Review of "How Do You Live Without Love?" by Anthony Bradshaw

​Score: 90+/100 (9.0+ out of 10)

Some pastors save souls. Wesley Aames spends much of How Do You Live Without Love? trying to save everyone except himself. He arrives at New Covenant Methodist Church in Asheville, North Carolina, with the unenviable task of reviving a congregation still struggling with declining attendance, dwindling finances, an aging membership, and enough internal politics to make pastoral ministry feel suspiciously like surviving a corporate board meeting with hymns. Wesley is inexperienced, irreverent, occasionally foul-mouthed, fond of beer, emotionally bruised, and not particularly interested in pretending ministers are somehow less human than everybody else. Naturally, some members begin judging him almost immediately. Yet the more time we spend with Wesley, the more Bradshaw begins turning that judgment back on the people doing the judging.

Religious hypocrisy becomes one of the novel’s most persistent themes. How Do You Live Without Love? repeatedly contrasts small violations of Christian respectability with much larger failures of Christian compassion. Wesley drinks. He curses. He does not always behave the way some members believe a pastor should behave. Yet he feeds teenagers, listens to people nobody else seems interested in hearing, sits beside grieving families, comforts the lonely, volunteers on a suicide hotline, mentors troubled young people, and conducts the funeral of a gay firefighter despite knowing the decision may create controversy within his church. Bradshaw keeps asking a deceptively simple question: What matters more, looking like a good Christian or behaving like one? Wesley’s imperfections frequently make him the target of moral scrutiny, while gossip, cruelty, manipulation, prejudice, institutional self-preservation, and outright exploitation can hide behind far more respectable appearances.

That critique is compelling, although the novel returns to it so frequently that the message occasionally begins to feel overemphasized. Once Bradshaw has established that drinking a beer tells us considerably less about someone’s morality than how that person treats the suffering, we do not necessarily need quite so many variations on the lesson. Similar observations about judgmental church members, Wesley’s language and lifestyle, church politics, sexuality, appearances, and respectable hypocrisy recur throughout the story. The point is a good one. Sometimes it is so thoroughly made that we found ourselves wanting the novel to trust us to remember it.

What begins as a relatively small-scale story about an unconventional pastor and a struggling congregation gradually becomes considerably more volatile. The death of teenager Jamie Lee McFarland sends shock waves through the community, particularly as grief, blame, her relationship with J.J., and the behavior of her mother, Rosa Lee, become increasingly public. Wesley finds himself ministering not only to a bereaved family but to young people struggling with anger, guilt, identity, relationships, and the feeling that adults have failed them. Jamie Lee’s death also draws unwanted attention toward New Covenant, eventually creating a messy collision of tragedy, media spectacle, church reputation, and people who appear increasingly interested in controlling the story surrounding a dead girl.

At the same time, Wesley’s involvement with teenagers such as J.J. and Thad deepens. He feeds them, takes them to basketball games, spends time talking with them, tries to give them somewhere safe to belong, and gradually begins building the kind of youth ministry New Covenant has largely been missing. His work outside the sanctuary becomes just as important as what happens inside it. He also volunteers on a suicide hotline, counsels people facing personal crises, cares for struggling members of the congregation, and repeatedly gets pulled into situations where there is no sermon, policy, or theological slogan capable of solving the problem. These storylines increasingly converge with opposition inside the church, where Wesley’s unconventional ministry, association with controversial people, and refusal to protect appearances at the expense of individuals lead some members to seriously question whether he should remain their pastor.

Fortunately, Wesley is strong enough to carry an occasionally repetitive story. He is funny, compassionate, impatient, judgmental, generous, insecure, stubborn, self-destructive, and frequently convinced that he has failed people whom the reader can plainly see he has helped. Beneath his irreverent exterior is a man living with enormous grief and guilt surrounding the death of his wife, his estrangement from his daughter, and his belief that surviving somehow means he failed the people he loved. That gives the title considerably more weight than its romantic-sounding phrasing initially suggests. Wesley’s problem is not that he has never known love. It is that loving people has repeatedly given life another way to hurt him. His instinctive response is therefore to save everybody around him, as though preventing enough suffering elsewhere might finally atone for the suffering he could not prevent in his own life.

Bradshaw surrounds him with an unusually large but generally memorable supporting cast. Charles Loftin brings experience and perspective, Susie Reynolds provides warmth and loyalty, Gary Meade becomes an important friend, and Simon and Thelma Jenkins offer a moving portrait of long-term devotion. Matthew, Susie’s son, brings another kind of tenderness to Wesley’s growing collection of relationships, while J.J. and Thad give the novel much of its youthful energy and increasingly serious emotional weight. Rosa Lee is deliberately difficult to like for much of the book, particularly as her treatment of Jamie Lee and later behavior invite anger from both characters and readers, although Bradshaw eventually gives her more history and complexity than her early scenes initially suggest.

Then there is Lucky, an abused three-legged dog who may be the least subtle metaphor in the book and also one of our favorite characters. Lucky is wounded, scarred, imperfect, still capable of trusting people, and far more useful than anyone might initially assume. Sound familiar? His relationship with Wesley works because Bradshaw never needs to explain the parallel very much. Both have been hurt. Both carry visible or invisible damage. Neither is as finished as other people might assume. And both continue finding reasons to attach themselves to somebody else anyway.

The novel is often at its best when these relationships gradually transform New Covenant from a building Wesley happens to work inside into something resembling an actual community. Some of the quieter scenes involving meals, basketball, music, hospital rooms, grieving families, teenagers, dogs, and ordinary conversations accomplish more than the larger speeches because they demonstrate Wesley’s theology without requiring him to explain it. There are also moments of genuine emotional power when Wesley encounters grief in other people and recognizes versions of his own pain staring back at him. The closer the church comes to deciding what to do with Wesley, the clearer it becomes that the decision is about considerably more than whether one pastor keeps his job. It becomes a referendum on what kind of church New Covenant intends to be.

The story can become episodic through its middle, however, with repeated meals, committee conflicts, exercise, music, youth interactions, and Wesley’s recurring self-reproach creating stretches that could probably be tightened. Some antagonistic characters are also painted with broad strokes. Ruth can become more symbol of church opposition than fully dimensional person, while certain media-related personalities venture close to caricature. Rosa Lee ultimately gains meaningful complexity, but we would have welcomed more of that nuance earlier rather than spending so much of the novel encountering her primarily through her worst behavior.

The submitted manuscript would also benefit from another comprehensive line edit. We encountered several noticeable technical errors, including “ballon” instead of “balloon,” “call phone” instead of “cell phone,” and the sentence “Wesley removed his mask and let him dangle from his ear,” where “it” is clearly intended instead of “him.” There are also occasional punctuation, capitalization, and awkward phrasing issues that interrupt an otherwise engaging narrative voice.

Bradshaw also moves rapidly between homespun comedy and extremely serious material involving suicide, abuse, racism, homophobia, grief, violence, and family trauma. Much of that contrast feels intentional because real communities do not experience tragedy in neatly separated genres, but a few jokes land uncomfortably close to scenes carrying substantial emotional weight. Greater restraint in both the humor and repetition would make the strongest moments hit even harder.

Still, How Do You Live Without Love? has something considerably more valuable than perfection: it has a point of view. This is not merely a story about a pastor trying to save a dying church. It is about a deeply imperfect man entering a community preoccupied with what Christianity is supposed to look like and gradually forcing the people around him, and himself, to confront what Christianity is supposed to actually do. Bradshaw’s answer is not found in spotless behavior, polished appearances, or winning theological arguments. It is found in feeding people, sitting beside them, listening to them, forgiving them, protecting them, mourning them, and continuing to love even when love cannot guarantee a happy ending.

That also brings the novel back to Wesley himself. He spends much of the book believing his worth is measured by whether he can rescue the people around him, even as life repeatedly demonstrates that love does not grant anyone that kind of power. The deeper question behind How Do You Live Without Love? therefore becomes something more complicated than whether a man can survive grief. It asks how someone continues loving when love has already cost him so much, and whether accepting that we cannot save everybody means we should stop trying to help anybody. Wesley comes to Asheville believing he is supposed to breathe life into New Covenant. By the time the congregation faces its greatest tests, the more affecting truth is that New Covenant and the people surrounding Wesley may be doing exactly the same thing for him.

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