A fearless coming-of-age tale
It’s tempting to call poet Catherine Graham’s debut novel Quarry a mystery. It isn’t, but detective skills would sure come in handy in solving the family puzzles inherited by narrator Caitlin Marhag.
Caitlin’s early memories are of living in her “Upside-Down House” (bedrooms downstairs, kitchen and living room up) in Grimsby, Ont., a time of joyful parties that fade into silence after her mother’s “woman’s operation.”
In their new house beside a water-filled limestone quarry, “the house of Mom’s dreams,” her red-haired mother smokes and gazes at the water’s changing surface; Dad drives his Caddy, selling envelopes on the road. It’s the 1980s.
One August, cousin Cindy visits; the girls invent crazy dives and generally have fun, until Cindy challenges Caitlin about her parents’ wedding photos — there aren’t any.
Uninterested in silly wedding games, Caitlin rows across the water, showing Cindy her secret: a splendid heron, “grey and blue and wonderful.”
Sharing a lurid tale about a drowned orphaned woman “who’d lost her will to live,” Caitlin scares her cousin (the desired result) who does not, like her, thrill to tales of “lost lives.” Our unusual narrator sometimes sees “outside” herself, “like a flying bird, or a god watching.”
This image is typical of Graham’s poetic skills, as she draws us deep into a world that is both ordinary and haunted — a world infused with mysterious rifts in the rhythms of life and thick with signs of encroaching death.
As her once-glamorous mother fades, Caitlin’s Nana comes to stay: a judgmental witch who doles out hideous meals and moral censure in equal measure. Dad escapes with friends; Caitlin eats PopTarts, tries dating and dope-smoking, failing beautifully at both, but excelling at school and, oddly, at selling, her father’s specialty. The summers she works peddling bus tours with watery “bottom feeders” on Niagara Falls’ Clifton Hill are perfect satires of the hustler’s art.
Caitlin’s quarry is a potent symbol — of the unknown, of risk, perhaps of the unconscious mind itself. “None of this made sense. But sometimes it did, when I tried not to think about it, like the way you see a star by looking to the left. Just a little.” In the season of her mother’s death, the quarry “received the snow and turned the snow to water. Eventually, it would scab over, cap the quarry of life.”
With its colourful, endearing cast — Darren, the stoner from Buffalo; Suzie, the campus “slut” who doesn’t care about gossipy girls; Linda, Dad’s surprisingly sympathetic girlfriend; a lecherous professor; and the real-life newscaster Irv Weinstein, an habitué at Dad’s favourite Buffalo eatery — this imaginative coming-of-age tale is by turns tense, funny, painful, wondrous and all too real: a crazy, fearless dive into life’s deepest mysteries. Nancy Wigston is a freelance writer and critic in Toronto.