OUT OF ESAU

Troubled hearts meet troubled souls.

Making a graceful fiction debut, Webster-Hein crafts a soulful novel set in a small Midwestern town. Like Kent Haruf’s Holt, Colorado, and Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, Iowa, Webster-Hein's Esau, Michigan, harbors lives of quiet desperation. It’s 1996, and Pastor Robert Glory has ministered at the Esau Baptist Church for 10 years, barely subsisting on a parsimonious salary. Part Native American (his mother is Cherokee, his father White), he is treated like an outsider by his self-satisfied, narrow-minded congregation. One day, he notices newcomers at Sunday service: a 30-something woman with two young children. The woman is lovely, and at the end of the service, looking into her dark eyes, he feels “a rising thrill”—perhaps, he fears, a forbidden temptation. Webster-Hein’s narrative unfolds in chapters told from the points of view of her central characters: Robert, 38, who was raised in foster homes and found order and consolation in the church; Susan Shearer, the newcomer, unhappily married to a domineering, possessive man; Randy, her husband, frustrated at his factory job, given to violent rages; Willa, their 9-year-old daughter, who will do anything to make peace at home; and Leotie, Robert's mother, ill and aging, who was left poor, homeless, and helpless after her son was taken from her at the age of 8. Susan, seeing only a bleak future for herself and her children, struggles to live up to her wedding vows in a marriage that sometimes feels “like life without parole.” When she unburdens herself to the pastor, he counsels obedience and faith in God’s plan. His own faith, though, is wavering, shaken by Susan’s questioning and his undeniable attraction to her. “An alarm or a bell,” sounds within him, “either warning him of something or waking him up.” With characters yearning for intimacy and acceptance, Webster-Hein delicately probes the meanings of family, freedom, and desire.

A gentle tale of love and loneliness.