Bad decisions made good on paper
Rachel Cantor’s debut, 2014’s A Highly Unlikely Event, introduced her as an imaginative tour de force able to juggle the absurd with the poignant, the unbelievable with the necessary. With Good On Paper, Cantor does the same, and with just as much dexterity.
The novel opens with office temp Shira Greene hiding in a supply closet, having a whispered conversation with Durlene, her placement agent, about her need for a new job. She is in a rut, toiling away meaninglessly — “I got you a charity!” Durlene argues. “I know,” Shira replies. “Prosthetic legs, they’re important.” — and raising her daughter in Manhattan with the help of her gay best friend, Ahmad.
She has dreams, but none of them seem especially likely to come true. Until she gets a telegram from Romei — like recording artist Prince, he only goes by the one name — a Nobel Prize-winning poet whose work she once almost dedicated her life to studying.
Now, Romei is offering Shira a new life, or so it seems: a great deal of money to do the work she is meant to do, translating his latest literary offering — an epic blend of poetry and prose based on Dante’s La Vita Nuova — from the Italian. But Shira soon realizes Romei’s new work might prove impossible to translate and that it might also contain elements that threaten everything she believes in.
Cantor circles around Shira for a touch too long, faking the reader out with glimpses into her inner life that don’t immediately balance with the farcical tableaus of her existence. But everything, including her crush on the part-time rabbi and bookseller who owns the shop across the street and who she often spots in the window, locked at the lips with his too-young clerk, gains the required heft eventually.
Shira’s foibles come tenderly into focus as the book progresses, as does the idea that we are all just as imperfect as Shira, that we all make bad choices sometimes — and also, that we all might be waiting for a big chance that is most likely not going to arrive in the form we imagined it would. But when that chance comes, we must have the temerity to let it change our lives. Marissa Stapley is the Toronto-based bestselling author of Mating for Life. Her second novel, Things To Do When It’s Raining, will be released by Simon & Schuster in 2017.