A village “on the western edge of a wet nowhere” populated by men who drink too much and women who smile too little. Throw in cows, an addled priest, an abandoned baby and a thick cloud cover of shame and you have the elements for a quintessential Irish story.

So quintessential, in fact, I’ve held off reading Niall Williams for a long time, despite hearing raves about his work. My skepticism, it turns out, was misplaced. I’ve just emerged from a Niall Williams binge with a belated appreciation for his writing, which invests specificity and life in characters and places easily reduced to clichés.

Time of the Child is Williams’ latest novel, a companion piece, rather than a sequel to, his 2019 novel, This Is Happiness. Both books are set in the rural village of Faha — a town in the far west of Ireland whose inhabitants, we’re told, possess “the translucent flesh that came from living in an absolute humidity.”

Time of the Child takes place in the weeks leading up to Christmas 1962 and opens — and closes — on a set piece of Mass at the parish church, where most of the village gathers. In between lies a story that feels, at once, realistic in its rough and comic everyday unfolding and mythic in its riffs on the grand themes of despair and spiritual redemption.

Jack Troy is the town doctor and central character here. He’s a melancholy contained man who, we’re told, “carrie[s] himself in a manner that [the townspeople of] Faha might have summarized as Not like us.” Dr. Troy lost his wife and then the older woman he unexpectedly fell in love with, who’s now also dead. Keeping house for him is his 29-year-old daughter, Ronnie, the eldest of three sisters; the one who remained at home.

Ronnie, too, is a semi-enigma to the townspeople: Our narrator tells us that “Added to [her] reserve was not only the screened lives of all women in the parish at the time, but the marginal natures of all writers, for Ronnie Troy’s closest companion was her notebook.”

Dr. Troy has become haunted by despair and by a particularly heartrending question: “Why does no one love my daughter?” The answer, he fears, is his own glowering presence that may have repelled one especially promising suitor.

Inspired by what we’re told is a “mixed fuel of … brandy … [and] a parent’s fear of the unmade world after them,” Dr. Troy, uncharacteristically, resolves on a bizarre scheme to make things right. As the saying goes: “Man plans, God laughs.”

Instead of unfolding the Troy family narrative chronologically, Williams layers it on top of other simultaneous storylines, all of which are graced with language as bracing as salt spray from the chill Atlantic. We follow, for instance, the wanderings of Jude Quinlan, a 12 year old “on the rope-bridge between man and boy.”

Jude’s father drinks and gambles and his mother, Mamie, possesses “the anxious look of one married to an instability.” Listen to how Williams moves fluidly from the mundane to the wider lens of the numinous in these snippets from an extended passage where Jude helps to unload a van full of Christmas toys for the town fair:

There were toy soldiers, kits for flying gliders, … skittles in a net, balls, bats. … dolls of one expression but many dresses, …

For Jude, carrying everything from the van … was as close has he would get to handling any of these things. He had no resentment or bitterness . Rather, from nearness to the marvelous something rubbed off on him …

The other thing, the one that only occurred to him years later when he would recall what happened that day, was that what he was carrying out of the van that December morning was his childhood.

For those who believe in such phenomena, Jude will be the instrument for bringing a miracle — a Christmas miracle complete with a baby and a virginal mother, no less — into this story. The other miracle here is a literary one: Time of the Child itself, which gives readers that singular experience of nearness to the marvelous.

The love story of musicians Ann Marie Simpson-Einziger and Mike Einziger was fortified in a lab.

After meeting through a mutual colleague in 2010, the Santa Monica-based couple’s courtship began the following year, as they were collaborating with Oscar-winning composer Hans Zimmer on a series of film scores. Einziger is best known as the founding guitarist of California-based rock band Incubus. His wife is a renowned composer and violinist for artists including Jethro Tull, Ringo Starr, Dave Matthews Band and Stevie Nicks.

The couple had been seeing one another for only about a year when together they stumbled upon a medical mystery. It resulted in a thrilling scientific discovery, the founding of a biotech beauty company called Mother Science — and their own unique happily-ever-after.

“It was an unexpected journey,” said Simpson-Einziger.

“We were simply trying to answer a series of unanswered scientific questions,” her husband added.

It all began in 2012 when Simpson-Einziger developed a fungal infection while traveling abroad. A classically trained violinist by trade, she was performing with composer A.R. Rahman in India when she noticed lightened patches of skin on her back and under her bra line. They resembled “loosely drawn flower blooms, with rounded edges,” she said.

After consulting her dermatologist, Simpson-Einziger was diagnosed with a temporary fungal infection called Tinea versicolor, which can lighten or darken skin pigmentation as a result of humidity.

“It’s an imbalance of the microbiome,” Simpson-Einziger said. “The condition was harmless, it resolves on its own and [I was told] that the lightened patches of skin would all go back to normal. But I got so curious.”

Armed with an undergraduate degree in biology from the University of Virginia, the former physics and chemistry teacher pored through science journals like Pigment International and Chembiochem to find articles that better explained the science behind her skin condition. She then began to wonder if whatever had caused it could also be used as a skincare aid that reduced dark spots.

She enlisted the help of her then-fiancé, Einziger, who also happened to have a background in science. He had recently completed the two-year Special Student program at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, where he studied cosmology and evolutionary biology. He still had access to the university’s considerable research databases, which meant he could help her look up articles on Tinea versicolor. Soon, he joined her obsession.

“There was tons of literature to research, but nothing coming at it from our perspective,” said Einziger. “We learned pretty quickly that there were no real hypotheses about how this was happening.”

Though they still couldn’t prove it, Simpson-Einziger’s theory that her skin condition could be of use in the beauty world kept them both up at night.

“I actually had a nightmare that somebody took her idea,” he said.

It was then, in 2015, that he called Dr. Jonathan Sackier, a family friend and biotech and medical entrepreneur, who co-invented robotic surgery.

In 2023 Mother Science launched its first product, the Molecular Hero Serum ($89). The product is meant to reduce hyperpigmentation and brighten skin.

(Al Seib / For The Times)

“I taught his daughter violin lessons when I was a recent college graduate living in Virginia,” Simpson-Einziger said.

“We went to [him] fully prepared that we were going to get laughed out of the room,” Einziger added.

Sackier remembers the couple’s uncertainty during the phone call. “Ann-Marie was in the background, whispering, ‘He’s going to think we’re idiots,’” he said. “[Mike] asked if I could identify what it was about the fungal infection that was causing depigmentation and having identified it, could I synthesize or somehow isolate the chemical so that we could do something to impact pigmentation disorders.”

A surgeon by specialty, Sackier connected them with his colleague, Timothy Macdonald, a scientist and professor emeritus of chemistry and pharmacology at the University of Virginia.

“I have taken many projects to him over the years,” Sackier said. “I call him ‘Dr. No,’ because he always says, ‘No, that doesn’t make sense. No, that won’t work.’ When I told him this, he went, ‘Holy moly, that’s impressive.’”

Macdonald began advising the couple and helped connect them with a North Carolina-based research organization called PharmaDirections. The drug development company helped design a scientific program to explore various compounds that had caught the Einzigers’ attention while researching.

After countless studies, they discovered that a naturally occurring molecule that had co-evolved with the human microbiome, Malassezin (pronounced mal-uh-say-zin), could be beneficial for sun spots. While the molecule was identified and named in 2001, the Einzigers were the first to recognize that Malassezin could be valuable in the context of skincare.

“Malassezin is made from a yeast,” said New York-based dermatologist Dr. Amy Wechsler. “When someone has the yeast infection on their skin, the skin often bleaches temporarily.”

The couple filed an application to patent the discovery in 2016. (It was officially granted in 2018.) They then worked with a team of scientists including cosmetic chemist Susan Goldsberry and beauty innovation entrepreneur Tim McCraw to develop Malassezin into a topical serum after previously manufacturing it through a separate process called chemical synthesis.

They began testing to see if it could benefit melanocytes, the skin cells that produce melanin, the dark pigment in question. The couple used their personal savings to fund the initial research.

“I justified it as, ‘How much would I pay for an education where experts in the field teach me how to characterize a molecule and then commercialize it?’” Simpson-Einziger said. “That one-on-one education was worth what we put into investigating this molecule.”

They brought on beauty industry veteran Edna Coryell, McCraw’s daughter, as co-founder and CEO of Mother Science in August 2017 to oversee further research and development, which involved in vitro studies, 3D cell cultures, ex vivo skin testing and genetic analysis. Coryell had never brought a new ingredient to the market until Malassezin.

“It is very rare,” said Coryell. “Truly, as we were going through [the process], it was writing the playbook for this.’”

The Einzigers also collaborated with Dr. Pearl Grimes, director of the Vitiligo & Pigmentation Institute of Southern California, who specializes in vitiligo and pigmentation disorders.

“This is somebody who’s been looking at Tinea versicolor for decades,” Einziger said. “Her first reaction was, ‘How did you guys figure this out?’”

“I was 100% fascinated,” Grimes said of reviewing their initial in vitro studies. “The science [and] the concept was disruptive.”

Grimes assembled a clinical program, which led to proof-of-concept data that’s since been published in peer-reviewed journals including the American Academy of Dermatology and Journal of Drugs in Dermatology.

She went so far as to take a skin biopsy from her own elbow for lab testing. Using VISIA skin analysis technology, she found that the serum helped fade hyperpigmentation on the sample.

“That’s when I really knew that it worked,” Grimes said. “I used it in a stubborn area, and I could clearly see via photographic documentation that it was responding.”

“We had a lot of people who said, ‘You don’t want to do this. This is too hard. It’s going to take years.’” Simpson-Einziger said. “I remember thinking, ‘Years don’t scare me.’”

(Al Seib / For The Times)

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Einziger also biopsied a patch on his arm for Grimes to analyze. “We felt responsible,” he said. “Mine was done before we even did the human clinical study.”

Simpson-Einziger joked that she too “put real skin in the game” after she said she had her face punch-biopsied — a procedure in which an instrument is used to remove a deeper skin sample — three times.

“Having holes punched in my face was an ultimate act of belief in what we’ve made,” Simpson-Einziger said.

Once the Einzigers confirmed that the data supported their initial hypothesis in a human clinical study, they moved forward with a business plan for what eventually became Mother Science. (It joins the couple’s two other co-founded businesses, including Mixhalo, a networking technology company for live events.)

Mother Science — named as a nod to French physicist and chemist Marie Curie — was born as a result of raising an initial round of approximately $3.2 million in seed funding from a small group of venture capitalists and angel investors, including Hawktail’s Michael Polansky and Drew Houston, the co-founder of Dropbox. After more than six years of research, Malassezin became the DNA of Mother Science, which officially launched in 2023 with its first product, Molecular Hero Serum ($89). The product is meant to reduce hyperpigmentation and brighten skin.

“It’s a powerful antioxidant,” Simpson-Einziger said. “When we started testing, we learned that Malassezin happens to offer superior protection against hydroxyl and peroxyl free radicals, which are [some of] the most damaging. We had this molecule that was going to do something marvelous in protecting the skin.”

A second product, Retinol Synergist ($96), was released earlier this year. And Molecular Genesis Barrier Repair Moisturizer ($68), featuring Malassezin, will be released on Jan. 7.

“Malassezin is really versatile, as it’s able to target hyperpigmentation, improve the skin’s moisture barrier and provide potent antioxidant protection without any irritation,” said Connecticut-based dermatologist Dr. Mona Gohara, who is also an associate clinical professor at Yale University. “The beauty of it is it’s gentle but also highly efficacious.”

In 2016, the same year the Einzigers filed a patent for their scientific discovery, the couple married. They are now parents to four children including a nearly one-year-old son. Because their courtship intersected with their scientific passion project, they consider Mother Science their fifth child.

“We had a lot of people who said, ‘You don’t want to do this. This is too hard. It’s going to take years.’” Simpson-Einziger said, pausing. “I remember thinking, ‘Years don’t scare me. I have a baby. I’m going to have to take care of a human for 18 years.’ There are no guarantees when you have a child how they’re going to turn out, but you do it out of love, out of passion, and it makes your life richer.”

While the couple continues to grow Mother Science’s product lineup, Simpson-Einziger is most proud of their process of discovery itself.

“We’re excited about contributing to science, and having that legacy as part of our brand,” she said.

She hopes Malassezin will one day be as universally known as Vitamin C and hyaluronic acid.

“I want people talking about Malassezin, not even about our brand, just about Malassezin,” she said.

In other words, she and her husband hope the ingredients of their products will be front and center — not themselves.

“Nobody is excited about coming to me for their skincare needs,” Einziger, who still regularly sells out stadiums with Incubus, said with a laugh. “I’m just a person who plays music who happens to be curious about the skin microbiome.”

Motherhood in the U.S. is revered. Actual mothers? Not so much. So where’s a bedraggled mom to turn when she feels overworked, overwhelmed, and underappreciated? Turns out, momfluencers are stepping in to fill that void, including a particular category of momfluencer: the tradwife. We dive into that world to understand how it might intersect with the incoming presidential administration, what it has to do with white supremacy, and where moms of color fit in.

We want to hear from our listeners about what you like about Code Switch and how we could do better. Please tell us what you think by taking our short survey, and thank you!

This episode was produced by Jess Kung. It was edited by Courtney Stein. Our engineer was Josephine Nyounai.