A novel about reckoning with modernity and tradition

As is strangely common in the life of teenage girls, Laura’s obsession shifts from her male idol to a female friend when she meets Virginia Strauss, another Webster worshipper and a tightly wound young woman with a domineering edge. Their shared passion for their dead hero morphs hypnotically into an aching account of homoerotic desire — readers will recall with either fondness or pain the days when the brush of someone’s hair past their shoulder or a furtive intertwining of hands at assembly or lunch could mean everything.

Burton, who in addition to being a novelist is a columnist at Religion News Service and a contributing editor at American Purpose magazine, is an incisive observer of the spiritual impulse in contemporary life. She is also an immaculate dialogist. Her gift for the particularities of teenage speech is no less vivid than her understanding of the disappointments of today’s liberalism. In the world she has painted, full of characters such as social justice warrior Isobel Zhao with her shaved head or Anton Gallagher, a presumptuous preppy who listens to IDW-flavored podcasts, there is nothing more “cringe” than being a “neoliberal.” To “rage against the machine” is to be counterintuitively conservative. It’s easy to imagine this book as a film — for the Gen Xer or millennial, many scenes will recall rites of passage from a TV show like My So-Called Life. Charismatic, bulimic Virginia, with her high collars, long skirts, and black gloves, could be played by the present-day equivalent of Angelina Jolie in Girl, Interrupted or Megan Fox in Jennifer’s Body. The World Cannot Give is similarly instructive for an older reader seeking to understand 2022’s warring ideological factions and why those who worship at the altar of the Western canon are so at odds with the “men are trash” and pronouns crowd.

Burton is often at her best when diagnosing the maladies of, as her characters call it (arising from a line in Webster’s opus), “the sclerotic modern world.” The teenagers debate whether they should be required to attend the weekly Evensong service. They balk at how easily the values of liberal society can come to resemble an empty kind of relativism. They display a loss of trust in institutions that mirrors populist beliefs about the country tumbling irretrievably toward oligarchy (“It’s all moot,” Virginia at one point declares. “The debate’s just smoke and mirrors, to give us a semblance of choice. It’s the faculty that decides on these things.”) In singing a night prayer that one boy describes as “goth A.F.,” they address the hubristic nature of secularity: “We’ve tried to pretend that we control everything.” Gathering at the shore on one of many illicit off-campus excursions, the teenagers submit to the communitarian urge that is the hallmark of an emerging post-liberal sensibility on both the Left and Right. On one such evening, Laura “marvels at the understanding that passes between them … that gives them all that same complicit sense: that they are all in this together.” They lament the hollowness of hookup culture: “There’s nothing more boring than sex. It makes even serious people into petty, self-indulgent morons.” Burton even pokes fun at the pomposity of the think tank world, describing Virginia’s ambitions to be an intern at the fictional American Institute for Civic Virtue.

The World Cannot Give is at its most astute and haunting when it depicts the nature of desire between women. Laura’s sense of self is nebulous, and her friends detect the nature of her sexuality before she does. Her lust for another girl is both lofty (“it’s too sacred, she thinks, for sex,”) and ill-advised (“you could no more dissociate Virginia’s ecstasy from her cruelty than you could take salt out of the sea”). Burton masterfully evokes a phenomenon that has been written about before in such books as Lillian Faderman’s Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present. Eros and companionship are often interwoven in those first feverish alliances of adolescence, and women’s capacity for spiritual and sexual transport can feel safer and more expansive than the alien world of men. The first time Laura sings with her crush in the organ loft, tears trickle down her cheeks as Virginia tells her, “Not even the boys love it like that.” One is tempted to imagine these characters as adults, in a happier atmosphere — Laura as having come to peace with her lesbianism and Virginia as a grown-up power dyke.

Although Laura functions as a symbol for the modern individual trapped between dueling groups of revolutionaries, the book is not merely allegorical. Its characters have admirable depth. We get a glimpse into Virginia’s difficult origins, which explains some of her tendencies, but it would have been illuminating to hear a bit more about Laura’s past and what led to a personality so marked by submission. And while the spoken exchanges are sparkling, much of the nonverbal behavior Burton describes becomes repetitive. There is enough lip-biting to raise the specter of Twilight’s Kristen Stewart.

This is a book for fans of the emotional intensity of YA literature or admirers of the gothic novel. It is in no way a comforting or reassuring read. The World Cannot Give is a disturbing cautionary tale about zealotry and, at the same time, a grudging admission that “immoderate hope,” as Burton puts it, often feels like the only thing that can save your life. Ostensibly about a Christian school, there is very little genuine Christianity to be found here. Scenes in which students gather on the beach and sing Anglican hymns by moonlight often feel like pagan incantations. Similarly, the story’s villain, Virginia, comes across as more sadistic occultist than religious traditionalist. The only characters who display Christlike qualities are, ironically, those who might be deemed “basic.” We meet Bonnie, Laura’s roommate who documents her life for Instagram sponsorships, and her boyfriend, Brad, who steps in for Laura in a dangerous moment of noble sacrifice. There’s also Reverend Tipton, the young choir teacher from Oxford, who doesn’t even mention that he’s a priest in his Tinder profile. These “normie” characters, belonging to neither extremity of the moral-political spectrum at St. Dunstan’s, are the book’s true examples of kindness and decency.

The writer Carmel Richardson recently claimed in a piece for the American Conservative that “Americans have not lost their appetite for the eternal.” She also warned, “We either submit to the dominant culture around us, or submit to strong subcultures that run counter to it.” This is, in part, what The World Cannot Give is about. It is also about how the yearning to know God can feel close to the urge for sexual fulfillment. It is about how the mundanities of the world, even the moderation needed to lead a functional life, can feel so monstrously empty and the way such dissatisfactions are particularly pointed in adolescence. It is about the very human, yet nevertheless misguided, tendency toward idolatry. It is, above all, about being on the side of transcendence and the beauty of what Burton calls “wild piety” in a world that can feel unbearably tepid.

Emma Collins is a freelance writer. Find her Substack The File at https://emmaecollins.substack.com and her Twitter at @emmacollinsfile.