Book Reviews

Three First Novels

Elyse Friedman (Author)
Then Again. Random House
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Elisabeth Harvor (Author)
Excessive Joy Injures the Heart. McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
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Reviewed by Sara Jamieson

All three of these first novels by Canadian women focus on female characters who, having experienced the pain of loss and of unsatisfied desire, embrace the rewards and discover the dangers of solitude in the heart of the city or the wilderness.

In Elyse Friedman's Then Again, Michelle Schafer, the narrator, accepts her brother Joel's invitation to a "Blast From the Past" party in Toronto, hoping for a reconciliation with the lover she betrayed twenty years earlier. Joel, an enormously wealthy Hollywood screenwriter, has had the suburban home of their childhood remodeled to look exactly as it did in the mid-1970s, complete with avocado green appliances and shag carpeting. Unnerved by Joel's attempt to rewrite the family's history (he has hired actors to impersonate their dead parents), Michelle retreats into her own memories of her previous escape from their "Holocaust haunted" home with her first and only love, McCollum.

Friedman's evocations of "bad '70s design," and of the caffe latte pretensions of 1990s Toronto are very humorous; I find the satiric acuity with which Friedman observes the details of contemporary urban life more memorable than the moments of lyricism which punctuate her customarily brusque prose. She constructs an intricate and compelling narrative, deftly moving back and forth in time as she fashions characters who go to extraordinary lengths in their efforts to escape or recapture the past; as they discover the high price that accompanies the knowledge that neither of these things is possible, the meticulous timing with which Friedman offers and withholds information generates a palpable suspense.

Attuned to "the inaudible din of sibling communication," Friedman writes of the limits of family loyalty, and of the necessity of choosing to live for oneself when the demands of others become intolerable. Joel is a trickster whose pranks expose ambiguous truths: he accuses Michelle of destroying the family through her pursuit of independence, yet his discovery that the acquiescence of the group can make the most bizarre and atrocious behaviour seem acceptable validates the importance of the individual will. Michelle's quest for solitude, arising from her self-confessed agoraphobia, ultimately seems the only sane response to the voracious materialism of consumer culture that surrounds her. Her eccentric Winnipeg bookstore is a distorted echo of the one in Alice Munro's "The Albanian Virgin," a refuge akin to a wilderness cabin. Friedman's epic lists of sensual pleasures—food, whisky, weather, bubble baths, books, and music—affirm the restorative properties of living alone.

In Pearl Luke's Burning Ground, the pain of love and family resentments drives the heroine, Percy Turner, to seek a more drastic sort of isolation in the forest of northern Alberta. The novel follows Percy through her summer alone at Envy River Tower as she scans the surrounding wilderness for "smokes" that could escalate into fullblown forest fires. In this life of routine broken by occasional crises, she has plenty of time to grieve over her lover Marlea's refusal to commit, and to initiate an e-mail romance with another tower operator. She also has the opportunity to pursue her fascination with underground fires and conceptions of hell, interests that stem from the knowledge that her mother, suffering from post-partum depression, once tried to give her away, convinced that she was a child of Satan. In a flashback scene in which Percy confronts her mother about this abandonment, Luke powerfully contrasts the frigidity of the mother's shame and confusion with the violence of her enraged child's demand for an explanation. Less successful are the portrayals of peripheral characters like Marlea's boyfriend and her Uncle Blair, which rely too heavily on stereotypes to be fully convincing.

Luke's prose is most seductive when describing the rewards and frustrations of Percy's supposedly simple life in the wilderness: she makes a pressure-less, lukewarm outdoor shower on a cold, northern morning sound invitingly sensuous. Percy's solitude has its pleasures, but also its dangers and illusions. The high seclusion of her fire tower is a metaphor for her desire for control in her relationships, and for her reluctance to give of herself, "afraid to face her own fear that perhaps no one will love her the way she wants to be loved." Luke effectively manipulates the patterns of the classic quest narrative, as Percy begins her journey back to society by leaving the shelter of the tower and entering the forest. Her encounter with a "fluffy-looking" bear sporting a "creamy coat" with "chocolate trim," part teddy bear, part candy animal, signals her need to relinquish a childish desire that the world conform to her expectations. Finally, she survives a metaphorical descent into the underworld with a renewed sense of the value of her life and her place within the community.

In Elisabeth Harvor's Excessive Joy Injures the Heart, city-dweller Claire Vornoff, in her late thirties and separated from her husband, experiences loneliness that is as complete as that of Percy in her tower. Claire's anxious conviction that "she must do something with her life" produces a host of psychosomatic symptoms, including insomnia, eczema and debilitating muscular pain. Although she works in the office of a family doctor, her search for alternative treatments leads her to Declan Farrell, an unorthodox and charismatic practitioner, a "Pied Piper" in "holistic sandals" who wields a powerful influence over his female patients. The novel depicts the gendering of a therapeutic subculture in which the practitioners are men, most of the patients women, and the potential for abuse is seemingly always present: shopping around for someone to cure her, Claire often has trouble distinguishing "between what [is] lechery and what [is] therapeutic."

Indignant at Declan's bullying manner, his instructions as to how she ought to be inhabiting her own body, Claire nonetheless falls under his spell. Her friend Libi speaks for the reader (at least for this reader), voicing her impatience at the helplessness of Claire's deepening infatuation. Claire's search for cures is bound up with her urgent need for sympathy and intimacy: Harvor vividly conveys the sense of threat which permeates Claire's existence among predatory men and malicious women (the "excessive joy" of the title is not often in evidence here). The novel explores the potential of the mind and the emotions to affect the material world. Declan believes that a person's body bears tangible marks of their emotional history. Although he tells Claire that strong emotions don't "exist in a vacuum," he appears unmoved by her love for him. Harvor is unsparing in her evocation of the pathetic stratagems of unrequited passion as Claire obsessively sifts through her encounters with Declan, looking for evidence of his love for her. Unlike Michelle and Percy, Claire does not find a way out of her isolation at the end of the novel.

Of the three books, Harvor's is the darkest and most challenging, and the quality of her prose is the most memorable. She conveys sensory perceptions with striking and uncanny exactitude: pulling on a wet bathing suit is to feel the "quick cold nudge of a dog's nose [...] between the legs." Harvor is adept at capturing the way in which the smallest details of the world can shimmer with significance when viewed through the eyes of grief and love.

This review originally appeared in Canadian Literature #176 (Spring 2003), Anne Carson. (pg. 147 - 149)

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