“Hold Fast”
Spencer K. M. Brown, Wiseblood Books (2022)
328 pages, $10
“But still the desire is there, that hope for salvation, for love, for truth. Sometimes that desire to believe in something might just be enough. These are the new martyrs. No more burnings at the stake, no beheadings or crucifixions. But those who simply hold fast to that tiny possibility of hope, of love.”
These words, coming roughly two-thirds of the way through Spencer K. M. Brown’s 2022 novel, “Hold Fast,” serve as something more lyrical than a thesis statement for the story as a whole. Set in the icy heart of a North Shore winter, “Hold Fast” is the tale of a father and son in the harsh time following a pair of tragedies. Thom, a grizzled Minnesota handyman and snowplow driver, has fallen into a deep depression after the loss of Helen, his wife; Jude, his son, has lost both his mother as well as his dream of rowing on the Olympic team after an injury. Trapped in a cycle of day drinking, night jobs, heated arguments and heavier silences, it seems they are headed inevitably down the path of despair – until Thom has a fit of either madness or divine inspiration and sets himself a quest: He is going to build a boat and sail it across Lake Superior, or die trying.
What follows is a diptych of stories – one a father’s determination to find salvation, and the other his son’s embittered reluctance to hope. As Thom and Jude’s stories intertwine and cast light on each other, the world of a North Shore community is filled out with a cast of secondary characters who are each trying to numb their despair in their own ways. Substance abuse, lackluster relationships and consumerist distractions all provide partial anesthetics to creeping senses of purposelessness and wasted potential, though a few individuals, including a young craftsman and a line cook, provide moments of hope that point the main characters back toward the right path.
If this all sounds a bit grim, then it is grim only as the winter is grim: dark and stern, but starkly beautiful, too. Brown’s prose is its own work of craftsmanship, oftentimes blurring the line between the prosaic and poetic, especially in his descriptions of a frozen and sleeping world that only seems to be dead.
Winter, or to be more accurate Lake Superior in winter, is a silent third protagonist in this story, providing a backdrop ever-ancient and ever-new to the characters’ struggles to hold fast through their spiritual winters for a spring they’re not certain will come. In the center of it all Thom’s boat slowly takes shape, driving change in the lives of characters who might otherwise have preferred to hunker down and hibernate forever, and the reader is left to wonder until the very end if the vessel is really capable of carrying Thom and Jude to kinder shores.
It is difficult to level a criticism against such a work of art, but the book does have one fault, namely that of the characters of Freya and Andrew, a young pregnant woman and her physically abusive boyfriend. After Freya saves Thom from drowning, he offers her a place to stay upon finding her walking through a snowstorm with a black eye, seeking shelter from Andrew’s rage.
A good opener, Freya’s arc unfortunately ends with her returning to Andrew, who, on Thom’s advice, promises to become a better man. While it is a theological truth that anyone can be redeemed, it is a practical truth that a woman returning to her abuser, especially in a vulnerable time such as after giving birth, rarely ends well for her or her child.
Given how much the novel centers on themes of change when change seems most impossible, that particular plot element, in this reader’s view, breaks the spell by pushing our suspension of disbelief too far, especially for female readers – a sour note in an otherwise bittersweet refrain.
Nevertheless, this is a single failure in Brown’s otherwise excellent narrative, with its unflinching description of the chill despair that can be cast over the human soul, and the search for faith that warms it. “Hold Fast” is a novel about many things: grief, depression, modernity, and our collective sense of lost wonder and purpose. Fundamentally, however, it is a story about hope, and the desire for hope.
“I want to be someone who believes now,” Thom says near the end of the novel, and seeing the first blushes of spring after spending so long in the story’s winter, the reader can’t help but want it, too. Perhaps, the story whispers, the wanting itself is enough.