novel—lyrical, ominous, and unexpectedly funny. Kate Walbert has somehow managed to write an elegy for a Manhattan that still exists, and characters who—like most of us—would prefer not to think about their impending doom.” (Tom Perrotta, author of The Leftovers)

“Kate Walbert’s frightening, timely novel follows an achingly particular cast, small flames unexpectedly doused, so that the prevailing uncertainty of what it is to be alive rises like the waters flooding coasts. The insufficiencies of sheltering-in against Sudden Weather turn Who We Are Stories into Who Are We plaints, yet Walbert is wise and funny and compassionate, and she gifts The Sunken Cathedral with birds and strokes of blue. ‘Much to learn from blue,’ a painter considers, and much to learn from this ambitiously made, great fiction.” (Christine Schutt, author of Florida and All Souls)

“The Sunken Cathedral is impressionistic, a book of drifting shadows and blazing clarity; Kate Walbert has written a gorgeous and moving requiem for a people and a city that are not yet lost. A magnificent achievement.” (Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies)

“Hypnotic...though the novel seems to be set in the present,it feels more menacing than our current world, with sudden, dangerous stormsand terrorism drills in school. An unconventional and unsettling novel withvivid imagery and passages of pure poetry.” (Library Journal, starred review)

“[A] sense of a remembered world that lives on just beneath the ever-changing surface is at the heart of Kate Walbert’s stunning new novel, The Sunken Cathedral. A powerful elegy for a fading New York City and for the planet as a whole, it is also a deeply human story, full of rich and complex characters...[Walbert] writes with such precision that she’s able to pack 80 years worth of personal and world history — war, climate change, marriage, parenthood, friendship, death,grace, love, petty betrayal, and sudden violence — into a slim volume. She’s also very funny... the footnotes work beautifully...audacious...masterful.” (J. Courtney Sullivan, The Boston Globe)

“Walbert writes unlike anyone I’ve read before, imbuing each of her finely-tuned sentences with stunning detail. Trust me: You won’t ever have been more eager to read the footnotes in your life.” (Bustle)

“Insightful...Like so many elements of this rich new novel, its title points backward and forward... though Walbert never allows her narrative to dissolve into stream of consciousness, she manipulates time and space as though they were as viscous as oils. And she allows the central plot to drip off the edges of this canvas. That effect is structurally emphasized by footnotes that read like little prose poems of ineffable grace... Some of these notes are long, taking up more than two pages, and some contain incidents as moving and significant as anything in the main text of the novel,a strategy that implicitly challenges what’s central and what’s tangential in our lives... Walbert’s narrative method is a gentle lesson in empathy, a reminder that it’s only artifice and egotism that give us the misimpression that we’re the central protagonist of the life we’re composing.” (Ron Charles, The Washington Post)

“Kate Walbert's TheSunken Cathedral paintsan elegant picture of a LowerManhattan neighborhood and its citizens, at risk from both ‘suddenweather’ and relentless gentrification.” (Shelf Awareness)

“Walbert tunes in toa complex chorus of female characters in contemporary Manhattan, a cityrecently altered by climate change, tragedy and new wealth...The tapestry ofvoices weave a rich pattern, and the novel is strengthened by Walbert’s use offootnotes, which allow her characters’ thoughts to move freely from the presentto the past, uncovering private or previously unshared memories...TheSunken Cathedral is a reference to a piano sonata by Debussythat itself alludes to the mythical story of a cathedral that rises up from thesea. Like Debussy’s impressionistic music, the novel is poetic, full of lyricalimagery and subtle shifts of tone. Ambitious,elegiac and occasionally even funny, TheSunken Cathedral is an emotionally resonant story of people caught ina time of unease and change—and a striking portrait of the way we livenow.” (Lauren Bufferd, BookPage)

“[A] shimmering newnovel...At its heart is a wonderful pair of widowed French-born friendswho both survived World War II, married Americans, and raised their onlychildren together...Walbert has beenrightly celebrated for her ability to capture the variety and vulnerability ofwomen's lives with a combination of lyricism and brawn...In TheSunken Cathedral, she again creates multiple narrative strands whicheventually dovetail as satisfyingly as tightly fitted joints on awell-constructed rocking chair. But then she takes her remarkable technical prowess to a newlevel with long footnotes...This literal subtext forms a secondary narrativeline that cleverly reflects the way attention is so often fragmented...abeautiful tribute to a city that's continually in flux.” (Heller McAlpin, NPR.org)

The Sunken Cathedral I

The water rushed the low bank, its first destruction the unbinding of the strange bound sticks that had for years appeared along the West Side Highway bike path, sticks crisscrossed atop stones stacked in ways that suggested they meant something to someone. In an instant the water broke it all down, the detritus swiftly clogging the already clogged drains as the river rose—fast, there was pressure there, volume and shifting tides, currents, swells—over the West Side Highway bike path, flooding the recently resodded Hudson River Park, the roots of its sycamores and maples, ornamental cherry and dogwood too shallow to grip. The trees toppled and bobbed, knocking in a surging logjam the limestone foundations of the once tenement art galleries, the red-brick churches and garages, and too numerous to count glassy condo towers—each a flimsy envelope leaking carbon, heat, cooled air in summer. Now, capable of resisting nothing, their glass panes pop and shatter like so many bottles lobbed to the sidewalk, the ones that remain reflecting the darkening sky and the tempest of the day and the rising swirl of water as the higher, richer tenants stand in black silhouette.

Helen puts her hands into the rush of water. She knows it is unstoppable; ridiculously unstoppable. Too soon the famous buildings will buckle and go under just as easily as she did a little girl at the great waterfall at Great Falls. She went under in her daisy two-piece, her hard, pale body tight and smooth as the water that knocked her breath out, Great Falls too rough, her mother had warned. She could still hear her mother’s warning somewhere far away, distant as church bells.

She had known all along, her mother was saying.

What the hell had they been thinking? her mother was saying.

What the hell had any of them been thinking?