Seen, Known, and Loved

Sally Thomas 
2024; 279 pp.; $15 (paperback)

Seen, Known, and Loved: Review of The Blackbird and Other Stories 

In his analysis of Georges Bernanos’s fiction, Hans Urs von Balthasar discusses the role of the author as an accompanying presence walking invisibly alongside his characters in their suffering and misery. Balthasar argues that a saintly character may function in this way within the novel—like Donissan, Chantal, or the Curé d’Ambricourt in Bernanos’s work— but in stories where no saint appears, the author serves as this figure who sees and suffers with characters who are otherwise totally alone.

Reading Sally Thomas’s The Blackbird and Other Stories, I was reminded of Balthasar’s argument, as well as the slogan used by the Newman Center where I attended college: “Seen, Known, Loved.” Those three words succinctly describe Thomas’s approach to her characters: she looks in on them in situations where they are not sufficiently seen by those around them, knows them and recognizes them in their suffering, and, ultimately, loves them in a way that calls the reader to greater vision and love. 

This vision of love is introduced in the first and title story, “The Blackbird.” Though birds recur meaningfully throughout several of the collection’s stories, the Blackbird of this story is an Irish dance: the protagonist Emlyn is a young dancer whose mother is sick and who is chosen to dance the Blackbird solo. Emlyn’s life is overshadowed by her mother’s sickness. She is taunted by another dancer and the object of generalized pity from other characters. Within the story, Emlyn is unseen and unknown by those around her; Thomas fixes her gaze as author on Emlyn’s quiet life, and this seeing gaze on what is otherwise unnoticed is itself an act of love and validation. 

Much of the story’s emotional work is accomplished through imagery and implication about Emlyn’s family situation, building not to a Joycean epiphany but an ecstatic flurry of physical activity. Layered emotions threaten to bubble up and spill out through the cathartic movement: 

In the little kicked-up breeze, oak leaves were scattering like startled wings. With them, Emlyn was dancing the Blackbird. She was a blackbird, flying. Her feet moved between roof and air, warm and liquid. Leaving the set dance behind, again she danced a step of her own invention. As long as she kept not thinking, her feet kept knowing what to do. She danced to the edge of the roof. Before her, all the open air wavered, full of light and shadow. In another instant she might step out onto it and go dancing among the leaves, a bird on the wing.

In her poetic, transcendent prose, Thomas renders a fixed and intentional seeing of the person that recognizes individual dignity and testifies to hope even in the face of a world that tempts us to despair. 

In one of the collection’s uses of a literal bird, the otherwise grief laden “Doing Without” ends with a cardinal singing outside the protagonists’ window, “a pebble of sound striking the clear window of the air” in the middle of winter. The bird, if not an outright symbol of grace and the Holy Spirit—“They’re here all year,” one character says with rich double meaning—is a bright presence through the literal and figurative winter of these characters’ lives, reminiscent of the “warm breast and ah! bright wings” of Hopkins’s Holy Ghost. 

To see and know and love may ring in our ears as a little too easy or cliché, and it risks turning into a kind of Saint-Sulpice sentimentality. Thomas is aware of this tension and writes into it in “Doing Without.” When the protagonist Caroline’s daughter lights austere white taper candles and proclaims, “I don’t think we should be sentimental about Christmas,” Caroline wonders, “If you couldn’t be sentimental about Christmas, what could you be sentimental about? And if you weren’t sentimental, how else were you supposed to feel?” Thomas presses on this tension between true feeling and sentimentalism, on earned versus unearned emotion. 

Yet Thomas’s writing consistently carries an emotive punch without becoming pejoratively “sentimental,” and this is because her characters feel real and complete. Through the author’s vision, we see characters like Emyln in the shadow and uncertainty of her mother’s sickness, but also in petty feuds, talking to a nurse who “looked as though he belonged in a fitness video,” eating ice cream with a friend, and dancing alone and wildly in the breeze. These characters’ pains are real but not sapped dry, pathetic, or overdrawn—their sufferings are instead a part of the whole of each character.

Flannery O’Connor wrote, “The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that doesn’t require his attention.” This, I believe, is the basis of Thomas’s fiction: to stare, to see the little things that “require her attention.” Thomas walks with her characters, shines a light where there is pain, and loves them there. Her stories recognize the limits of the purely rational, the purely linear or narratological, and strike on the level of poetry. She doesn’t tell readers what to think, doesn’t overexplain what each action or image means. Instead, these stories are presented for readers to puzzle out and sit with on their own. 

The collection ends with “The Happy Place,” which brings together many of the book’s themes. This final novella is about a family that has appeared in four of the collection’s previous stories. Here we encounter divorce, loss, regret, the pain and necessity of change, and the unsentimental nostalgia that yearns for what cannot be recovered, a sort of unnamable grief that we all carry with us and that piles up as life goes on. But also, importantly, the story ends with a mockingbird’s song—innocence, hope, and grace even when the characters are too in the thick of their pain to recognize it. In that quiet love lies the power of Thomas’s stories.