In Mark Rader’s Debut Novel, Love Stands in the Way of Obligation
The Author of The Wanting Life in Conversation with Lori Feathers
In The Wanting Life debut novelist Mark Rader explores the quiet fidelities of ordinary lives, those quotidian acts of devotion to partner, family, belief and vocation that are unremarkable and taken for granted. In particular Rader digs deep into the revelatory moments when his characters realize that their steadfast loyalties contradict who they are and what they most desire. With perceptive, vibrant writing The Wanting LifeĀ depicts the nuanced interior lives of people just like you and me.
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Lori Feathers: The Wanting LifeĀ explores the parallel love stories of Father Paul, a gay Catholic priest, and his niece Maura, a married mother of two who is having an affair with David. Both confront the choice of remaining faithful to their commitmentsāFather Paulās to the church and Mauraās to her husband and familyāor being true to themselves by succumbing to a deep and passionate love. Why did you want to write about this quest for authenticity within the context of romantic love?
Mark Rader: Thatās a great question, and Iām sure one of the reasons has to do with my parentsā history. When they met in the late 1960s, Dad was (like Paul) a Catholic priest and Mom was a Franciscan nun. They started out as friends, but over the course of a few years they realized they were falling in love, which eventually led them to make the difficult decision to leave church life so they could stop seeing each other in secret and be with each other openly, get married, start a family. So that story about romantic love versus obligation has been in my bones forever.
The all-important difference between my parentsā story and Paulās story, of course, is that leaving the church in the early 70s to become half of aĀ heterosexual couple and to live openly as a gay person are two extremely different propositions. In inventing Paul, I think I was creating a way to explore what life might have been like for someone who might have felt the same pull towards romantic love that my parents did but who didnāt feel he could risk making the leap, because of the judgment he feared would find him on the other side.
Also, I go back and forth Ā on how Ā necessary I think romantic love is to us humans feeling happy and fulfilled, and I figured that writing a book that looked at Ā this from a number of angles might teach me something, or at least raise some interesting questions.
LF: Your novel opens with Father Paul, sick with cancer and given only months to live. He is overwhelmed with regret about his life and doubts whether his shame about being gay and his fidelity to the church have been worth the sacrifice of physical and emotional intimacy. How did you decide to use this end-of-life perspective to portray Father Paulās crisis of faith?Ā Did this perspective allow you to give his story more emotional weight?
MR: You know, I donāt think I considered grounding the story any other way. Having Paul facing death just seemed like the most natural and believable trigger for the kind of personal reckoning and secret-sharing I knew I wanted to feature in the story. I suppose it doesnāt hurt that thereās a built-in sense of urgency to a story in which the main character is living on borrowed time. And whether or not itās true that dying people have access to a kind of special clarity or wisdom, I think many of us like to believe they do. . . because weād like something to look forward to when itās our turn. But those things werenāt something I thought about directly as I was writing the story.
I go back and forth about how important I think romantic love is to feeling happy and fulfilled.Another answer to why I decided to tell an end-of-life story is that Iāve always loved reading them. Thereās something reassuring, on a deep level, when someone confidently surveys the long scroll of their life (or a characterās life) and says, āHey look. Right here.Ā This was the part that really mattered.ā Itās an act that argues that as messy and random and confusing as life can sometimes seem, thereās still meaning to be drawn from it, glittering here and there at the bottom of the murk, and who knows what part will glitter in the end, so maybe donāt give up hope yet.
Also, just on a pure reading experience level, when a story invites me to revisit a place and time from the past (a month, a few weeks, even a few days), in which a character was fully alive, or changed forever, I lean in more. Feel more alert and expectant. On the flip side, as a writer, when you build up the importance of a backstory that way, you better deliver the goods.
LF: A theme of the novel is the nature of sin and whether romantic love can be a sin at all because it serves a āhigher purposeā in bringing happiness and fulfillment to the two in love. In the case of Father Paul and Luca, no one would be directly hurt by their love but Maura faces hurting her husband and kids. In this respect do you think readers will view Father Paulās affair with Luca differently than Mauraās with David?
MR:Ā I do. Most readers will likely have more sympathy for Paulās situation than they do for Mauraās, for the reasons you mentioned. Paulās suffering can more easily be understood as noble, the fate of a martyr; Mauraās suffering. . . not as much.
Having said that, I have a soft spot for Maura. Sheās more obviously flawed than Paul is, but I think most people are. And as selfish as she may be, sheās willing to pay the price for her choices; beneath all her desire is a person who wants very badly to make things right, as much as thatās possible.
LF:Ā In addition to Father Paul and Maura you give readers the perspective of Britta, who is Paulās sister and Mauraās mother. Of the three only Britta has had a sustained relationship that fulfilled her sexually and emotionallyāher 32-year marriage to Don, recently deceased. Britta is the type of character that seldom gets portrayed in literature, a lonely, overweight woman in her late sixties who seeks solace from binging on food and wine. Why did you decide to bring Brittaās voice into the novel?
MR: In early drafts of the book, Britta was very much a secondary characterāthe nice widowed sister who was there to help Paul through his ordeal. Gentle, attentive, mostly untroubled. But when my wife read one of those drafts, she said, āBrittaās not complicated enough,ā and she was right.
When I sat with the character Iād roughly sketched out, I realized Britta was, like you say, someone who actually got what Paul and Maura had been longing for. She and her recently deceased husband Don were a couple that had a deep, sustaining love for each other. They made each other laugh, loved talking to each other, enjoyed a great sex life well into their sixties. But then Don dies, and I realized it would be more interesting (and realistic) if Britta was struggling with the loss of this happiness with the same intensity Maura and Paul were struggling with the prospect of never having it in the first place.
I guess her presence in the story serves as a reminder that even if you get exactly what you wantāif you reach life partner nirvanaāthereās a 50/50 chance that person will die before you do and youāll be the one left behind, mourning them. I included this not to bum people out, but because it seemed to extend this notion of our lives always being incomplete. Thereās going to inevitably be something important missing. But maybe thatās okay. Or even more generously, maybe that inevitable lack is actually the secret ingredient that helps make the good things feel so good.
LF:Ā Your title, The Wanting Life, takes on multiple meanings in the novel, the longing for a deep, romantic love and also for a sign of Godās presence, the āreassuranceā of a higher purpose. Maura feels that it is the wanting, not the attainment of this reassurance that is the point of life, a sentiment akin to the passage from Ruth Stoneās poem āWantingā that you include in the bookās epigraph:
To want is to believe there is something worth getting. Whereas getting only shows how worthless the thing is.
How did this idea of the worth of unfulfilled desire affect how you approached the novel?
MR: On the religious faith front, itās true: Maura doesnāt yearn for certainty when it comes to God, because she thinks that religious certainty is inherently bogus, and so not worth wanting. On the flip side, she also doesnāt want to accept that the world is random and meaningless either. So I think for someone wired like she is, simply allowing herself to hopeĀ thereās some loving higher power looking out for her, some greater hidden meaning or magic behind everything. . . thatās the closest thing to faith sheās capable of. Thatās as high as she can go. Being open to that wish.
I think her belief system when it comes to love is different, though. Sheās been a pragmatic, somewhat stoic person for most of her life (not unlike her uncle), but I think deep down Maura absolutely believes that ātrue loveā between two people is something real and wonderful and most importantly attainable. She believes this not because of Hollywood or whatever, but because sheās seen proof of it in the real world: rare great matches like her Mom and Don and her art heroes, Georgia OāKeeffe and Alfred Stieglitz.
Even if you get exactly what you wantāif you reach life partner nirvanaāthereās a 50/50 chance that person will die before you do and youāll be the one left behind.Itās definitely not enough for her to just yearn for ātrue loveā in some poetic and unrequited way the way she yearns for reassurance about the presence of God; she wants to actually get thereĀ and experience the comfort and happiness she thinks it would bring her. Of course, thereās a huge difference between believing that true love is something attainable in the abstract (when you can point to evidence of couples achieving it) and believing that true love is attainable by YOU (when thereās no evidence). Thatās why I think itās fair to say that every time we seek out romantic love, it requires something like a leap of faith.
LF:Ā I love novels like The Wanting LifeĀ that examine charactersā personal struggles to reconcile religious faith and passionate love. Two of my recent favorites are Jamie Quatroās Fire SermonĀ and Antonio Mondaās UnworthyĀ (translated by John Cullen). Had you read many books on this theme prior to writing The Wanting Life?Ā Is there a particular book or author that influenced or inspired the novel?
MR:Ā I donāt know Unworthy, but Iāve read Fire SermonĀ and Quatroās story collection, I Want to Show You More, and Iām a big fan of hers too. The descriptions of physical desire and guilt and the way they intertwine. . . the way she sets feelings of warm maternal love right beside the dirty stuff, all, say, while a character is waiting for her daughter to get out of piano practice. . . itās just such visceral writing.
I was well into Mauraās story by the time I encountered Quatroās first book, but I thought of Maura as a sort of cousin to her narrator. Maura is less bound by an allegiance to religious principles and a religious community than Quatroās narrator is, but her predicament, and the way sheās on fire for somebody are definitely similar. Regarding other influences, there were two books I thought about a lot, at least when I was getting started: Charming BillyĀ by Alice McDermott and EveningĀ by Susan Minot. Both of them feature an older character looking back on their life, specifically on the events of a single summer when they were young, and life was full of every possibility.
I love those books so much that I think in some way I wanted to write something that echoed the things I loved so much about them. To try my hand at a similar type of story. That said, I think what ultimately kept me from giving up on this project (which I almost did more than a few times over the 12 years I worked on it, off and on) was less me wanting to measure up to other books than it was me feeling there was a hole in the literature about Catholic priests and maybe even romantic love that only I could fill with my book. To believe such a thing is a little delusional and self-important, of course.Ā A lie you tell yourself to get your butt in the chair. But it worked. So if I need to for my next book, Iāll happily believe it again.
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Mark Rader’s debut novel, The Wanting Life, is available from Unnamed Press.