It’s a Small Town
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.
Tags: Issue 76, Libby Creelman
I loved your analysis of this novel. Insightful and accurate.