Novel posits bleak future

Debut novel Swarm

By Lauren Carter
Published by Brindle & Glass

288 pages, $19.95

 

Reviewed by Jenny Boychuk

Capitalism has fallen. The government hardly exists except as whispers in condemned buildings. There are no jobs and everyone is poor. There is violence, rebellion. People have to quickly adapt to an older way of life—when living and surviving meant the same thing.

Lauren Carter’s first novel, Swarm, is narrated by Sandy, who lives in a previously abandoned house on a rural and isolated island with her partner, Marvin, and their elderly and dying friend, Thomson. Sandy and Marvin fish, hunt, farm and keep bees in order to survive.

         “Things would never be what they were—brightly lit supermarkets with asparagus from Peru and frozen pasta in microwave-safe plastic bowls—”

         “What are our battles? I could have asked, but didn’t. I thought I already knew. Survival, putting food on the table.”

When Sandy, never able to have children, finds the footprints of a small girl in her garden, it sparks a search and a yearning for something much larger than the child herself. The neighbour’s baby sleeps, sickly, in a blue recycling box—but Sandy still wants nothing more than a daughter of her own. She is preoccupied with what makes up a life, but is unable to differentiate between her fantasies and her reality.

Sandy addresses her story to the elusive child, whom she has named Melissa, as the book alternates from her past in the city to her present island life. It seems fitting that, in a time of so much isolation, Carter has her protagonist tell the story to someone who may not even exist.

         “No matter what, I had to find you. You had to be real.”

The ambitious structure is effective in keeping up the pace of the novel, as well as in helping the reader understand how everything fell apart, and how all of those small collapses influence the characters’ present lives. This novel is terrifying because of how realistically Carter has built this dystopian world; it could very easily become our world in the near future. We are already seeing a lack of jobs and resources as the divide between rich and poor continues to grow larger in real life. Carter’s descriptions of this isolated island are easy to imagine—and it’s no doubt that the clear-eyed specificity comes from her upbringing in rural Blind River, Ontario.

I immediately identified with Sandy’s character, and I found myself asking the same questions she’s faced with: What do we risk for our ideals? How do you build a home from things you’ve never imagined or have never cared to? I found myself thinking about how I deal with my own unexpected realities. Though the naivety of Sandy’s character often annoyed me, it’s hard to judge her. When every day is a struggle to survive, it’s difficult to imagine that other stakes exist, but Carter corrects of this notion. Swarm is proof that, regardless of what our current world looks like, humans will always yearn for the same things: love, security, compassion, and companionship.

Carter’s debut reads like an elegy for an entire population, an entire planet. This somber world, paired with a wash of beauty in the prose, makes for a reading experience I can only compare to the blue hour of the day—something half-way between light and darkness.

         “It was too late. Despite whatever I’d once wanted in a life, I had made my reality.”

 

Jenny Boychuk is British Columbia writer and reviewer

 

 

 

 

“Everything” worth writing about, poet says

By Liz Snell

Emily McGiffin’s bright-eyed, earnest face contained no pretension. She spoke her poems with confident resonance, but also vulnerability, as if they were letters written to a close friend, not intended for everyone else in the room. She seems like the kind of person you’d meet in a small town or on a farm; when she speaks, you feel she’s not just wasting words to impress you, but is sharing a homespun and heartfelt wisdom.

Her poetry is full of solitude’s topography: one person leading the blind speaker through a fog, someone living in a car and playing solitaire. Wild mountain landscapes butt against domestic acts like woodcutting and carding wool. Her writing, both on the page and spoken aloud, conveys a tension between closeness and distance.

Victoria poet Carla Funk, who conducted the evening’s Q & A at the Open Space event, asked McGiffin which three dead poets she’d invite to dinner. McGiffin bowed out of the question, saying she knows little of classic poetry, and instead cited her favourite “dead poet” poems: “Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold, “Ode to Autumn” by John Keats, and “Fern Hill” by Dylan Thomas. These poems encapsulate both the joy in and loss of an Eden-like, harmonious world, a theme close to McGiffin’s own writing. One gets the sense that she’s attempting to write her way into the feeling of home, struggling to trust in a tenuous place: “And when, walking through the enormous and solitary land,/you grow hungry for company, you will find it underfoot…”

McGiffin began “fiddling with lines” of poetry in high school. She took writing courses at UVic as a side to her focus on geography and biology. Of studying writing she says, “It might have had an impact in that I never really did anything with my biology degree.”

Now pursuing a PhD in environmental studies at York University, McGiffin seems to still be searching for ways to explore the relationship between her scientific studies and her poetry. “I’d like to find a way that they can talk to each other a bit more.”

McGiffin initially struggled to see her creative writing as a worthwhile pursuit: “Poetry’s kind of a marginalized art form… It took a long time to feel it wasn’t something I was just doing on the side.”

To an audience member who asked, “How do you know what’s worth writing about?” McGiffin replied,  “Once I decided anything was worth writing about, it became less of a question of what was worth writing about – everything is.”

McGiffin recently moved to Toronto from Smithers, B.C., where her writing was often influenced by the Skeena River, which has been threatened by coal mining. She spoke of her concerns about conservation, and how we view the world in terms of “resource management.” In response to such environmental destruction, does McGiffin’s writing take a stance of hope, or despair? She’s not sure. “The question is, is there hope for humans? I don’t know.”

Liz Snell is a Victoria writer

Hank Angel Pays Homage to Rock and Roll

Hank Engel

Hank Angel (Extended Play 45)

Produced by David Jeffrey and Dave Lang

Reviewed by Chris Ho

Victoria musician Hank Engel’s self-titled EP is a nostalgic gem that brings you right back to the feel-good rockabilly vibe of the 50’s. Engel pays homage to the underground music scene in Edmonton in the 1980s, and more specifically to one of his favourite bands, The Draggnetts. Although this band had recorded much of their material and were admired for their musicianship, they ended up disappearing into obscurity. In an interview with Drive-in Magazine, Engel said, “We idolized those guys. Not only did they play great music, but they lived it, in an old house with rebel flags and velvet paintings and overflowing ashtrays. Empty bottles all over the place, a bust of Elvis on the mantle. Their girlfriends walked around looking like Betty Page and Marilyn Monroe. Their band was like a gang, like every band ought to be.”

The idea of living out the music that you write and express is essential to a lot of rock and roll — something that you don’t see as often these days. Many bands don’t have the luxury of being signed and consequently need to manage their own careers. Likely, it would only hinder productivity in that regard if they were to live out that kind of lifestyle – (talk about a buzz kill). But this isn’t the sort of genre that lends itself well to being focused on marketing, and making sure you tweet frequently enough. It’s a genre that’s about the music and the lifestyle. It reminds us that, when all is said and done, it’s the whole package that counts: sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll.

Hank Engel’s EP reminds us of this. The production isn’t flashy, and the vocals aren’t tuned to perfection. Many of the tracks sound as though they were recorded live off the floor, which gives it that old-­‐school rockabilly feel. And regardless of how polished the EP may be, one has to admire this decision to record the songs in this way. Hank Angel could very well have recorded these old tunes in a more mainstream, or polished way, but instead he stays true to the rockabilly roots.

Producer David Jeffrey clearly has a good understanding of Hank Angel’s genre, and has recorded and mixed it in a way that harks back to that early vintage rock-­‐ and-­‐roll sound. As a result, the EP gives you just the right amount of crisp guitar tones, non-­‐intrusive drum rhythms and raw vocals. Hank brings a new life to the songs of Art Adams and The Draggnetts, although it’s a shame that he doesn’t include more of his original material. His song “A Guitar and A Broken Heart” is a great opener for the EP since it has many of the elements that make a great song, including the catchy vocal melodies, tasteful guitar riffs, and simplistic drum rhythms. But instead of developing this, along with his own sound, he decides to resurrect a couple of great rockabilly tunes, obscuring his own path as a musician.

Nonetheless, his motives are pure, and the songs have come together very well. And who knows, maybe we’ll get to hear more original rockabilly releases from Hank /Engel/Angel in the future.

Chris Ho is a UVic  graduate, musician and closet cookie dough eater.

Family circle resists shaping

Every Happy Family

By Dede Crane

Coteau Books

247 pp., $18.95

Reviewed by Susan Braley.

Jill, mother, wife and “itinerant” scholar in Dede Crane’s third novel Every Happy Family, thinks “perfection is out there . . . if only she tries a little harder.” For the five years we know her, she devotes herself, lovingly and wearily, to rounding her husband Les and their three teenagers into a perfect circle.  But Crane deftly disrupts her efforts with the cat’s-cradle complications, multiplicities and heart-stopping randomness of real family life.

Language and logic, once grounding for Jill, short-circuit repeatedly throughout the story: a quiet talk with son Quinn doesn’t settle the question of the hidden vodka bottle, and a lecture to enlighten her adopted daughter Pema about misogynist rap lyrics falls short. Her handsome son Beau suffers from a stutter; her kids are more at home with her “faucet mouth” sister-in-law Annie than with her; and her mother, suffering from dementia, can no longer advise her. The lost-language crisis of Langue d’Occ, the subject of her latest paper, is happening in her own home.

Another anxiety for this family circle is its blurring circumference. Already struggling with her mother’s decline, Jill is shaken when Pema’s biological mother asks Pema to meet her in Tibet.  At the same time, Beau longs to set Pema outside his “blood” family, since he has secretly fallen in love with her. Pema questions the status of Quinn’s girlfriend Holly: “He brought a girl. Isn’t this a family event?” Yet Holly and her young son give Quinn the strength to dump a forbidden drink: “Feels like he’s pouring his own blood and thinks he might faint.”

Crane bends the definition of blood relations beyond the biological: her characters long to be truly seen and touched, to feel “the soothing vibration of a living creature.” Jill’s mother imagines a male roommate for herself after surviving a long, unhappy marriage; Les, too ill for love-making, misses Jill’s breasts.  To capture the depth of this longing, Crane includes a tender scene where Satomi, a classmate, explores Beau’s face with her fingers, not her eyes, and then draws it. As her hands linger on his face, he feels known beyond his beauty.

The novel seems to posit that  “outsiders” like Holly and Satomi amplify family, if only temporarily.  When loved ones are overwhelmed, the characters tell their stories to people willing to listen: Annie to a seatmate on a plane, Pema (not trusting her seatmate) to us, Les to an open-hearted teenager in a tree. He observes: “Random encounters with strangers. Is family any different? He’d have to say that Pema, oddly enough, feels more knowable to him, more familiar, than either of his sons, whatever that’s about.”

Crane intimates the interconnectedness of family, in all of its iterations, with the headings she offers in “Parts,” her table of contents. She dedicates the primary chapter titles to family members (for instance, “Les”), and the secondary ones to a category of relative (“Sons”). In “Les,” Les jealously remembers Beau’s coach hugging Beau like a father; in the following section “Sons,” he pushes himself to reach out in a new way to “brainiac” son Quinn. These chapter titles animate the complexities of relationships in the story before and while we read.

Similarly, the time frames dropped in between these titles – Eight Months Later, Three Years Later – generate a lively pace overall. These leaps in time allow the psychic lives of the characters to unfold fluidly, unencumbered by the mechanics of events such as Quinn’s release from assault charges and Pema’s exit from the house.

It is startling, then, to find over one-third of the novel occurs in one long, final chapter, centred on Les’s “Living Wake.”  Although the progress of the characters is enthralling on one level, this section lacks the agility of the previous pages, thus some of its poignancy is lost.  Surprising, too, is the studied effort to “chase the circle closed,” when Jill admits at the wake that it is “impossibly sentimental” to imagine everyone under one roof again, to expect to “come full circle.”  The evening’s ambiguous sun, “oddly like permanence . . . .[a]nd at the same time, as temporary as a breeze,” seems more in keeping with the wise and wistful vision of the novel.

Susan Braley (www.susanbraley.ca) is a writer living in Victoria.

A triumph of battlefields and bed sheets

 Falstaff

 At Theatre Inconnu

 Starring Clayton Jevne

 Adapted by Clayton Jevne from Robert Nye’s novel

 Oct. 4 – 19th

 

Reviewed by Leah Callen

 

 Sex!  And now that Falstaff has your attention, let the laughter guide you somewhere unexpectedly divine.  Clayton Jevne is incredibly authentic as he fills the boots of John Fastolf, a lusty English knight who is said to have inspired Shakespeare’s Falstaff.  As he tells us tall tales about his wars and whores in rich detail, this one-man confession had me laughing, blushing, and crying.  With characters such as Pistol and Shallow, you’re bound to crack a smile. 

        

This storytelling is unapologetically profane, but surprisingly sacred and poetic at the same time. As Fastolf relives every sexual exploit of his life from the cradle to old age, we hear episodes that are both pornographic and beautiful – from a young woman’s creamy breasts and cherry nipples, to the butterflies that magically burst out of a bishop’s hand.   Just when one may get too uncomfortable with all the innuendo about his “soldier,” “in a flash of sack” the story takes a soulful turn.  Don’t let the prim music at the start fool you, though.  Hold onto your seats!  I felt my cheeks glowing in the dark.

        

Fastolf shares an intriguing point of view on some of the most famous medieval battles, witnessed from the edges of history. Audience members can get a little lost on this history map if they don’t have a built-in compass for it, but the accounts are so vivid that it doesn’t matter. While he miraculously conquers the French by throwing jewels and herrings at them, philandering Fastolf is conquered by chaste women. The saints slay his heart. Jevne paints a stunning image of Joan of Arc that is beyond human and, to me, the most bewitching part of the narrative. 

        

Jevne’s full costume reminded me of a naughty Puss in Boots.   The character certainly tries to spin his life in magical proportions, moving from the mindless thrusts of youth to the far sight of age.  But Fastolf travels a touching arc from a hyperbolizing hedonist to one humbled.  We see both a public and private persona in this play – a man embellished with bravado and the bare soul hiding inside him.  As he spins these far-out tales, Jevne creates an iconic pose, his lower half leading the way.  It suggests a character led by his worldly appetites.  But he is reduced to his knees before God, turning away from the audience.  The faceless humility of that pose is striking. 

        

Though the protagonist is larger than life, Jevne’s masterful acting never fell into caricature.  There was a natural flow to all his facial expressions and gestures that made the whole show feel genuine.  It was enthralling, watching him light up with lust and melt gently into tears.  Perhaps this play’s final wish is for us to be more promiscuous in our compassion and love for other human beings.  When our lives fade out, which will be the most powerful memories left behind: our selfish joys or our random acts of humanity?

 

Leah Callen is an MFA student at UVic.

 

 

 

Open Word: Readings and Ideas: Emily McGiffin

First reading: Wednesday, October 9, 2013, at 12:30 p.m., University of Victoria, Fine Arts Building, Room 209
Second reading followed by interview with Carla Funk: Wednesday, October 9, at 7:30 p.m., Open Space
Admission by donation, books available for purchase, cash bar.

Toronto writer Emily McGiffin will read from her new book Between Dusk and Night as part of the literary series Open Word: Readings and Ideas. The event is hosted by the University of Victoria Department of Writing and Open Space. Her book of poems considers the human relationship with the earth during the current environmental crisis, and the intimate relationship between humans themselves. Local poet Carla Funk will interview McGiffin after the 7:30 p.m. reading at Open Space.

 

Poet deploys wordplay and humour

Sit You Waiting

By Kim Clark

Caitlin Press

112 pages, $16.95

Reviewed by Candace Fertile

Sit You Waiting is the first collection of Vancouver Island writer Kim Clark, whose poems reverberate between the mental processes we are all captured by and the world we inhabit. Topics include illness, love, desire, travel, and poetry, and Clark infuses several of the pages with bold wordplay and wry humour.

Clark uses square brackets, which can be a bit unnerving until it becomes evident that the recurring technique provides a sub-text. For example, in “A Woman Builds a Body, Post Tsunami,” the brackets help build the poem:

Sleep [stealthy] leaves

the makeshift bed, the woman

[a subduction].

Many poems use this technique, almost as a signature.

Clark handles a variety of length with ease. In “Lavender,” thirty-two words reveal the force of scent-driven memory. In “Three Days on a Train In and Out of Dreaming,” a longish poem of thirteen pages with fabulous use of white space, Clark delves into a train trip across Australia, a place of great space itself. Again the poet employs symbols, this time the number sign (#) and the equals sign (=) to organize the sections. The first is #= and the poem moves to #======= and then back to #= while maintaining more than half a page of space on each page as the traveller observes the landscape and contemplates the journey, both physical and mental. In the poem’s middle section, “A herd of stones gets up and walks away on wooly legs. / The treelines in motion are not stones or sheep but alphabetic arrangements. . . . “ These poems touch magic.

Even a short poem can tell a story, and “Wishing for a Colt” is a clever and funny look at people in a bar hoping for more than a drink. This poem is completely grounded in the concrete. The speaker tries to talk to a “failed cowboy, / dust-diving rodeo rider, / seven broken ribs with a mighty big / hat, and a real small / herd of hay burners / in the interior” while the bar waits for action. It comes.

I am drawn to poems about poetry, and Clark delivers. In “Primate Remuage,” the speaker advises readers to “Be the guerrilla / in the midst.” The corny pun works beautifully as the directions continue and focus on destabilizing the domestic environment until the final command: “Warm to this poem / deep in your pocket. / Leave crumbs / to find your way out.” Overall Clark’s poems appear to be about digging deep within the pockets of our minds,  then pulling the treasures out into the light.   How lovely.

Candace Fertile teaches English at Camosun College         

 

 

 

 

“Sofa dogs” big hit for artist

Sofa Sitters of Victoria Exhibition. Showed September 12-24, 2013 at the Art Centre at Cedar Hill– CACGV Main Gallery, 3220 Cedar Hill Road.

View Durrand’s work at http://www.dianadurrand.com/

Reviewed By Liz Snell

Two older women stare at the framed photographs in the gallery. “Sure is different,” one comments. “What a funny idea.”

“That’s our church!” the other points out. In the photo, Sophie, a golden retriever, sits on a checked sofa in front of Victoria’s soaring Christ Church Cathedral.

Another woman stops at a photo of the Beaconsfield Inn, which is perfectly matched with the plaid armchair set in front. Lily, a grinning Labrador retriever, poses on the chair. “I worked in that building. Oh for heaven’s sake, isn’t that something. Is it still there?”

Victoria artist Diana Durrand, 62, spent two years photographing passersby’s dogs on Victoria’s discarded furniture. The ordinary scene of a dog on a sofa, transplanted to an unusual setting, creates both whimsy and pathos. Durrand’s inspiration for The Sofa Sitters of Victoria arrived after she lost her own dog and began to notice everyone else’s. On her walks around the city, she’d stop at a roadside sofa and wait for the right dog to come along. “It was always an adventure; I never knew what I’d find.”

Dog owners were usually excited to participate. “Some of them have become friends; I met some really interesting people.”

Many of the dogs in the series had been rescued by their owners. In one photo, a rescued dog, Sir James Douglas, lounges calmly on a discarded loveseat in front of an abandoned house, as if to say, “I’m the lucky one.” The description alongside each picture includes the dog’s name. This specificity was important to Durrand: “They’re not just ‘a dog.’”

Durrand studied visual art at the University of Victoria from 1968-1972 and has been painting for many years, but photography was something new. The Sofa Sitters project was a crash course on “learning to see like a photographer.” She printed the photos in black-and-white then re-coloured them with chalk pastel. This allowed her to add softness and limit her palette. She describes this process as creating an intimate connection with the subject: “It’s almost like touching.”

Durrand particularly enjoyed working collaboratively on this project, noting the dog owners, sofa-sighters and those who helped her perfect the photo/pastel technique. “I don’t really feel it’s my show.”

For a project so rooted in community, this seems right. Durrand describes the public response to Sofa Sitters as “over-the-top.” One of the comments in her guestbook calls the exhibition “the quintessential Victoria art show.”

Durrand agrees. “It’s so about them.”

She sees Victoria as the perfect setting for this project because of its high number of pedestrians (especially dog-walkers), its toleration of roadside sofas, and its friendliness. “You couldn’t do this in Detroit; there’s not the trust.”

Durrand is no stranger to the magic in roadside cast-offs; she’s found inspiration for a previous series in a discarded McDonald’s fries carton, and for another in Vancouver’s abandoned gloves. Even as a child she formed creations from her mother’s old cigarette boxes.

“The beautiful stuff’s already beautiful; I’m not interested in painting flowers. I want people to have a second look at things. There’s beauty everywhere.”

Liz Snell is a writer and recent UVic graduate.  

Recycled Shakespeare is a Riot

Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning, Juliet)

A play by Ann-Marie MacDonald
Directed by Ron Jenkins

The Belfry

Sept 17 – Oct 20

Reviewed by Leah Callen

Constance Ledbelly, the unrecognized Queen of Academe, is a slave in inky chains at her desk at Queen’s.  While falling for a plagiarizing prof and trying to prove that Othello and Romeo and Juliet were originally comedies, she tips head-first into the recycling box – and into Shakespeareland.  Goodnight Desdemona is a playful, magical adventure in the theatre of the self, pitting real life against the stage

As the audience flowed into their seats, I couldn’t help feeling wowed by the visual detail of the set.  The staging is spectacular, with swordfights that get the blood going to ingenious trips through time and space.  If the Bard ever wandered into an episode of the Twilight Zone, this would be it.  Everything gets turned on its head, from a bloodthirsty Desdemona to a slutty Juliet – bloodlust and physical lust out of control.  The moment Romeo stops a sword with his long-stemmed rose like a Renaissance flower child, you have a feeling this star-crossed hero may take to cross- dressing.  Sexual orientation is up in the air as characters swoon for both sexes in their quest for satisfaction.

The physicality of the actors is a blast as they swing from the rafters and balance atop bookcases.  The contrast between cynical, awkward Constance and her melodramatic Shakespearean counterparts is a riot.  Lighting is literally striking in this production, as are the trippy sound effects and music.  In fact, this play milks as much out of the stage as possible with props and surprises.  Though the heroine is endlessly philosophizing with wonderful wordplay, you  never get bored, thanks to the theatrical action.

Daniela Vlaskalic is charismatic as the romantically challenged bookworm Constance Ledbelly, cloistered in her intelligence.  Her nerdy character borders on caricature, but she also has charming quirks, such as her parakeet pen, long johns and open-minded attractions.  Nicola Elbro is a punchy Desdemona who roars her way gloriously through the story.  Most of the actors here multi-act.  Jameson Matthew Parker brandishes a double-edged sword as both the lovesick Romeo and the bitter Iago.  Michael Dufays fumes as Othello, but also delights us as Juliet’s nurse – more Irish than Roman Catholic in this tale.

MacDonald’s parody of Shakespeare is hilarious.  The night I attended, I heard  non-stop laughter through Pippa Mackie’s upside down antics as desperate Juliet.  But some of the story struck me as over-the-top chaos:  as pieces of Constance show up scattered in this parallel world, I just couldn’t wrap my head around Tybalt balancing her appendix on a sword.   It stretches the limits of belief.  Costume-wise, the cross-dressing was a lot of fun, but I wasn’t sure I bought Desdemona’s hot pants.  They left me wondering why.

Still, this a joyful journey that celebrates the magic of theatre, as the mousy yet brilliant heroine struggles to grow a spine and appreciate her own value while giving the boot to the bad guys.  You’ll thank your lucky stars you saw it.

 

Leah Callen is an MFA student at the University of Victoria.  

Love’s Jazz can be painful

Love, & All That Jazz
By Laurie Lewis
Published by The Porcupine’s Quill

222 pages, $22.95

Reviewed by Jenny Boychuk

 How long are we supposed to wait for the ones we love? What happens when the years you’ve been apart equal how long you were together?  And when that number doubles?

 

Laurie Lewis’ memoir reminds us that, while we may use time to measure many things, it is not always an accurate way to measure love—if love can even be measured at all.  Lewis published her first book, Little Comrades (also a memoir), at the age of 81. Love, & All That Jazz acts as a sequel. She talks about discovering her love of writing late in life on her website:

“When you’ve lived a long time, as I have, it’s possible that you’ve had not just one life but several.”

 

            Lewis begins her  new memoir in 1950s New York City. She is in her early twenties and married to Sol, a “smart, honorable, kind” man, with whom she lives a content life; that is, until the day she walks past Gary Lewis, a jazz musician and future photographer for Pepsi-Cola, on the second floor of her apartment building. Neither can ignore the immediate attraction they feel for each other.

 

            It is summer when Lewis begins to see Gary, who is also married, in secret. They meet at bus stops, go for breakfast, and, eventually, Lewis finds herself in his apartment. A few weeks before Christmas, she leaves a note for Sol and sets off to begin her new life with Gary. Living in a tiny, cold studio apartment in Manhattan with hardly any furniture and little money, they are both happier than they could have imagined. Within the next year, they are married and their daughter Amanda is born.

 

            But while the first years are happy, things soon begin to turn and Lewis, who is heartbreakingly innocent and naïve, tries to support her husband through his drug addictions, alcoholism and mental illness. He cheats on her. He lies. He abuses. But still, her love sees him through every recovery, every relapse. Even when he stands before her as a stranger, she manages to see the man she fell in love with on the staircase. 

 

            Her compassion is evident even many years later, as she recounts how those years passed:

 

“Gary’s periods of serious illness run together in my mind. How hard to write about this, to sort out the memories, to make decisions about how much honesty, where, and when. I see things now so differently.”

 

            Lewis aptly describes the ‘50s and ‘60s NYC art scene with vibrancy and detail; she takes her readers into a time when Andy Warhol was “a talented and relatively unknown illustrator,” Ginsburg and Kerouac were reading in local bars, and Ray Charles was playing in California clubs.

 

            “There was Ray with his piano, the musicians grouped at the side rather formally, and the Raelettes in front of the band, the stage only slightly raised. Ray was perspiring and Gary thought he needed something to wipe his brow, so he passed him a silk handkerchief. … The Raelettes swaying, vocal backup, all the love and energy in the room. Gary’s photographs of them were more soulful than the ones for Pepsi-Cola World, certainly. This was his spiritual home.”

 

            Eventually, strong-willed and independent Lewis steps outside of her relationship and builds a life for herself and Amanda in Ontario. She becomes a single working mother in a time when daycare doesn’t exist, and the space she gives her marriage will last far longer than the seven years she and Gary were together. Lewis questions what it means to build a life, and what happens when you are living a kind of life you didn’t intend to. Are there people we are meant to be with no matter what? And why do we keep coming back to them?

 

Lewis’ prose is an easy kind of beauty, and the story reads as if she sat down and typed it out within a single afternoon. She is humble, honest and likeable, which makes it difficult not to care about her story and her life. Even the ending lends itself to the book’s humanness and honesty; it is strangely satisfying:  “But I have to get to the end of this book. Have to finish it now, because I’m sick of writing about the past. I’d like to wake up tomorrow and exist in the day that is, whatever it is.”

 

I think the best books are ones that manage to both end and begin on the last page.

 

Jenny Boychuk lives, reads and writes in Sorrento, B.C.