By Mary Ann Zehr
Reading in the Burg is a monthly column in 2025 by a local teacher and reader about connecting with books and taking in Harrisonburg’s literary scene.
~Kauffman, Rebecca. I’ll Come to You. Counterpoint, 2024~
The characters who first make an appearance in local author Rebecca Kauffman’s latest novel, I’ll Come to You, are noticeably unremarkable.
Ellen, a longtime school bus driver, and Gary, a retired bank teller, have each lost a spouse through divorce, and a woman named Susan has set them up for a first date. After Gary describes his cousin Susan’s chatting as “yap-yap yapping,” and he readily pours a second glass of wine, Ellen feels “hope dribbling out of her.”
Gary is self-aware enough to say, “I think it’s obvious I’m not dating material.”
But readers should not be fooled by first impressions.
At least three of Kauffman’s previous novels–Chorus, The Gunners, and Another Place You’ve Never Been–explore a theme that everyone is worthy of being loved. Kauffman signals this theme during the opening scene of Gary and Ellen’s date when she writes: “Gary laughed, and to Ellen’s surprise, it sounded like a nice person’s laugh, hearty and warm.”
The novel has a cast of seven main characters who become increasingly connected. The “small town” in which they were raised or live and breathe isn’t ever named nor is the state where it is located. The town is somewhere in the Midwest, and it has frigid winter days and summer heat waves. When people in the novel aren’t connecting well with each other, they open a door and step outside to interact with the elements alone.
The unnamed town is the kind of community that I grew up in–and also somewhat like Harrisonburg–where you expect to see someone you know in the grocery store and if you join an anonymous support group, it’s quite possible that everyone will not remain anonymous. Some of the people from my childhood–i.e. my classmate who made a career as a mail carrier or the custodian at my elementary school who every year gifted a marigold plant to each child in the school–would likely feel right at home in Kauffman’s new novel. As a small-town girl at heart, I feel at home in the novel. Virtually absent in the town are gourmet foods, brand names, and luxury goods.
Something that may be a particular temptation in such towns because it’s so easy for someone to gather clues about someone else’s personal life is to tell lies. Most of the characters tell only small lies, but one character is a habitual liar. The characters are flawed, and their flaws are believable–what we recognize in others and ourselves. One character talks too much or another doesn’t say the bare minimum to express his feelings.
Kauffman reveals who her characters are at a fast clip with carefully selected details that suggest she has an exceptional ability to read humans. Not far into the novel, I found myself caring about the characters. We learn that Ellen has a tendency to imagine events so far in advance that as soon as one Christmas season has ended, she envisions who will gather around her dinner table during the next one. Gary, who denigrates himself as not being “dating material,” is savvy enough to offer himself to Ellen as friendship material.
The unremarkable seven characters become engaged in remarkable moments tied to the birth of a child. The child is anticipated, born, attended to, and loved. This happens over the course of one year–1995–framed by two Christmas seasons. The parents, grandparents, and others in their orbit who anticipate and interact with the newborn child are transformed–some slightly and some significantly.
Kauffman includes a quotation from another novel, Lila, by Marilynne Robinson, to preface I’ll Come to You: “There isn’t always someone who wants you singing to him. . .” The words are spoken by the character, Lila, in appreciation for her newborn child, whom she is so attached to that she can hardly stand to put him down. Both Lila and I’ll Come to You speak to the transformative potential or power of a newborn child.
Religion and spirituality are central to Robinson’s novel, Lila, but that is not the case with Kauffman’s novel. The character of Lila is a vagabond with no experience in religious circles who eventually gets to know God’s love. By contrast, any religious practices or thoughts of Kauffman’s characters–for example, a couple of them are church-goers–are mentioned only in passing.
I started reading I’ll Come to You on December 23, and I finished it after I had attended a candlelight service on Christmas Eve in which scriptures were read and songs were sung about the birth of Jesus. I saw parallels between the promise of hope of the newborn in the biblical story with the hope that impacted a single family with the child born in the novel. New life in the world is precious and inspiring. Although the novel ends with a family gathering at Christmas time, Kauffman doesn’t explicitly make a connection between the newborn in the Christmas story and the one in the novel.
Over the course of I’ll Come to You, the flaws of the characters become more subdued as the characters embrace authenticity. In an attitude change that enables Gary to reflect on mistakes he made in his first marriage, he realizes, “an eye was never for an eye.”
What sticks with me is that, like for the characters in I’ll Come to You, no matter my state of ordinariness or the extent of my flaws, I can change to do a better job of loving the people I’m striving to love and also in receiving love.
Local author Rebecca Kauffman will converse with Amelia Schmid about her most recent novel, I’ll Come to You, at 4 pm, Jan. 11, at Parentheses Books, 76 W. Gay St., in Harrisonburg. Kauffman will also participate in WMRA’s Books & Brews by discussing her novel at 7 pm on Feb. 11 at Pale Fire Brewing Co., 217 S. Liberty St. #105, in Harrisonburg.
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