OK, right up front, this one is not my favorite Jamie Langston Turner title. That honor might go to A Garden to Keep or maybe the first book I read by Ms. Turner, Winter Birds. I supppose I’d have to say I liked Some Wildflower in My Heart better than this one, too.
And still Sometimes a Light Surprises is a nice slow ride through the psyche of an older man, Ben Buckley, who has encased himself in ritual and hidden himself in books and wordplay and is now living in a “gated community of [his] own making.” He’s walled himself off because of the death of his wife Chloe, murdered by an unknown assassin nearly twenty years before. After Chloe’s death, Ben withdraws emotionally from his four children and becomes an unapproachable, unloving father. I never did quite understand what Ben had done to make his family, especially his daughter Erin, quite so angry with him. He seems to have been an emotionally distant, but decent, father. He gave the children financial support, but not much love and caring. I would have liked a couple of flashback scenes or memories in which I could have read about exactly how Ben’s neglect of his children affected them. However, we are told that it did, and that has to be enough.
The book switches from one point of view to another frequently, and in addition to Ben Buckley, the reader is introduced in turn to:
Kelly Kovatch, a young Christian homeschool graduate whose mother, Kay, is dying of cancer,
Caroline Mason, Ben’s cranky and nosy secretary, who discovers a secret and doesn’t know what to do about it,
Erin Buckley Custer, Ben’s estranged and barren daughter,
and a host of minor characters who are mostly well-realized and interesting in their own right.
It would have been easy for Ms. Turner to go off on a tangent, telling us the stories of any one of the minor characters, and it almost feels as if she did that when Caroline and Erin, in particular, occupy center stage and the spotlight moves from Ben Buckley and his limited life to the people around him and how they interact with other people, some of whom never even come into contact with the main character. In this sense, the novel sometimes reads like a set of intertwined short stories or novelettes: one about Kelly Kovatch and her coming to terms with singleness, one about Caroline and her thirst for intrigue and significance, and another about Erin and her struggles with wanting a child and distrusting her father’s attempts at mending their broken relationship, and a final over-arching narrative about Ben Buckley.
The book should be enjoyed for what it is: an attempt at writing Christian fiction in which the characters are complicated and some of the issues remain unresolved at the end of the story. I do think I know what Ms. Turner was trying to do. In fact, she telegraphs her intentions in a scene where Kelly, who is also Mr. Buckley’s employee, visits her mother’s grave:
“I read one of those Christian novels you gave me, and I hated it,” Kelly said suddenly. . . . I mean I hated the fact that everything came out so happpy at the end, because it didn’t seem real. The girl acted too perfect, even when things went wrong, and then the man came along at just the right time and loved her at first sight, and at the end they overcame all their problems and got married . . . of course, they got married. Everybody gets married. The whole world gets married. Somebody ought to write a novel that doesn’t turn out so—”
This novel doesn’t turn out so, and Ms. Turner is to be commended for writing such compelling characters. I like character-driven novels. However, a little more plot in the next novel might be nice.
