Category Archives: Reviews of the written word

Simpson’s spirited stories shift perceptions

Islands of Decolonial Love

By Leanne Simpson

ARP, 143 pp., $14.95

Reviewed by Tyler Gabrysh

Leanne Simpson’s latest work, Islands of Decolonial Love, is an impressive collection of short stories. Simpson’s book includes poems and brief vignettes, as well as audio downloads for select stories to round out the reader’s experience.

Simpson’s writing concerns Indigenous Peoples– particularly those of her own Nishnaabeg nation.  Her work conveys heartache, sensitivity, and innocence, sometimes at odds with circumstance, blemished truth, and awkwardness.  Readers are introduced to this collection through the narrator’s unsettling (and implied) account of a relationship incident.

Throughout the book, many words (and chapter titles) replicate the language of the Nishnaabeg with an according translation given at each chapter’s end. While this is admirable, a single index would have been helpful.

“waaseyaaban” opens with the narrator describing the single shower all four family members take as mother “instructed us to wash ourselves and our five pairs of dirty underwear.” Then, “binesiwag” tells of an eight-year-old’s resistance to staying with relatives for the first time. Next, “it takes an ocean not to break” reveals disdain for an ignorant white therapist who uses the word “aboriginal” too frequently.

Simpson jolts us with jarring content, including the following from the narrator’s friend: “lucy says that i made a critical mistake on my first day of therapy. ‘you have to lay all of your indian shit out on the first day, drug abuse, suicide attempts, all the times you got beat up, all of that shit. then you sit back and watch how they react. then you’ll know if they can deal or not.’ ”

As effectively as Simpson jolts us here, she finesses elsewhere. “Caged” concerns a spotted lynx and a male bear, along with  “nozhem,” a female bear spirit. The tone is warm, reaching for compassion. “She told him 10,000 years of everything” is rich in atmosphere as a thirty-something waits at a music gig to interview the lead singer before a timely romantic encounter. “For asinykwe” is tender prose about a woman healer. Although not a central focus, humour pops up now and again, too.

Overall, Simpson provides a host of rarely heard characters and various means of travel and experience. The language is woven with spirit, symbolism and metaphor. Phrases strike a chord and readers are made to re-examine presuppositions they may have held about Indigenous Peoples in Canada.

Tyler Gabrysh (www.tylergabrysh.com) is a writer who lives in Victoria.

Ruzesky treks for beauty, obsession

In Antarctica: An Amundsen Pilgrimage

By Jay Ruzesky

Nightwood Editions

239 pp, $24.95

Reviewed by Bonnie Way

“A map reveals through silence and quiet white space; monsters fill the places that have never been seen. When the earth was a plate there were gorgeous waterfalls at the edges and serpents all around. In the Antarctic, the empty landscape on maps is not snow or lack of geographical character. Those thousands of square kilometers are blank because they have still never been visited.”

In Antarctica: An Amundsen Pilgrimage captures Jay Ruzesky’s fascination with Roald Amundsen, the first man to reach the South Pole on December 14, 1911. In 2011, Ruzesky set out on his own expedition to Antarctica, wanting to see and experience just a bit of what Amundsen had seen and experienced a century earlier.  The story moves between Ruzesky’s contemporary voyage from Vancouver, BC, down through South America to Antarctica and Amundsen’s historic expedition from Christiana (Oslo), Norway, down the globe to the South Pole. Ruzesky brings alive the historical men (and dogs) who made up Amundsen’s expedition and contrasts travel in 1911 with travel in 2011.

Ruzesky can be forgiven for his obsession with Amundsen, who is one of his ancestors. His experience in Antarctica is deeply emotional and his poetic language enlivens the beauty of this far-away place. He says of his trip, “What I am looking for is not icebergs and penguins and humpback whales; I am looking to travel through a myth that is my own, a story of ice that is mine to dream and to know.”

That desire to make the story our own is, I believe, what each of us seeks as we pick up a book. As I read, I found myself comparing this story to that of Ernest Shackleton, another Antarctica explorer whose journey has been told in books and IMAX movies. I also thought of my own trip to Glacier Bay, Alaska, a place of ice and rock and cold and water that only hints at the vast beauty contained in Antarctica.

Ruzesky extols the beauty of Antarctica but also comments on what this hard-to-reach place means to our modern world: “Much in the way Christmas reminds us to want to be our best selves, the Antarctic reminds us to want to change our lives. Here is the world before we messed it up. No cigarette butts on the beaches, no graffiti carved into the glaciers. Pristine is a word I keep hearing.”

In Antarctica is a beautiful melding of the personal and the public, the past and the present, research and emotion. Ruzesky presents the facts of Amundsen’s life and work, yet also captures Amundsen’s dreams and despairs. Just as Amundsen was foiled in his goal of being the first man to reach the North Pole and had to change plans, so Ruzesky also failed follow exactly in Amundsen’s footsteps and reach the Pole. Both men adapted, doing what they were able to do, and creating compelling stories in the process.

Bonnie Way has a BA in English (2006) and a BA in Creative Writing (2014). She blogs as The Koala Bear Writer.

Author captures slacker heroes

David Foster Wallace Ruined My Suicide and Other Stories

By D.D Miller

A Buckrider Book

246 pages, $20

Reviewed by Adam Hayman

Here is the easiest way I can summarize this book: if someone made a collection of short films out of D.D Miller’s stories, the director would have to be Louis C.K. However, if you’ve never seen the show Louie, that won’t make much sense, so let me put it this way: if a close examination of the “post-millennial” man is what you’re after, then Miller is able to deliver that, and he does so from a handful of angles.

A dozen stories in this book all paint many men in, what I’m afraid to call, an honest light. Men who think about porn, fantasize about waitresses, and fail to act at times they know they should.  These guys are held back by what they think of as laziness, but any undergrad in a first year psych class would call fear: fear of failure, being alone, or commitment. It certainly isn’t a flattering light, but somewhere in this collage of characters many men could share a sentiment. Miller doesn’t give the impression that he’s writing these characters out of humour. They seem to come from an understanding of their humanity.

The stories’ premises vary from something as simple as two couples on a beach, to an untethered, pig-blimp flying over a city in the midst of a city-worker strike. There are men in every stage of modern relationship; the women they all long for vary. The stories to watch out for: Dinosaurporn.com; Son of a Son of a Flying Pig; David Foster Wallace Ruined My Suicide; and My Summer With Seth. The last story piqued my interest because it is written in the form of a letter, and more importantly, it features a character that is likened to Seth Rogan. What gen-y-guy hasn’t laughed at the odd Rogan flick?

Reading several stories of different men pining over the sexual image of a woman, and enjoying the feeling of a cold beer can, however, loose its attraction. The Tudor, a story in the collection, is a prime example of this. The main character describes vivid sexual fantasies involving one of the university students he is tutoring. It is at times a little uncomfortable to read, especially for those not interested in such subject material. It is, however, well written. The main characters’ thoughts and actions are what make it uncomfortable, but if the author had left them out the story would’ve fallen flat.

This collection is a great tool for anyone looking to study the “slacker hero,” or for anyone simply looking to find great examples of characterization. This is Miller’s first book, and I am all too excited to see a full novel come from his desk. The chance to read Miller explore every aspect of a character would be hard to pass up.

Adam Hayman is a writer and student journalist.

Poet tackles life’s uncertainty

The Fleece Era

Joanna Lilley

Brick Books

105 pages, $20

Reviewed by Julian Gunn

Joanna Lilley’s The Fleece Era is the discovery of Brick Books’ spring season, a first poetry collection with a subtle, shifting vision of ecological and human connection. Lilley is a transplant, raised in England and now living in the Yukon. Because of her northerly coordinates, I thought first of snow clouds and then of sheep when I read fleece. In fact, the title poem refers to that fuzzy synthetic fabric so symbolic of current environmental questions. The narrator, a lost hiker, talks to the man who’s given her a ride: “Big deal, he said, we can make / sweaters out of plastic pop / bottles, yet there are places / where it’s illegal to hang your / washing out to dry.” This question of relationship—between strangers and family members, between individuals and culture, between human beings and nature—drives the collection.

The Fleece Era is divided into four parts. Each gathers variations on the theme of relationship, which modulates from section to section. The first part, “A Riddle,” concerns family and distance—both emotional and geographical. The narrator of “Overheard” imagines herself “shouting from the shore / of my mother’s Atlantic teacup.” The next section, “Emotional Expenditure,” considers the intricately interwoven social and bodily alienation experienced by its female narrator. In complement, the third part, “At Each Exhale,” examines the latent violence of intimate connections like marriage. “Scientist” narrates a painful disconnect between partners, enacted while skiing: “How is it I’m lost / yet you’re not, although / we’re on the same blank trail.” The troubled relationships of The Fleece Era remain open-ended.

The final section, “Nobody Else Dies,” takes up the vexed relationship of human minds to the natural world. “Ten Thousand Trees” is stark about the destructive drives of even ethically committed human beings: “I didn’t know the flash / of a forest gash could mesmerize, that there could even be a lust / to witnessing the first road ever forced on feral land.” In “Earth Twin,” the collection’s closing poem, Lilley writes wryly of a scientist who theorizes that “there might be planets even more / suitable for human life than ours.” She recognizes this as a dangerous fantasy: “It takes / a day or so for me to comprehend / he was talking about Heaven.”

Across the four sections, key relationships, characters, and themes create a world that feels consistent. There is a mother and a father, sisters and a brother, a husband. Yet there is a perceptual wobble, or say a parallax, built into the language that describes the central figure of these poems. This figure is sometimes an “I,” sometimes a “she,” and sometimes a “you.” This unstable centre, surrounded by more static figures, builds a sense of self-alienation across the collection. It seems an appropriate choice given the ecological position of contemporary Canadians, whether in the Yukon or Victoria. As Lilley queries in “Earth Crack,” “What if the piece of the world / I’m on tears off?”

Julian Gunn is a Victoria poet and essayist.

YA novel confronts life on Vancouver streets

Rabbit Ears

By Maggie De Vries

Harper Trophy Canada

232 pages, $14.99

Reviewed by Kyla Shauer

Every young adult novel I’ve ever read has concluded with some sort of bow-tied happy resolution. Usually the hero/heroine procures the love of someone dear, defeats their inner and/or outer demons and makes the world better. This is not that kind of novel. This novel discusses real problems from the streets of Vancouver. While it does not feature a brooding love interest, its complex characters give faces, voices and life to stories we normally hear as news statistics. Rabbit Ears shows that every story and person matters.

Many readers will remember De Vries from her compelling memoir, Missing Sarah, which focused on the author’s sister, who was one of the young women who went missing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside in the Robert Pickton case. A former editor at Orca Books, De Vries teaches creative writing at the University of British Columbia, focusing on children’s writing. She has written eight previous books for children.

Rabbit Ears follows sisters Kaya and Beth as they navigate Kaya’s inner problems that lead her to Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside in late 1990s.

At 13, Kaya starts high school already at issue with her identity. Kaya collides with the return of a former friend Diana, whose presence at her new school pushes Kaya to run from her secret past. On one of her trips she meets Sarah, a prostitute and heroin addict, who tries to protect Kaya by shoving her onto the bus home. Soon Kaya returns and searches for Sarah but finds heroin instead.

De Vries utilizes the viewpoints of both sisters to tell the story from the perspective of the family and the runaway herself. Unusually, Kaya’s character is presented in the second-person point of view: “It feels weird being outside in the city so late all by yourself. You can feel the eyes on you. And the danger. You think briefly about your bed. Warm. Dry. Safe. Then you shake that off and march down the sidewalk.”

By contrast, the first-person point of view focuses on the emotional conflict that affects Beth and her mother as they search the streets for Kaya. “I’m on my way back downtown when I see her, standing right there on the corner, teetering on her high-heeled boots.”

The transitions between the sisters can be jarring, especially between multiple shifts within a few pages. De Vries evidently chooses the viewpoints to engage the reader by looking at teenage runaways, drug use and prostitution from different sides.

Rabbit Ears is a rewarding read for anyone wanting to understand what could make a person choose the streets when she had other options. This novel does not shy away from brutal reality but neither does it dwell on the violence or abuse. De Vries modeled the character, Sarah, on her sister and gave Sarah to Kaya as a guide and defender in honour of Sarah’s memory. I would recommend Rabbit Ears for later teens and adults.

Kyla Shauer is a Creative Writing student at UVic and a Communications Assistant at TRIUMF, Canada’s national laboratory for particle and nuclear physics.

An Informative Journey Beyond Down Syndrome

Writing With Grace: A Journey Beyond Down Syndrome

By Judy McFarlane

Douglas & McIntyre  2013

205 pp. $22.95

Reviewed by Janet Ralph

      Vancouver writer Judy McFarlane uses a personal and conversational style to invite readers into her experience mentoring Grace Chen, a young woman with Down Syndrome, who has a dream of becoming a famous writer. McFarlane is initially uncertain about the task but, after doing research into Down Syndrome and confronting her own fear and prejudice, she decides to work with Grace. 

       Hopes and dreams form the essence of the story— the most delightful being Grace’s retelling of the Cinderella tale, which includes Grace as the heroine, Ronald, a boy she likes, their honeymoon, an emergency helicopter rescue off the Titanic, three babies and a future career of espionage. In her next story, Grace plans to send the duo into space.

       McFarlane includes many other dreams in her book, including her own neglected childhood dream of becoming a writer, and her daughter’s dream of a career in theatre. She also looks at the hopes and dreams of adults with Down Syndrome for acceptance in schools, jobs, friendships, love and safe places to live their lives – in short, their basic human needs.

      Woven into the stories are quotes from Jean Vanier’s book Becoming Human, Robert Murphy’s The Body Silent and Martha Beck’s Expecting Adam. All offer insights into life with handicaps and prejudice towards people with disabilities. McFarlane refers to David Wright’s book Downs: The History of Disability to summarize the tragic treatment of people with intellectual disabilities in the past.

      Writing With Grace has a mosaic structure with six parts, each made up of short sections of stories and research. Although the title suggests otherwise, the author’s experience writing with Grace actually takes a back seat to McFarlane’s own life: her pursuit of a writing career, her parents, brothers, husband and children. 

            Sometimes abrupt story shifts disrupt connections between stories, resulting in some connections feeling contrived. McFarlane’s writing flows well when exploring research on high-functioning individuals with Down Syndrome. However, the discussion of Down Syndrome would be more complete if she had included information about the lives of families who are dealing with lower-functioning people with Down Syndrome as well.

     In the end, Grace’s venture into writing is a success. She is recognized in her community in British Columbia and in her birthplace of Taiwan. Her family bond is strengthened by a visit with her grandfather who finally accepts her as she is. Even better, at the World Down Syndrome Congress, Grace promotes her book and meets others who share her abilities and interests.

            The Jean Vanier epigram McFarlane chooses is apt for every human story: “Is it not the life undertaking of all of us . . . to become human? It can be a long and sometimes painful process. It involves a growth to freedom, an opening up of our hearts to others, no longer hiding behind masks or behind walls of fear or prejudice. It means discovering our common humanity.” 

Janet Ralph is a Victoria reader and writer.     

Farrant fearlessly paints life’s details

The World Afloat

By M.A.C. Farrant

Talonbooks

96 pages, $12.95

 Reviewed by Marjorie Doyle

I’ve been taken on a wild ride, with reflective stops along the way.  I wasn’t scared.  I trusted the driver.

Reading through M.A.C. Farrant’s stories is like taking a tour through the psychedelic album covers of the 1970s – simultaneously laughing and probing for meaning.  These 75 “miniatures” invite us to loosen up a little, see the world through a freshly cut lens.  Many readers will know the Vancouver Island writer for her 11 previous books, especially wonderful 2004 memoir, My Turquoise Years.

Miniatures, yes.  Or if we see Farrant’s new collection like a painting, like a wide comprehensive Bosch-like canvas, these are details, lifted from the whole and magnified, allowing us to look more closely.  We never fear we will go adrift in this world afloat because the narrator is anchored.

Characters roaming this canvas include the teen who talks “outside of humans like a poet.” The couple “speaking to each other in Vain, an old, old language. He said, she said, neither one of them listening.” A man named Mark: “Short, rugged, lovable, and not unhandsome.” The person who arranges a busload of Japanese schoolgirls in a Zen garden: “one schoolgirl to every ten thousand pebbles.” And Muses who “have gone mad and are living as lady golfers in Palm Springs California.”

The distinctive voice is breezy and energetic.  Farrant is playful but never frivolous.  She’s a humorist (that rare breed!), but as with all good humour there is a point.  You can sober up quickly in the middle of a guffaw.

Some pieces are complete stories, but short. Others are teasers or hints or scenes.  And some are small works of genius – laugh out loud funny or thoughtful.  She has perfected this technique – nay, it is an art.

Consider the story “Our Spiritual Lives.”  It opens: “We’ve seen stains on tea towels that look like Jesus Christ’s face so we know he exists.” We then meet a woman who lost all her money to fiscal fraud, “So we pray to the banking industry not to do the same thing to us,” and a man who doesn’t pray.  He’d “rather trust the presence of hamburgers in his life to render it benign.”  The story moves along to composite pictures tacked on telephone poles.  Then:

“It’s Jesus Christ again.  The pictures are meant to show what he’d look like if he were alive today and sixty-nine years old and lost. Like practically everyone we know.”

“Along the Way” satirizes the funeral industry.  As we’re half laughing at embalmed corpses sitting in rocking chairs, we are gently towed into a thoughtful reflection on life and mortality – in a few hundred words.

As with most good art, some pieces eluded me, but who gets everything on one visit to a gallery?  I must, and will return.

 Marjorie Doyle is a writer in St. John’s, Newfoundland.  Her latest book is A Doyle Reader:  Writings from Home and Away. 

Poetry captures nuances of resilience

Steeling Effects

By Jane Byers

Caitlin Press

95 pages, $16.95

Reviewed by Barbara Herringer

From the very first page, Jane Byers plunges readers into her gritty, beautiful first collection of poems as she prises apart her experiences of resilience, of hanging on, of enduring. In short, Steeling Effects reveals the real world: a near-death birth, sexual assault, learning to be an adoptive parent of twins, being a lover, the intricacies of work, and the crucible of one’s geographic location. Her spare language creates a landscape that may be familiar, or at least understood by many of us — the tangled fragility and strength of our humanness.

In a recent interview with Shannon Webb-Campbell (Plenitude, Issue 4) Byers related that “steeling effect” is a phenomena in psychological resilience research suggesting that certain stressors may act as an immunization or enhancement of later functioning in an individual. That definition illuminates the journey of Byers’s life and the territories of resilience and resistance that she uncovers in each of the five sections of the book.

Byers moved to Canada from North England with her family as a young girl, and lives with her wife and two children in Nelson, B.C. Just days after the release of this collection by Caitlin Press, she won the Richard Carver Award at the Kootenay Literary Competition.  She is a three-time winner of the Nelson and District Poetry Competition. Even in her paid work with WorkSafeBC,  and previously in Toronto in corporate health and safety, the reality of resilience is foremost. And it’s shared in a remarkable section of the book.

Byers begins the collection with her near-death birth experience and ends it with the death of a 90-year-old friend. The first section of six poems sets the stage for life-shifting events. I appreciate how she illustrates the shifting moods of resilience in each poem — what keeps her going, what and who sustains her. She is generous in sharing those life-changing incidents that many would keep hidden. In “What Doesn’t Kill You . . .,” she sets the groundwork for the collection:

My first journey alone from uterus to incubator,
an inoculation against despair.

I study resilience.
I search for cracks in structures
returned to their original shape
after assault.

Breakwaters eventually break.

I vow to mimic the tensile strength of a spider web
and the mutability of bacteria
that render them resilient,
not the succor of cement.

I breathe my way back,

empty and fill,

to belief in my pliant self.

I found Byers’ section called “Joy’s Urgent Threshold” especially poignant. These poems move to a new level as she writes the space of parenting 14-month old adopted twins — their lives from birth mother, to foster parents, and finally, to Byers and her partner.

Still, how to explain those essential people disappearing?
What’s left is the efflorescence of tears on your face.
I hold you, you cry some more.
Now you insist, “I cry, I cry,”
as if it is your only birthright.
That lonely sob, a consent to loss.

Throughout the book Byers uses just the right word, line break and space to let us follow her narrative. She is generous to those who people her poems: her grandmother as an audacious young woman; women and men struggling with dangerous work; immigration. And she is generous with herself: how that first conscious breath seems to have set her on a creative path–and opened the door to steeling effects.I’m sure I’m not the only one waiting for Byers’s second collection.

Barbara Herringer is a poet and editor living in Victoria.   

A long time coming, but worth the wait

Fists Upon a Star

By Florence Bean James with Jean Freeman

University of Regina Press

298 pages, $34.98

Reviewed by Joy Fisher

If you like true stories about strong women, you’ll like this book. If you’re interested in live theatre, this book will engage you. If you have a vague notion that it’s important to fight injustice, this book will snap into focus your understanding of the human cost of government tyranny.

If, like me, you have a sparking interest in all three topics, this book will ignite you.

Subtitled “a memoir of love, theatre, and escape from McCarthyism,” Fists Upon a Star tells the story of Florence Bean James and her husband Burton, who founded and ran the Seattle Repertory Playhouse for 23 years, until Washington State’s House Un-American Activities Committee convicted them both of “willful refusal to answer proper and material questions.”

Ruined financially by the legal expenses incurred to fight the charges, they lost the lease on their theatre to the University of Washington. By December 30, 1950, the final curtain had descended on their last production, and, by November 13, 1951, Burton James had, according to his doctor, died “of a broken heart.”

In Seattle, the Jameses had devoted themselves to a “theatre of the people, by the people and for the people.” When Florence migrated to Canada in 1952 after being offered a job with the new Saskatchewan Arts Board by none other than Tommy Douglas, she finally found a “philosophical home.”

Norah McCullough, former executive secretary of the Arts Board, recalled a conversation she had had with then Education Minister Woodrow Lloyd. Concerned the Jameses might have been Communists, Lloyd asked about Recreation for All, the proposal Burton James had made to the State of Washington which had brought him under suspicion. McCullough had a copy and gave it to Lloyd. When he read it, he said: “Well, it sounds like the Saskatchewan Arts Board,” and she replied: “Yes, exactly.”

Already in her 60s when she moved to Canada, Florence James travelled “the length and breadth” of Saskatchewan by train in all kinds of weather conducting acting workshops and directing amateur theatrical productions in hundreds of communities. After her retirement from the Arts Board in 1968, Florence continued to work as a dramaturg with the Globe Theatre, the first professional education theatre company in Saskatchewan. In 1976, she was awarded the Diplome d’honneur by the Canadian Conference of the Arts, presented to a Canadian who has “made a sustained contribution to the cultural life of the country.”

In Canada, Florence James took up the job of finishing the book her husband had started before his untimely death. He had defiantly named it Fists Upon a Star, from a passage in Stephen Vincent Benet’s epic poem, John Brown’s Body, about the radical abolitionist who raided Harper’s Ferry in 1859.

Florence kept the title, wrote and, with author/actor Jean Freeman, rewrote the book and searched in vain for a publisher until her death in 1988 at the age of 95. Fists Upon a Star was finally published in 2013, after Canadian playwright, journalist and social activist Rita Deverell took up the cause and persuaded the Canadian Plains Research Center (now the University of Regina Press) to take a look.

Now we can all take a look. And I hope you will.

Fists Upon a Star includes a preface by Freeman, an annotated introduction by Mary Blackstone, professor emerita of the University of Regina Theatre Department, and an epilogue by Deverell.

It was a 2014 nominee for the Saskatchewan Book Awards in the categories of non-fiction, publishing, and publishing in education.

Joy Fisher graduated from UVic in 2013 with a BFA in writing. She is a member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. 

 

Deaf memoir speaks passionately

The Deaf House 

By Joanne Weber

Thistledown Press

274 pages; $18.95

Reviewed by Margaret Thompson

There is a prefatory Note to The Deaf House by Joanne Weber that explains the difference between deaf/Deaf and hearing/Hearing as they are used in the narrative. For many readers this may well be their introduction to points of view radically at odds with their perception of profound hearing loss as a disability. That the Note needs to be there at all, on the very first page, is a clue to the frustration and conflict the deaf/Deaf face in their attempts to survive and thrive in the hearing/Hearing world.

Weber relates her own experience to illustrate that struggle. We meet her first as a small child, baffled and disturbed by the sounds in her head. Her hearing parents, especially her mother, throw themselves into the task of acquiring every scrap of knowledge and skill that would help them help her. The result is a child who is amazingly successful at school, despite profound deafness. She loves books, and thanks to her mother’s constant insistence on correction and practice, on learning sign language and lipreading, speaks clearly and grammatically. To all intents and purposes, she functions perfectly, although she guesses much of what is said; she is even paraded as an exemplar of what a profoundly deaf child can achieve.

Weber gives an impassioned account of the inadequacies of this way of life. There is a frantic quality to the events echoed in the tone of her writing. We follow the compulsive student, the affair with a married man, the single mother of two small girls who keeps moving house, the frustrated teacher, torn by the professional requirements that tie her to teaching practices she is convinced are useless. The simmering anger effectively conveys the turmoil of those years, but it is the quieter moments that provide insight for the hearing reader: the younger daughter, weeping, placing her hand on her mother’s throat, for instance, or the image of Weber’s ideal house—open, doorless, so that she can always see people talking.

The tensions inherent in a lifetime of trying to function in a world whose rules are predicated on being able to hear are most clearly exposed in Weber’s accounts of her interactions with her students and the education system. Her attempts to make her students more proactive and independent are frustrated at every turn. The students have cochlear implants and think they need nothing else; they rely too much on interpreters; the interpreters sign sloppily and inaccurately, using a code invented by hearing people rather than American Sign; the students think of themselves as disabled, belonging only to the hearing world rather than to the Deaf community.

Weber uses many fictional devices to convey the chaotic nature of her life. She plays with time, cutting frequently forward and back, to her childhood, to the early days of her relationship with her daughters’ father, often repetitiously, and sometimes, distractingly. She has conversations with herself, and introduces different facets of her own personality in dramatized playlets—Ms. Hearing Weber, for example, Little Red Deaf Coat, Joanne Maybe Hearing, It Depends. Such restlessness “on this weary walk in the desert” needs an antidote, and it does come finally with the appearance of Johanna, who can tolerate compromise and failure, and say, “I must stop looking for ways to escape my Deaf body.” Her voice is the last we hear, calming the turbulence:

“There is no solution, no cure, no rehabilitation, there is my body that just is. Fired into the world, my Deaf body has become the house.”

There is satisfaction for the reader in Weber’s acceptance, but also, perhaps, a sense of an opportunity missed. For those who can hear, deafness is an unfathomable state; how illuminating it would have been to devote more space to a discussion of the role of language, for example, or to explore the choice by the Deaf to not pursue technological or surgical remediation. Dwelling so exclusively on the personal engenders sympathy for an individual, but information and analysis may lead to understanding and action for a community.

Margaret Thompson’s new novel is The Cuckoo’s Child.