More than can be measured

Niall Williams’ Time of the Child (Bloomsbury, 302 pp.) takes place during the Christmas season of 1962 in the fictional Irish town of Faha where the “stale,” “mournful,” never-ending rain renders “all the seasons one.”

Old Jack Troy, the only doctor in Faha, has come to the end of his rope. He lives in a “cloud of melancholy” that is more than the typical occupational hazard of the small-town general practitioner. He’s “lost his love of the world,” a self-diagnosis he categorizes as “desperate” in much the same way he might assess one of his aged patients. However, for him, there’s no prescription, no treatment, no salve.

Over the years he’s atrophied into a fading nihilist, a broken, sorrowful old man who dwells in a land of heartache and for whom the unpredictability of human individualism has led to the edge of despair.

Dr. Troy has lived under the assumption that the empirical lens through which he was trained to see the world would be enough. But the older he gets, the more he discovers that the com­plexity of the human soul cannot be explained by the data, the methods, the observation, or the diagnoses. All are failing him now and existence has become a long march into a sleepless form of invisibility.

Dr. Jack Troy is a healer who doesn’t believe in miracles. To live is to suffer your way into a ghostlike state of solitude where you simply become one with the earth’s “ancient and sombre overcoat.”

Then, early in December, on the night of the Faha Christmas fair, a newborn baby girl is left in his care, and his life is upended when his grown daughter, Ronnie, falls head-over-heels in love with her. For Ronnie, who lives with her father and helps him run his practice, the little girl is an enlivening energy, and the force of her love for the child (and her father’s love for her) drives the second half of the novel.

Williams’ story is unveiled in exquisite, sonorous prose that is uniquely, musically Irish. But his sentences aren’t merely beautiful for their own sake: They are beautiful precisely because they are attentive to the specific power of language to elicit, to move, and to invite a reader into the transcendence that a great story can provide.

As the reader grows increasingly comfortable with the rhythms of the prose, Faha begins to come alive. It’s as lived-in a place as any in recent literature, brimming with the sweat and tears of reality in a way that calls to mind Wendell Berry’s Port Royal, Ky., and Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, Iowa.

In fact, Williams’ work shares a spiritual kinship with the novels of Berry and Robinson. All three tell stories about generational wounds that are buried alongside age-old traditions meant to provide form and healing. All three authors linger in the reality that “real change is often seen only in hindsight” but that “the greatest challenge of life … is always nothing more nor less than how to get through another day.”

In the end, Williams offers the possibility that the rare “moments when life resembles fairy tale” are just as real as the ones that seem like nightmare.

Time of the Child, our 2024 novel of the year, is a Scrooge book: It’s the story of a lonely man who is awakened to the sense of the miraculous and to the notion that it is possible, when all is said and done, to attain greatness of soul, even if such a quality can’t easily be assessed or diagnosed or accounted for.

That Niall Williams accomplishes this in a small-town Christmas book featuring an unexpected child and a surprised mother, all of which culminates in a dramatic and moving church-­based conclusion without plunging into saccharine claptrap is a remarkable, uncommon feat, and one especially rare in contemporary fiction. Perhaps it’s the Irishman in him. Certainly it’s the skill of a great novelist.

Next in this 2024 Books of the Year special issue: “Love of poetry examined.”