The Other Mrs. Smith succeeds
Novel centred on woman whose memory is fragmented by electroconvulsive therapy
Book review ›
The Other Mrs. Smith, a novel Bonnie Burstow | Inanna Publications and Education
448 pp., $22.95
Talk about beginning your story “in medias res!”
“An eerie smell in the air, as if a tin plate had been accidentally left on a red hot burner. Bloated bodies dressed in white floating over me. Something cold and sticky on my temples. Something rubbery in my mouth. A band pressing in around my head …. Straps wrapped around my legs, shoulders, torso. ... Can’t move a muscle. No way to breathe.”
This painful passage occurs in the opening pages of Bonnie Burstow’s The Other Mrs. Smith. Her protagonist, Naomi, is experiencing ECT (electroconvulsive therapy) in a Toronto mental hospital, and Burstow employs the classic narrative strategy of beginning her story “in the middle of things.”
Burstow, an academic and activist based at the University of Toronto, has been a prominent critic of medical model psychiatry and ECT for years.
This could, at first blush, seem like unpromising material for a novel. Whatever their position on the public debates about ECT, the average reader might be forgiven if she thought an anti-ECT polemic told from the perspective of someone whose memory has been hollowed out by the controversial procedure would not work as fiction. Such a reader would be wrong.
The Other Mrs. Smith is a compelling novel that invites the reader to join Naomi in her efforts to recover from the harm done to her by ECT and to reclaim the life, family and memories that had been effectively burned out by the bolts of electricity shot through her brain during this treatment. (Many readers will be surprised to learn that ECT is still being used in Canada, but by one estimate over 15,000 Canadians every year endure this questionable “therapy.”)
Unlike many who try to use prose fiction to make a political/sociological point, Burstow never makes her characters stand-ins for abstractions. My particular favourite among the book’s richly imagined cast of characters is Gerald, a kind and generous trans man who was, as “the other Mrs. Smith,” the first wife of Naomi’s husband before coming out as trans. In many ways, Gerald is the moral centre of this complex novel, but he is not the only nuanced and memorable character.
Like Mordecai Richler’s classic, Barney’s Version, The Other Mrs. Smith succeeds in telling a long and complex narrative through the lens of a damaged mind and memory. This book is a literary tour de force and a persuasive call on readers to consider the ethical implications of ECT. Highly recommended.
Tom Sandborn lives and writes in Vancouver. He welcomes your feedback and story tips at tos65@telus.net