All the World Beside

October 1, 2023

In 1700s Puritan New England, stern, pious Rev. Nathaniel Whitfield dominates his congregation and attracts followers from afar. One such congregant is physician Arthur Lyman, and the growing passion between the two men threatens their earthly existence and their relationship with their God. From the author of the New York Times best-selling memoir Boy Erased. Prepub Alert.

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January 29, 2024
Conley turns from the homophobic Baptist upbringing of his memoir Boy Erased to 1730 Massachusetts for a finely tuned debut novel about a queer love affair between a reverend and a doctor. Rev. Nathaniel Whitfield bonds with his parishioner Arthur Lyman when the latter treats Nathaniel’s frail younger child Ezekiel for an unknown illness. While the forbidden love story of the two men is at the core of the narrative, its scope and depth comes from the empathic and complex treatment of the other family members, including Nathaniel’s daughter, Sarah, who in 1765 receives letters from Ezekiel referencing an estrangement between the siblings that he seeks to heal. Conley’s prose is slightly formal but also direct and rhythmic, as in the opening lines, written from a young Ezekiel’s perspective: “The shore of his mother, her warmth sheltering his infant body from the cold. The shore of his sister, pressing her nose on his.” An author’s note on Conley’s research into 18th-century clandestine gay life offers welcome context to Nathaniel and Arthur’s bewilderment and guilt over their undeniable love. This is a potent chronicle of an underexplored era in queer history.

Starred review from January 15, 2024
Conley, who thought deeply about the intersection of queer sexuality and religious persecution in Boy Erased: A Memoir (2016), plumbs that topic again in a sensitive novel. The premise that two men in Puritan America fall in love with one another--and one of them's a preacher--might sound like the setup of a Thanksgiving Saturday Night Live sketch, but Conley has crafted a rich, deeply researched story whose characters are alive with contradictions. This book is one of a number of recent historical novels about characters with same-sex desires who would have suffered grave consequences for being out: In Memoriam by Alice Winn and The New Life by Tom Crewe, to name just two. In 1730, Nathaniel and Catherine Whitfield have an infant son, Ezekiel, and an older daughter, Sarah. When she married Nathaniel, Catherine didn't know that he'd first felt same-sex desire in England, where he was raised. He becomes a star preacher in America, credited with the miracle of leading "five hundred souls to be saved in one meeting" during the Great Awakening sweeping the Colonies. He establishes a village of 200 people in Massachusetts called Cana, where the Lyman family is among his flock. Arthur, the village physician, is married to stylish Anne; they have a daughter named Martha. Conley's interest isn't so much in the suspenseful machinations of how the two men connect but in the revealing ways they react to their feelings for each other at a time when even articulating their desire is profoundly shocking. Arthur's love is pure and insistent; Nathaniel is deeply tortured, though he acknowledges to himself the love he feels for Arthur. This novel defies the contemporary mantra "It gets better," and the conclusion feels true to the setting. A novel that brings its Puritan setting alive with two men who are wounded for falling in love.

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Starred review from February 15, 2024
Reverend Nathaniel Whitfield leads a flock of followers in Cana, the Massachusetts town he founded. In 1730, Nathaniel and his wife, Catherine, raising older-than-her-years Sarah and young Ezekiel, forge a friendship with a new Cana family, Bostonian doctor Arthur Lyman, his wife, and their daughter. The families' alliance, seemingly forged by the wives, was in fact preceded by the secret love affair between Nathaniel and Arthur. The 1730s time line follows reverberations of the men's affair, Catherine's growing detachment timed with Ezekiel's understanding that he is different from his peers, and Sarah's forceful turn as the overseer of religious awakening in Cana. All this is occasionally interspersed with letters to Sarah from a person calling themselves ""your brother, Nobody"" in 1765. Conley, author of a memoir, Boy Erased (2016), about his time in gay conversion therapy, writes in an author's note at book's end about his research, the ""animating questions"" of his work, and the goal of queer history ""in opening up imaginative possibilities that allow us to paint the whole human canvas with the bold, bright colors we see today."" He succeeds in this sprawling, subtle, complex, and rewarding work of powerfully envisioned historical fiction, a novel rich in themes of faith, divinity, desire, and love.

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