LONELY TERRITORY
JESSE RUDDOCK’S DEMANDING DEBUT NOVEL IS SPARSE IN BOTH LANGUAGE AND LANDSCAPE
Last night I dreamed of persimmons. I’ve never eaten a persimmon, but happened to catch a cable TV rerun of Chopped Canada as I nodded off on my couch – just long enough to learn Susur Lee likes them ripe and that ice cream is rarely a good idea in the studio’s kitchen. Have at it, Sigmund.
What did you dream about, Jesse Ruddock? I bet it was something profound, astute, hyper-vivid in LSD technicolour. Reading Ruddock’s first novel, ShotBlue, it’s clear the Guelph native’s imagination paints only in her palette’s sharpest hues – smearing broad swaths, dark and moody and dense on the page.
Shot-Blue’s small cast of characters is built to linger and they do, their portraits fortified with Ruddock’s rich setting: a constellation of islands floating somewhere that might be Canada’s oft-forgotten coast, gnarly and northern and not really the place for newly orphaned Tristan to orienteer his adolescent wilderness alone. Rachel, Tristan’s mother, isn’t long for Ruddock’s canvas, but manages in that time to slash through it stunningly – giving the novel its only definitive measure of clean tempo or closure.
Chapter- less and drifting, ShotBlue shadows Tristan through his home’s harshest seasons into a summer heated by the arrival of Tomasin, who comes in from out of town for a few months’ work.
Their age says puppy love but Ruddock says no: kids are dangerous enough alone; together, in something like lust, they’re fearsome. Shot- Blue picks through Tomasin’s curious infatuation with Tristan, a boy blistered by grief but callousing quickly at the simple matter of staying alive. Cut the cast with Gary Paulsen’s hatchet, sprinkle some Susanna Moodie c/o Carol Shields, and sow Iain Lawrence’s Skeleton Tree for backdrop – this is a story out of Canada’s survivalist canon but told mostly through illusion, allusion and emotion instead.
All big dreams and knitted brows, Shot- Blue is a serious and demanding book, contemplating widely in wandering prose. Ruddock is a poet (among other things) and we can call this her debut novel or we can call it what it is: poetry. She taps skills honed across medium – Ruddock a songwriter and photographer besides – to paint vividly a savage, inhospitable northern winter and the human collateral it claims.
Beautifully drawn and lyrical, Shot- Blue moves fluidly, a beat past the norm of something so literary. Dialogue is sparse, and that is both a good and a bad thing for Ruddock’s debut: her characters speak not with but at one another, solitary lines so few that each begs the reader to weigh them carefully on delivery. There’s been no promise of anything light in Ruddock’s first go, but her style asks a lot and risks leaving you behind. Tristan, sketched gradually to great interest, is a character study himself: Ruddock offers a generosity to children most authors reserve for their post- pubescent set, a whole and dynamic personhood that’s no more or less interesting for its age, only governed by the circumstances it knows and encounters with time.
Whatever comatose fantasies consume Ruddock at night, the author’s writing demonstrates she can sift through them deftly for meaning and present that subconscious contemplation on a page. Not always lucid, though consistently rich, ShotBlue’s examination of loneliness skitters beyond easy digest but is braced in a story that makes its challenge worthwhile. Whatever Ruddock requests in presenting readers her riddled prose, it’s evident she’s done that work doubly herself in their clever crafting.
In January, I counted Shot-Blue among 2017’s most notable forthcoming debuts; I was excited to read Jesse Ruddock’s first book, and facing lofty expectations, it didn’t wholly disappoint. But I’m jonesing harder now for Ruddock’s sophomore round: her art doesn’t need refinement so much as tethering, skills strong but wanting ground that experience will sow, something Shot-Blue makes clear she can muster.