Dr. Edith Vane and The Hares of Crawley Hall, Suzette Mayr, Issue 28, July 2017
If one has spent any time working and teaching in a postsecondary institution, it’s nearly impossible to read Suzette Mayr’s new novel, set on the campus of the fictional University of Inivea somewhere in Alberta, without recognizing the crisis of self-confidence experienced by the hapless, anxiety-ridden Dr. Edith Vane.
Seven years into her unremarkable career at the U of I as a scholar of English literature, Edith is embarking on a new fall semester, determined that this year “will be her supernova year.” Her Ph.D. dissertation-turned-bona fide book is finally, after nineteen years, about to be published – a study of the lost work of Beulah Crump-Withers, “former sporting girl, then housewife, prairie poet, maven memoirist, and all-round African-Canadian literary genius.” With few publications to her name, Edith is convinced she has at last accomplished something that will truly legitimize her standing in the department among her unforgiving fellow academics, and rescue her from the danger of eligibility for the university’s euphemistically named EnhanceUs Refreshment Strategy. Mayr successfully pokes marvelous fun at such corporate encroachments on postsecondary education and the administrators who execute their cunning strategic plans.
In the weeks before the school year starts, Edith is full of her own strategic plans for self-improvement, chastising herself, as scholarly Type-A personalities often do, for her inadequacies and past failings. She will be a proper professor and write her course outlines, complete her Academic Achievement Overview, write peer-reviewed articles and abstracts for conferences, shop for “proper clothes to start the academic year right,” wear Hangaku shoes because “the fashionable female professors wear Hangakus,” and exercise regularly to “tighten up her marshmallow body.” Most importantly, she will act on the platitudinous advice of the university’s BalanceWell employee health program’s psychologist: “I am the architect of my life; I build its foundation and select its furniture.” Unfortunately, too soon into the new school year and after a humiliating attempt to network at a department reception welcoming her terror of a former Ph.D. supervisor as a Visiting Fellow, she realizes, “No matter how much she tries new clothes, therapy, or a shiny new attitude, she’s still herself.”
Admirably, Edith’s extreme self-consciousness, naiveté, and physical awkwardness, right down to her spasmodic eyelid, are so effectively rendered by Mayr that her behaviour never becomes caricatural. The reader is genuinely invested with an almost morbid curiosity in observing Edith in her bungled interactions with her colleagues and students. It’s not really possible to feel sorry for her, despite the relentlessness of her bad luck, or to like her – she’s just too humourless and intense. Even her father advises her to ease up a bit. “That way,” he suggests to her, “maybe the world will stop shitting on you so much.”
Edith’s problems are legion, but her biggest obstacle to achieving her supernova year is Crawley Hall itself, the Brutalist building housing her department, office, and classrooms. Mayr’s satirical take on the absurdities of life in a scholarly institution reaches full effect and veers into the fantastical as Crawley Hall assumes a life of its own, crumbling apart and turning on its occupants. Crawley is crawling with hares, infested with maggots, polluted by toxic air, and haunted by possessed mailboxes, elevators, and washrooms. Edith is seeing strange patterns in her clothing, her colleagues are becoming ill, disappearing, and worse, and a giant sinkhole opens up in the building’s parking lot. And the semester’s not even half over! Clearly, something is rotten in Crawley Hall and by extension the university, and Mayr’s personification of the ivory tower itself as a destructive supernatural entity is just far-fetched enough to be eerily convincing. “The University of Inivea is just a machine that eats people,” Edith’s colleague Angus notes, “They want you to give until they’ve sucked you into a husk.”
Dr. Edith Vane and the Hares of Crawley Hall is Mayr’s second and admittedly more successful attempt, following her previous novel, Monoceros (2011), at incorporating magical realism into her narratives, and this story owes much to Alice in Wonderland. Similar to Alice’s hallucinatory experience of having her world turned upside when she lands in Wonderland, Edith’s return to Crawley Hall after summer break is like a stumble down the proverbial rabbit hole, figuratively and literally. Just what is in the subbasement of Crawley Hall? And what is the significance of Angus’s Cheshire Cat watch? As for the creepy hares in the book’s title, they might be a nod to the madness of the March Hare, or perhaps to their mythical association with shape shifting, a not insignificant detail in this novel.
Poor Edith. “All she ever wanted to do is read books. Write books. Talk about, sleep with, breathe, shit, and eat books…That’s why she thought she’d chosen the right job, because understanding books is what professors do.” But as this whip smart, captivating novel shows, the wonderland of academia is rarely so straightforward.
So Much Love, Rebecca Rosenblum, Issue 27, April 2017
To read Toronto writer Rebecca Rosenblum’s first novel, recently nominated for the 2017 Amazon.ca First Novel Award, as mainly a thriller about the mysterious disappearance of two people from their small Ontario town, is to place too much emphasis on the surface of this quietly brilliant novel, overlooking its deeper, perhaps less conspicuous themes and implications.
It is true that the story of Catherine Reindeer’s abduction and captivity in the company of high school student Donny Zimmerman is critical to the framework of So Much Love. Without Catherine and her ordeal at the centre of the story providing a point of connection, the novel operates as essentially a collection of discrete vignettes of the lives of minor, though fascinating and well-drawn, characters. The “worst thing to ever happen to Catherine,” tragic and horrifying to be sure, serves as the novel’s through line. It keeps the story’s momentum going while allowing Rosenblum to digressively explore through her peripheral characters and their ties to Catherine the intricacies of intimate relationships, the ways in which love both saves and destroys, and the capacity of art to provide light in dark times.
Of all the narratives connected to Catherine, though, it is the story of young poet Julianna Ohlin that stands out in the novel for its haunting effect and for what we might read into its inclusion. Early in So Much Love we learn that Catherine, at twenty-seven years old, is a university student taking a Canadian poetry class with Professor Altaris. Prior to her disappearance, she is studying the posthumous publications of Ohlin, a former resident of Catherine’s hometown of Iria and a one-time student of the same university Catherine attends. Ohlin, full of creative promise, died – likely at the hands of a violent husband – in the mid-1990s, before she had the chance to do “the work she was going to do.”
Catherine is struck by the similarities between her life and Ohlin’s: “this poet, Julianna Ohlin, seems to have had a life a lot like Catherine’s, at least up until now. They both waitress, they were both young when they hooked up with their partners, they both liked school and books.” Ohlin “seems like she could be Catherine in another life.” And this may be the point of this seemingly parallel storyline: Ohlin, like Catherine, was a young woman in pursuit of understanding her place in the world, buoyed up by her love of writing poetry – “a feeling of plenty even when she was broke” – and the promise of her first published book. And also like Catherine, Ohlin’s progress toward her future and “the work that was still to come” was interrupted by male violence: “The book, the job, the cat – there were too many things she was doing lately that he didn’t control, and he wanted this victory, or had wanted it in the moment. He wanted her to fall, but didn’t want to admit he made it happen, not even to himself. He hated her. They loved each other.”
Unlike Catherine, though, Ohlin did not survive that violence, her poetry and voice permanently muted. Catherine’s escape from her captor Dex gives her the second chance that Ohlin did not have.
By juxtaposing the lives and tragedies of Julianna Ohlin and Catherine Reindeer, Rosenblum emphasizes the role that art and knowledge play in enriching and even sustaining life. In the darkness of Dex’s basement prison, in the face of pain and terrible abuse, Catherine recalls Ohlin’s poems, reciting them over and over for comfort to herself and Donny, so much so “that they started to feel like prayers.” In the most extraordinary and horrific of circumstances, Ohlin’s focus on the everyday details of life in her poems becomes a kind of balm. “I realized that everything ordinary was what I loved,” Catherine says, “And so I tried to escape in my mind back to those ordinary things by remembering her poems.”
And it is through Catherine’s love of books and reading, a constant in her much-altered life, that she may, we’re led to believe by the novel’s end, be able to move forward in the aftermath of her suffering. With a subtle touch, Rosenblum uses the familiar symbolism of darkness and light in So Much Love, contrasting the gloomy hopelessness of Dex’s basement with references to the light Catherine sees when she returns to her university, the light of knowledge: “It’s nearly full dark now but the bright windows of the library stay where they’ve always been, and behind the light, I can see all the books I haven’t yet read.”
So Much Love, a masterfully complex and beautiful novel, is about so many things, but for this reader it is principally about the promise of a young woman reclaiming her voice and her right to be on her way, to do what she loves, and to be the person she wishes to become.
Meadowlark, Wendi Stewart, Issue 21, November 2015
It is a very human tendency to look for reason and meaning in tragedy in order to cope with the terrifying randomness of life’s misfortunes. Wendi Stewart’s notable debut novel, Meadowlark, tells the story of a senseless family catastrophe: the drowning death in an icy lake of a mother and her toddler son. For six-year-old Rebecca Archer and her father, Robert, the loss of half of their family is a devastation that permanently alters the course and substance of their lives.
When the Archers’ car goes through the ice on Rainy Lake in northwestern Ontario in March of 1962, Robert can save only Rebecca from the sinking vehicle. Having made the fateful decision, despite being warned against it, to drive across the ice-covered lake to reach their cabin late in the winter season, Robert is consumed by guilt as he lays his wife and son to rest and returns with Rebecca to their farmhouse. Destroyed not only by the emotional torment of his grief, the formerly robust and able farmer is also reduced physically by the tragedy, having lost his toes and most of his fingers to frostbite. Rebecca heartbreakingly knows that in many ways she’s lost her father, too: “Instead of a family, my father is stuck with me, the teams are chosen and I am the only one left standing. If we were in the yard, he would lift his head, tip his chin as if to say come on, but he has already given up, certain he will never win.”
As the weeks and months pass by, Robert removes all evidence of his wife and son from their home and retreats further into himself, leaving Rebecca at her tender age to parent herself, manage their farm, and keep her memories of her mother alive. She becomes increasingly angry with her father for his weakness and inertia, at times screaming at him in frustration over “the grief he wears like a heavy coat, the grief that has curled his spine and ruined his eyesight so that all he can see is misery and emptiness…” She even experiences fleeting thoughts of hurting her father, though these thoughts only add to the crushing survivor guilt she already feels. In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, Rebecca’s surprising maturity and perspicacity can seem incongruent with her extreme youth, but as the novel progresses and she grows into her adolescence, instances of jarringly adult insights become less frequent and her voice rings more true.
Meadowlark is not, fortunately, a story without hope. Despite the burden of her circumstances, Rebecca is not doomed to a life of loss and despair. She chooses a different path for herself, one that involves the making of a new kind of family with her friends, Chuck and Lissie. The heart of Stewart’s novel resides in the relationship that forms between the three young people, all suffering from dysfunctional home lives. Together they provide one another with a system of support and acceptance that carries them through their high school years and through the hardships of dealing with broken or abusive parents.
Chuck and Rebecca bond quickly when they meet on the bus on their first day of the first grade, a pair of misfits with heavy hearts. Chuck’s father, Harold, “a lean, mean dog, a scrapper who can fight dirty and whip any opponent, not with strength or skill but with outright meanness,” regards his son as a useless failure and exacts cruel punishments for Chuck’s perceived shortcomings. Harold’s abuse extends to Gran, his aged mother-in-law –a true light in the story – who becomes a sort of stand-in mother for both Chuck and Rebecca, often shielding them from the tyranny of the adults in their lives.
Rebecca and Chuck’s exclusive twosome enlarges in high school to include Lissie, an indigenous girl adopted by a single white woman named Charlotte Smythe. As if Charlotte’s intense perfectionism, unreasonable demands, and early-onset Alzheimer’s disease were not enough for the teenaged Lissie to contend with, she has her own very challenging self-esteem and identity issues. There is a mystery surrounding Lissie’s parentage, and Charlotte cannot bring herself to reveal it. It is this mystery that by the novel’s end will carry not only Lissie, but Rebecca and Chuck as well, out into the world and away from their small town in search of answers.
Ultimately, Rebecca Archer is confronted with an almost impossible decision to make: to stay on the farm and abandon herself to her father’s mournful influence, or to leave behind the parent she used to adore, knowing he might not survive without her, in order to have any chance of her own happiness. Her struggle to do what is right is moving and believable, and we can’t help but admire her courage.
For a first novel, Meadowlark is remarkable for its distinctive, clear-voiced, endearing young characters. While the three adult antagonists – Robert, Harold, and Charlotte – are at times almost caricatures of the stereotypical bad parent, Stewart does not render them completely without sympathy. The novel does lose some ground midway as it digresses into descriptions of minor characters and events at Rebecca’s school. There are also some heavy-handed symbolic references, including the death of Rebecca’s childhood pet, Daisy the horse, just as Rebecca is emerging into her adult years. These flaws, however, are incidental to an otherwise very promising debut.