The blurbs that accompany Tom Noyes’ excellent first collection of short stories consistently discuss the same element–the characters, and rightfully so, as the characters in this collection are startling and praiseworthy. Impressively, Noyes fleshes out each average Joe with eloquent brevity. It is easy to claim that these Joes are simple–even their names, Buck, Quinn, Cal, Jan, are monosyllabic–but they are never simpletons. For Noyes, complexity is an emergent property of a multitude of simplicities, thus he combines individuals in interesting ways to create loving, tragic relationships and contemporary struggles–one character digs a hole that a child falls into, another deals with disruptive employees, and a third brawls with a rival mascot, and so forth.
          The settings are diverse. Stories take place at a bowling alley, a frozen interstate, a backyard BBQ, and a grocery store. However, the people in these stories all exist in the same empty, suburban world. The narrator of the title story clearly establishes this world when he asserts:

The universe is a barbershop quartet, one ongoing medley that won’t be interrupted, even for applause. When you get a red light, someone else gets a green, and it is good. The traffic flows. If you dig a hole, the next thing you do is fill it up. You inhale then you exhale. Too fast you faint, too slow you suffocate. You stay in step despite yourself.

This is the apathetic environment that each person must struggle against. Many are able to do so with great humor and wit, while others sadly succumb to it.
          Noyes presents pitiable characters without passing judgment upon them, as in "All I Want and More," where he describes a young man incapable of moving on with his life after a failed relationship. Instead of reviling this character, Noyes surprisingly invokes sympathy. The heroic characters in the collection (Cal and Jan in "Burying Agnes," Abe and Vera in "Georgia, Would You Mind," Megan in "All You Want and More," and Robin in "One Removed") do not ally themselves with the pitiable, but are either isolated or align with individuals nearer to their own semblance. In the story "Vehicles," a father and son long for a successful baseball career for the son, but an injury to the son’s head soon ends this dream. The father and son unite in the face of adversity and continue their lives working as bricklayers. The son mixes cement and brings the bricks to his father who "sets and scrapes, and when a row is finished he goes on to the next one." What might have been a cliché in the hands of a lesser writer becomes a touching story due to Noyes’ ability to write characters so well.
          Other characters unite with humor in the face of fatal hardships, as in the story "Georgia, Would You Mind?" Here, a married couple, Abe and Vera, cope with Abe’s failing heart, and they hide their fear with great irony and wit. When Abe receives an echocardiogram at the end of the story to discover his heart’s weaknesses, the couple jokes back and forth, so much so that a technician has to keep hushing them. It is this resolve and courage that is inherent to most of the inhabitants of Noyes’ world. In "Truck’s Testament," the narrator best sums up this tenacity when he says, "I’ve got the capacity to admit I’m flabbergasted while continuing to move forward."
          While the characters shine the most in this collection, it must not be forgotten that the book is not titled Behold Lyle, the narrator of the title story, but rather Behold Faith. Thus faith must play an integral part in each of the stories. And though we find several pastors and churchgoers and even characters dealing with unique religious quandaries, most notably the young football player who believes that he has been chosen by God to be a prophet, the central faith in the collection does not reside in piety.
          The phrase "behold faith" appears in the title story after a boy has made a face at someone through the window of a car’s backseat. The younger brother of the boy, who is sitting next to him, is unable to actually witness the contorted face but still erupts into laughter. He has faith that the mocking face is worthy of laughter and it is this kind of faith that is most pervasive throughout the collection.
          Characters who haven’t witnessed events and who fail to see the bigger picture have faith in their ability to fill in the gaps of their missing information and have faith that they can solve the riddles of their everyday lives. The best example of this is in the tragic story "One Removed," where the narrator must not only deal with her husband’s infidelity but also the aftermath of a violent beating that her husband receives at the hands of his lover’s jealous ex-husband. The wife is "one remove" from the truth of her husband’s secret existence, and so too is the reader, but this does not impair her faith that she can know the details through her own summations. Faith is not a religious entity in this story, but rather a conviction that the world is a tangible place even when one is not directly participating in it.
          Behold Faith is a collection about people who struggle to understand one another and who wrestle with the problems that they face. This is a collection about faith–faith that we can understand these problems and resolve them, and if not, then faith that we can have the courage simply to carry on.