Beneficence

Last week I read Meredith Hall’s first novel, Beneficence. She is also the author of a much-praised memoir, Without a Map. I recommend both. Beneficence is set on the Senter family farm in Maine from 1947 to 1965, even dipping into the 1930s for context. The Senters number five: Tup, the father; Doris, the mother, and the children: Sonny, Dodie, and Bestus. The farm is almost a character, a setting that influences every aspect of life in Beneficence: the dairy cows and their calves, the fields of hay, the vegetable garden, the creek running through the farm, the family cemetery on a hill where five generations of Senters are buried, and that essential structure where so much life and work happen—the barn. The Senters suffer an unspeakable tragedy, one that three of them blame themselves for. The bonds of work and patience and love break, and the family flies apart. You agonize for them, hoping they find solace and healing and cease unintentionally hurting each other. Beneficence unfolds through three first-person points of view: Tup’s, Doris’s, and Dodie’s. Doris might be the most vulnerable and feel the most deeply. She surely has the poet’s eye. Here is a sentence typical of her perceptions: “The creek is frozen, a ribbon of silver through the white fields and pasture to the pond.” Dodie is the clear-eyed one, even as a child. She senses what is happening to these people she loves, and you see her strength and will to hold the family together as she herself gains maturity, all the while taking on one responsibility after another. Tup, the father, is the most philosophical. “We ride this little planet with all its sorrow and all its love and all its beauty and all its hard mysteries. There is not time to waste. Learning love is, I think, why we have this inexplicable chance, these few years on this earth. I am grateful for this offering, this beckoning toward all that we can make here.” I’ve read many novels since March 2020. Some prize winners, some classics I’ve missed. Even one trashy novel. Beneficence was a welcomed read. It made me want to slow down, even amid this pandemic, when so much of our lives has slowed. Learning and relearning love, for many of us, is a lifetime project. I recommend Beneficence. It is quiet and steady, beautifully written. No car crashes. No spies. No apocalypse. Just the critical stuff of living: love and work and joy, grief and hurt and loss, bitterness, compassion, acceptance. We need them all if we’re going to learn and grow, if we’re going to be better, more loving, and, in a word, beneficent. That’s the kind of world I want to live in.

Some readers might find this book too slow or depressing or many other things. As a fan of the writing of Kent Haruf and William Kent Krueger and Stoner, the novel by John Williams, I loved this book. It's the story of a Maine farm family who suffer a great loss and eventually find a way back to each other from their grief. The writing is beautifully descriptive, and I loved how the story flowed by year and from the perspective of three of the main characters.

This novel is a wonder. I read it very slowly, sometimes going back to take in certain passages (many of them) a second time. I know I will read it again. There is so much beauty in the writing, but never a line with a tinge of self-conscious artistry. (I think here of another favorite of mine, Kent Haruf’s Plainsong. )As a person who has—twice—set a piece of fiction on a New Hampshire farm (but one in possession of a far more primitive understanding of its workings) I also want to make the observation no doubt shared by all who have read this extraordinary novel. Reading Beneficence, I had the feeling the author had lived on this farm, inhabited this house, knew this family. The reader will come to love them , flawed as they are.I could go on. Beneficence is a book with so much tenderness, heart, authenticiiy and wisdom . A nearly perfect novel.

This book will stay with you long after you've finished the last page. The writing is simply gorgeous. The real, raw emotions of each of the members of the Senter family show us explicitly how grief can tear a family apart and then sew it back together.

Beneficence, what a beautiful word! The author gives us an honest look at family relationships stressed to the breaking point by terrible loss and the redemptive power of love.

Meredith Hall is an artist of words and Beneficence is a masterpiece. Her beautiful and poetic writing immerses you in the nature of a farm in Maine and in the heartbreaking emotions of a family that has no choice but to battle their grief. I will read it again and again.

This is a heart wrenching, beautifully written tale of loss and grief, love and forgiveness. The stunning beauty and healing of the land and the rhythm of farm life in the 1950s provides a backdrop for a compelling story.

As an author who spends most solitary hours of the day and night on a remote mountain ranch writing, knowing art, knowing rural life, I can say this novel is a masterpiece to be cherished, kept handy on the bookshelf — read and reread. I am astonished by the depth of Ms. Hall's highly evocative scenes and characters, exposing the unexplored subtleties of life unnoticed by too many. Seventy-plus years are behind me now and thousand of books. I wish I could give this one more than five stars.

Good understanding of the characters. Very sad story.