Grove Press, 2010

In her July 15, 2009 column, National Post columnist Barbara Kay addresses her frustration with “Giller-endorsed but virtually unreadable CanLit,” singling out Lisa Moore’s February as an example. Kay’s criticism, somewhat undermined by her not having read February, takes the novel to task for not being Barometer Rising.

It is possible that Kay hadn’t read Barometer Rising either, or at least not lately, forgetting that Hugh MacLennan’s novel is also a love story set against tragedy, that both books “deflect attention from the tragedy to hover solicitously over a surrogate victim.” Barometer Rising is also a story about a woman, from whom February’s Helen is not such a departure.

I point out this discrepancy to establish that Kay’s literary criticism should be paid little mind. Still, her column is remarkable for its most unsubtle application of Woolf’s “difference of value.” The problem with February, according to Barbara Kay, is that Lisa Moore puts the 1982 Ocean Ranger disaster (in which an oil rig sank, killing all 84 crew members on board) in the background, focusing instead on the disaster’s aftermath and its effect on one woman who lost her husband.

This is an important book, Kay assumes, because it deals with oil, and storms, and shipwrecks. This is an insignificant book because it deals with women in a drawing room.

Barbara Kay’s assessment of February is only worth considering because it is not an anomaly. Her ideas share something in common with the legitimate criticism of Alex Good, who had actually read the book, and reviewed it three weeks previously in the Toronto Star.

Good writes that February “seems held together with a kind of teary hormonal paste.” The narrative is fixed to the female body – Good citing fetal kicks, leaky nipples, fecundity, fertility, and streaming orgasms. February’s, he reports, “is a deeply maternal universe,” and then he rearticulates his thematic concern as aesthetic:

There is no sense of evil, aside from nature’s rage in the sinking of the oil rig, and hence no conflict. The narrative doesn’t progress so much as gestate, rolling around through a series of flashbacks until the hatching and matching at the end.

The one scene Good uses to show “flashes of how interesting a writer Moore can be” is, notably, from the perspective of Helen’s son. As a reader, Good finds Moore’s maternal universe offering little of appeal.

The difference of value persists, however, not just in elevating one book over another, but in how one book is valued from separate points of view. It doesn’t help the argument for February that while on the one side critics dryly malign its emphasis on female emotions and its lack of explosions (orgasms notwithstanding), everybody else is hysterical.

“It makes me cry whenever there’s a conversation about it,” says Moore herself of the Ocean Ranger disaster, in a National Post profile by Katherine Laidlaw. It’s this profile that set Barbara Kay off, that Moore used her own experiences of grief as a touchstone to understanding her main character. “Moore didn’t know any of the 84 men who died when the Ocean Ranger oil rig went down,” Laidlaw writes, “. . . but that doesn’t stop her from crying about it.”

Caroline Adderson is crying too, in her Globe and Mail review: “I teared up on pages 157, 198, 206, 253, 261 and wept from page 291 pretty much straight through to page 300.” Her review is too effusive in both praise and tears, but at least Adderson considers February itself, beyond its failure to be another book. Applying close reading to a tiny scene about the removal of a tissue from its packet, she suggests the narrative is doing more than just rolling around:

The gesture is broken down into its constituent parts. The repeating use of “and” combined with the prose-poem-like structure of each short chapter, often starting with a present time moment, then jumping from memory to memory, lulls us and draws us in.

“Women’s literary fiction” is often distinct from literary fiction in general, either because it reads as such (with the squirting nipples, breaking water and placenta on a plate – if a man had written this book it would be surprising), or because it’s come into the world via a woman’s pen and is therefore received differently from literary fiction in general (which is to say, men won’t read it). Sometimes both of these things are true, sometimes one is, and sometimes neither.

In her essay “Shakespeare’s Daughters,” Rachel Cusk writes, “it seems to me that ‘women’s writing’ by nature would not seek equivalence in the male world. It would be a writing that sought to express a distinction, not deny it.” Still, it would be convenient for the purposes of some if there were no such thing as women’s writing. But it would be a fallacy to pretend that all fiction is universal; worse, to demand universality as a quality standard is to say that drawing-room women are insignificant, that sisters, wives and daughters do not matter.

Because for many readers, sisters, wives and daughter don’t matter, or at least their stories don’t. Or their stories do, unless these are stories about squirting nipples, breaking waters, or placentas on a plate. And I can’t help but wonder where the onus lies in the failure of women’s writing to achieve universality – what is it that lets us down, the stories or their readers?

In his review of February, Good addresses the notion of women’s fiction, how “men are cordially not invited to examine its mysteries.” But who is doing the uninviting? Apart from the women in his life who’ve advised him to “stay away” from Cat’s Eye, of course, but I suspect these women meant something different. I suspect that what they actually meant was, “Don’t even bother. You’re not going to like it. You’ll only just tell us it’s all held together with ‘teary hormonal paste.’”

“But I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of transparencies laid on top of one another. You don’t look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing ever goes away.” —Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

Barbara Kay finally read February, and reported back that it was lacking in “prole-friendly dialogue, action, and, above all, plot.” If such things are what you demand from your books, then you’re probably not going to like women’s fiction. Alex Good’s point that February has less progression than gestation is probably true of most women’s fiction, though this, of course, is not the case for every book. It’s impossible to pin down what women’s fiction looks like, but it’s bound to be as distinct from men’s as that drawing room is from a battlefield.

The Cat’s Eye passage comes close to defining a structure for it, however. If “narrative” can be substituted for “time” the structure serves both for February and for Cat’s Eye, which Good cites as the quintessential women’s novel. The passage also defines the structure of grief, as expressed in February. Moore’s prose appears plodding, and rolling, taking 40 pages to contain a single moment (Helen watching orange sparks fly as a skate blade is sharpened), because that single moment contains the past and even the future. Because nothing ever goes away.

Instead of progressing, February’s narrative accumulates, sentences and clauses linked by a repetitive “and.” Other sentences are constructed as lists, to similar effect. Every moment is distinct from the others, belonging to itself, this one and this one and this one, which is the way that Helen, in her grief, manages to stay upright and breathing.

Such momentum, however stilted, charts the plot that lies at the heart of this book. Which, incidentally, is not the present day love story most critics scoffed at – Good refers to “the stuff of commercial fiction”; Nathan Whitlock’s CNQ review is titled “Highbrow Harlequin”; Emily Donaldson calls February an “overly sentimental love story” in Quill & Quire. Each of them overlooking the real plot implicit in a line like, “All of the families of the drowned men were waiting for the settlement, because how do you feed four kids and pay Newfoundland Light and Power?” Forget about Helen getting her groove back; the premise of a heartbroken widow left alone to raise four children is positively dripping with plot (direction onward, with one foot in front of the other) and conflict (she can’t go on vs. she’ll go on).

Of course, this plot is not straightforward, just as time is not a line. In a CBC interview about her first novel Alligator, Moore explained, “I think that a real engagement with a book means that the reader has to chase after the story,” and the reader has the same task before him with February. Looking down through Moore’s narrative, the plot is present, to be teased out from the whirlpool of churning cycles and repetition, but it’s a story as harrowing as a shipwreck, and Helen is its hero.

It’s a question of scale, I suppose. There are sock-matching heroics, and there are dead-in-a-shipwreck heroics, though it’s worth noting that only the former has a choice in the matter. It’s also strange that one gets to be a hero by merely being aboard a ship that sinks, but the story of those left behind is “deflection.”

The sock-matcher, however, has an awesome task before her:

Matching socks was an act that looked very much like matching socks. She looked exactly as though she were in the world, engaged in the small work of Here is one sock, now where could that other sock be? And when she was done there would be an actual pile of socks.

An actual pile of socks: it’s a small thing, a moment, but in February these moments are what life is constructed of. They’re entirely significant to a woman with four kids to feed, a household to keep together. A woman whose husband’s death has just rent a hole in her life, and the hole is threatening to engulf her.

The hole left by Cal’s death is as gaping and devastating as the one created the night Helen learns that his body has been found and her living room ceiling comes crashing down. The actual hole serves a purpose beyond the merely symbolic, making clear the practical matter that the falling-down house is now her problem because her husband is dead, and there will be those bills to pay, and socks to match, and always, there will be more socks to match.

In her essay, Rachel Cusk suggests a connection between the pattern of a woman’s daily life, the cycles of her body, and the use of repetition in her fiction: “She can look around her and see that while women’s lives have altered in some respects, in others they have remained much the same.”

And so it seems: the difference of value persists, more than 80 years after A Room of One’s Own. Though February is probably not as good as Caroline Adderson asserts, I must protest that neither is it insignificant for being a woman’s story, or therefore beyond (or beneath) any critic’s scope.

The Darren Effect
Libby Creelman
Goose Lane Editions, 2008
258 pages, $19.95

By necessity, Heather Welbourne has become something of a stalker, a huntress, but ever-elusive remains her prey – her boyfriend, Benny Martin, who is married to another woman. Their distance is only augmented when Benny is diagnosed with terminal cancer and Heather is forced to have her mother “poke around” for details of his condition.

“. . . Just do this.”
“On one condition . . . You stop . . . driving by their house.”
Heather paused. “How did you know that?”
Exhalation. “It’s a small town.”

In The Darren Effect, the first novel by Libby Creelman (author of the short-story collection Walking in Paradise), the small town is St. John’s, Newfoundland. That Creelman is part of St. John’s’ remarkable Burning Rock Collective shrinks the town even further. Her fictional St. John’s is so small that, by chance, Benny Martin’s wife and mistress both seize upon the same Benny-surrogate after his death; Benny’s death being the novel’s point of departure, which is not to say that from there the narrative moves only forward.

Through retrospection, we come to understand the history of Heather and Benny, as well as Benny’s marriage to Isabella. Creelman aligns her narrative structure with her grieving characters’ shattered states of mind to show that their pasts are just as current as their presents. Every moment in the novel leads to another (as moments tend to do), though usually backwards in time – as Benny’s young son Conner notes, “Memories were like that, like dreams, they are always one step ahead of you.” Heather Welbourne becomes wholly absent from her present life – hiking through woods, hardly dressed for the weather, it is only by remembering pollen in the air during one spring day with Benny that she notices snow falling around her now.

But as much as this novel is about the process of grief, Creelman works to deny such a process, or any attempts at grief’s patholigization. Heather Welbourne, a clinical social worker, is surprised to note now that she’s in the eye of its storm that, “the study of grief . . . seemed pointless in the face of grief’s blind impersonal energy.” Any such study ceases to matter, for how does one itemize the contents of an abyss?

Further complicating any straightforward examination of grief is the unstraightforward nature of human relationships. How is a woman meant to mourn the death of a man she couldn’t even publicly admit to loving? Heather imagines, “If she were a different woman she would muscle in . . . She would insist on some right to participate. To spend hours in that hospital room. Hold his hand, kiss his brow. To care for him too.” Though she isn’t even sure Benny would want this.

And Benny’s wife Isabella is on ground no more established than Heather’s. In preparing for her husband’s death, Isabella finds herself ready before it comes, and there is relief when it finally transpires. Moreover, she’d known of his relationship with Heather; Benny had hurt her and she was angry. But still, she loved him: “There was the way his laughter remade his face. I’m going to lose that, she thought; then, the world is going to lose that.”

Creelman shows the idiosyncratic nature of actual human experience by conceiving “The Darren Effect,” a most unscientific phenomenon wherein both Heather Welbourne and Isabella Martin become inexplicably attached to wildlife biologist Darren Foley. Creelman further undermines any typical investigation of grief by making the effects of “The Darren Effect” comic, however darkly.

Darren Foley is an unlikely candidate for a Benny Martin surrogate. Though as readers we know him secondhand, the gaping hole of Benny’s absence suggests a presence large as life. In contrast, Darren Foley lives with his agoraphobic sister, spends his days identifying dead seabirds washed up on the beach, and is a member of the local nature club. That’s about it.

And because theirs is a small town, through the nature club Isabella has met Darren Foley before. He becomes her neighbour when she moves to a new house following her husband’s death, and he is easily manipulated into becoming a bizarre domestic sidekick. He begins accompanying her on runs to big box stores where she disturbs him with shopping habits he suspects might be compulsive.

If Isabella weren’t challenge enough to Darren’s staid existence, there is soon another woman on his tail; he frequently glimpses her red Toyota in his rearview mirror. It turns out Darren has met Heather Welbourne before too, having encountered her soon after Benny’s death on that ill-advised hiking expedition, disoriented and lacking adequate footwear. She’d suffered frostbite but recovered, and he can see now that she’s pregnant.

Heather and Isabella’s attraction to Darren is analogous to that of the seabirds he tracks as they seek harbour upon ocean vessels. Darren imagines the birds as being attracted “not only to the ship’s almighty size . . . but to its sheer presence over the unyielding landscape, as though it had been invoked not through chance, but necessity.” Isabella and Heather want him because he’s there, and he’s there because they need him to be. Both women challenge his world view: “Until now his expectation of human behaviour seemed unimaginative.”

Creelman doesn’t explain much; her characters are often presented without context and frequently act indecipherably, even to themselves. Her narrative pushes the limits of “show, don’t tell,” to portray the sheer unknowability of another person through observation. Which is important to Darren, the scientist, and Heather, the social worker, both of whom are accustomed to applying labels to experience, though often standing away from it, remaining detached. Remaining detached from their true vocations also – Darren’s attraction to birds stems from a desire towards flight, but the only birds he ever sees are dead or dying. Heather became a social worker in order to help other people, but she comes to see her role as ineffectual and, moreover, is hardly capable of conducting her own affairs. Heather and Darren are as absent from their own lives as the now-deceased Benny is from his.

Both of these characters’ failures of engagement have resulted from a need to maintain control in their lives. Darren Foley has been most comfortable sitting out life altogether, not daring to let the world escape his tiny grasp of it. Heather Welbourne involves herself only part way, falling in love with a man who’d devote just a portion of himself to her so she’d never have to submit fully to him. Further, with so much of her relationship with Benny actually taking place inside her head – the things she’d told him, the things she was going to tell him, the details about him she carried when he wasn’t around – who they were as a couple was very much her own construction. But when Benny dies, Heather realizes she can’t control the plot, and when she forces herself into Darren’s life, he begins to consider that his quiet existence might not be enough.

The Bruce Effect is actually a documented phenomenon (as opposed to The Darren) in which female mammals reabsorb their pregnancies when exposed to an unknown male. Heather remembers it from her animal behaviour classes, and of course wildlife biologist Darren is familiar with it too. The idea strikes Heather’s fancy as she gets closer to Darren, pregnant with a child she doesn’t want, the product of one of her last encounters with Benny. The Bruce Effect hasn’t been seen in humans before, but even Darren wonders about the possibility of it, for after Heather and Isabella, he now concedes that anything could happen. He and Heather continue to stand back from life, and arbitrarily label what is happening between them. If they were different kinds of people, they would probably just call it falling in love.

The Darren Effect is a small town in and of itself, crowded with characters, woven with plot lines. And though part of this is quite obviously intentional, it can serve as evidence of an earlier struggle for the book to find its feet. This novel, so composed of its parts, contains remnants suggesting it once comprised many more, so that strands throughout are not as realized as they should be – Heather’s sister Mandy functions as more plot device than character, and even Isabella and her son step into the background as Darren and Heather emerge at the centre of this tale. This makes the book’s pacing a bit uneven, the reader unsteady inside it.

But ultimately, The Darren Effect satisfies. Creelman’s narrative puts the reader at an intriguing distance and absolutely demands our engagement, taking us deep inside the story. Her quick dialogue injects the novel with humour, dark, strange and lovely. Creelman also provides us with the ending that we want, and which the characters we’ve come to care about so desperately need. Characters we know by now, because it’s a small town, and we have been so enveloped by it, forgetting the rest of the world for a little while.