The Agnostics

by Wendy Rawlings

“Who knows if there’s a God? There’s us, now, and caterpillars and other insects and mulch. So thinks Stephen Wirth as he watches his marriage collapse. Between bouts of alcoholism and attempts to restore a fleet of decrepit boats, Stephen does his best to help his daughters cope with their mother having fallen in love with another woman. But growing up and making sense of the world is something the girls must do on their own, just as for their mother there is no easy way around building a new life. Set on Long Island, The Agnostics follows the Wirths through several decades as they struggle to redefine themselves and their idea of family. 

Painting with a fine and delicate brush, Wendy Rawlings reveals her characters’ lives as a series of discrete moments, illuminating the intimate story of one American middle-class family.

“Already an accomplished stylist, Rawlings has given us a first novel that is at once delicate and intense. The characters are so finely engraved and their passions so recognizable, the river of their daily lives runs so broad and deep, in the end we feel not that we have merely read about them but that we have lived with them, side by side. A poignant, exquisitely focused book.”
—Sigrid Nunez, author of The Last of Her Kind

248 pages, Hardcover

First published August 2, 2007

Reviews

[Pamela · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful! This chronicle of a Long Island family from the early 1960s through the 1990s is beautifully written, smart, funny, and very moving. Stephen Wirth is from old WASP stock and Bev Cohen is a Jew, but (like many educated, bohemian-leaning young marrieds in the 1960s) neither of them find much relevance in religion. They raise their two daughters, Louise and Deborah, with what they believe is straight, unmystified talk about life and death and the ways of the world. But things get trickier when Bev gets romantically involved first with one and then another woman and the marriage totters. Louise and Deborah realize that even without God there are mysteries, and they must figure out for themselves how to define terms such as "family," "self," and "love." In her Acknowledgements, Rawlings mentions being influenced by the work of James Salter, and The Agnostics indeed has Salter's muscular narrator, lyricism, sly wit, and sometimes-melancholy, sometimes-joyous preoccupation with the changes wrought by the passage of time.

[Joseph Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

A longitudinal account of what life is like growing up without religion and, at least to me, how little it actually means in the grand scheme of things. I'm not entirely sure why I love Rawlings's style, but I imagine it has to do with how similar it seems to be to the way my thoughts bubble up in my brain, though there's much more fluidity and poetry to her words. The characters are thoroughly likable, though intensely flawed and at times terrible to each other, themselves. I can't really explain it, but The Agnostics is a novel that will stay with me for a very long time.