When Charles is 7 years old, his father, a respected minister, challenges the boy outside their church door: “How will you know you are saved?”
“Sir, I know not how I should come by such knowledge,” the boy replies.
Correction:
An earlier version of this review conflated the Pilgrims, who were separatists who arrived on the Mayflower to found Plymouth Colony in 1620, and the Puritans, who later founded the Massachusetts Bay Company. This version has been corrected.
Hugh Nissenson’s ‘The Pilgrim,’ reviewed by Ron Charles
(Sourcebooks Landmark) - "The Pilgrim" by Hugh Nissenson
And then his father reveals the essential paradox of their way: “The truth is, we all live in doubt.”
By describing the pendulum of Charles’s faith, Nissenson conveys the exquisite agony of that condition. For all our silly parodies of uptight Pilgrims, they were on fire; despair was their greatest temptation. Despite following his father’s footsteps toward the ministry, Charles confesses, “I was nothing but a mass of sin.” And his interior battle reflects the treacherous natural world in which he lives: Smallpox hideously disfigures those lucky enough to survive, and even a tiniest cut can begin the quick slide through infection, fever and death. Starvation is an ever-present threat.
With his well-employed father and prosperous uncle, Charles enjoys a certain degree of security in England, but he must still figure out how to spend his life — and with whom. The sweetest moments in this story describe his courtships and the central role that faith plays even in the most intimate moments with his fiancee. “We shall soon lie abed, taking pleasure in each other as man and wife,” Charles says in a rare moment of sexy talk. “May our bodily delight be a temporal intimation of our eternal spiritual union with Christ.” Whoa, down boy!
When Charles sails to the New World in hopes of avoiding temptation, his life becomes woven into the events behind our national myth of Plymouth Plantation, and some truly harrowing adventures await. Gov. William Bradford passes through these pages, as does little Capt. Standish, but in general Nissenson sticks to the details of Charles’s story while giving a bracing portrayal of how precarious the earliest settlements were — how close starvation, disease, dissent and cold came to wiping them out. Nissenson is particularly deft in handling the Pilgrims’ conflicted relations with Indians, those savages who needed to be saved or killed or appealed to for food, depending on the weather.
The novel’s Puritanical style gradually thaws as the story progresses, which I found a little disappointing even as it made for enjoyable reading. We get more natural-sounding dialogue, gracefully constructed episodes and even a few of those anachronistic modern ideals that look like a microwave oven in a mud hut. But all in all, Charles remains a distinctly separate kind of man, though endowed with an earnestness that speaks across the centuries. If you’re really interested in the people who might have celebrated Thanksgiving near Plymouth Rock, “The Pilgrim” is a novel to be grateful for.
Charles is The Post’s fiction editor. You can follow him on Twitter @RonCharles.
THE PILGRIM
By Hugh Nissenson
Sourcebooks Landmark. 356 pp. $24.99
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