A novel that is a “treatise on love”

At the end of Four Letters of Love, his first and lovely novel, Niall Williams explains briefly how he wrote it. He and his partner had moved back from New York to the West of Ireland determined to become writers. They’d risked everything. Williams couldn’t get started, but then the first line of the novel came to him: “When I was twelve years old God spoke to my father for the first time.” He had nothing else. He continues: “It arrived and I repeated it, and said it aloud and knew this was a beginning. When I got home I took out a white page and wrote it down. Who this ‘I’ was, and what God said to the father, I had no idea. I sat there for hours.” Eventually after much tribulation the novel was complete. The novel might be described a treatise on love. At the beginning of the novel we meet Nicholas, a 12-year-old boy living in Dublin who is baffled by his father deciding to give up his office job and become a painter because God has told him to. Not long afterwards we are introduced…