A Mysterious Box Arrives. Inside? The Dead Body of a Child Saint.

New York Times

2 days ago

LITTLE WORLD, by Josephine Rowe
'Little World' is a swoony, atmospheric, blink-and-you'll-miss-it short novel told through three interwoven stories. The Australian writer Josephine Rowe binds her disparate characters through a shared psychic connection to a very physical entity: the body of a child, incorruptible in death — 'a maybe-saint, a novitiate, a fledgling?' — who becomes a holy figure to those who encounter her.
Though the novel is only 100 pages long, there is so much strange potential in its conceit that from the start it feels primed to deliver a massive world instead of a little one. The first section follows an aging man named Orrin across the well-worn grooves of his solitary life in rural Western Australia in the years after World War II. He inherits an antique canoe-timber box containing the corpse of the supposed child saint, from Kaspar, a Norwegian ex-lover whom he worked for in Micronesia 25 years earlier. The box is accompanied by an official letter listing the body's 'saintly characteristics': its 'heady, floral aroma, believed to be the odor of sanctity,' and 'the weeping of pink-tinged tears.'
Orrin is not a believer, but he keeps the girl's miraculous body in his kitchen ('Catholic or not. You don't turn away a saint'), passing the time quietly between 'the brief colorless edges of the day,' worrying termites might get inside the wooden box and reflecting upon Kaspar, Orrin's parents and sister. Meanwhile, the saint's own vague memories stir, of her hard, short life, where sweetness was only ever found in the in-between moments, in playing with dogs, in 'the tug of her sister's fingers combing her hair.' These early passages shine with the promise of a delicately entwined story to come.
But as soon as it finds its tempo, this first section ends, and the novel picks up with Mathilde, a listless 36-year-old insomniac who discovers Orrin's long-abandoned cottage — and inside it the body of the child saint — on a haphazard road trip to the west coast of Australia in the 1970s. Though she's accompanied on the trip by two well-heeled young lesbians, Mathilde's back story is as lonely as Orrin's and the saint's, lit only with tiny, radiant moments of real joy. Revisiting her past over and over into the night, she is haunted by the son she gave up for adoption as a teenager, as well as by her brief, bright romance with Sally, another unwed mother at the Catholic home where she spent her pregnancy. 'One grief rousts another,' Rowe writes, 'restless siblings turning over in a too-small bed.'
After an abrupt, somewhat pat third section, which feels like an epilogue, or an extended universe for the characters we've come to know, the whole novel is done. If the end feels disappointing — and it does — it's because it doesn't quite live up to the vast possibilities Rowe has conjured through her affecting, sensual, otherworldly prose.
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