Home comforts in a complex comedy
Crow is a prodigal(ish) daughter tale peppered with picaresque bits of plotting
In a spirited debut novel, Amy Spurway offers a warts-and-baggage portrait of woebegone but wisecracking Stacey Fortune. The Dartmouth, N.S., author tracks Stacey’s misadventures following a reluctant homecoming to the impoverished landscape that formed her. Crow is a prodigal(ish) daughter tale peppered with picaresque bits of plotting, and Spurway writes it to memorable effect.
As the novel opens, Stacey’s I’ll-makeit-big-and-show-’em fantasy that first propelled her to Toronto right after high school has resulted in a cheating fiancé, a heartless job selling snake oil, and cynicism that’s grown beyond skin deep. The final straw: an ominous medical diagnosis. Back in rural Cape Breton — “an amalgamation of OxyContin-ridden, call-centre infested, coal-stripped craters that erupted in the armpit of the Island’s industrial end,” she quips — after two decades, Stacey settles into family (she comes from a long line of “dirtpoor, cursed lunatics”), old business, and Crow, a former nickname. On “borrowed time,” this “masochistic narcis- sistic drama queen” vows to stay and do whatever she wants, envisioning an epic swan song, vengeance, a searing memoir, and her end-of-days as “a blaze of impulsive, outrageous, scandalicious, truth-bombing glory.”
Naturally, the plans of the former “nightclubbing cougar with no standards” go awry immediately. Reunited with her downtrodden mother and estranged school friends Char and Allie (as well as a zany cast of locals that includes Willy Gimp, Becky Chickenshit, Duke the Puke Clarke, Wendigo Wendy, Skroink, and Weasel Tobin) and facing hallucinatory symptoms that foretell her demise, Stacey begins to reassess past events and relationships. Although she doesn’t often muster “outrageous, scandalicious, truth-bombing glory,” she does manage to right some old wrongs (and fix some new ones). She also creates vital new memories and makes some scenes that will have tongues clucking for generations to come. Instead of Toronto, where she’d experience “another neurological malfunction in a sea of indifferent strangers,” she realizes home — even with its assorted shortcomings — offers her comfort at last.
Even with a couple of iffy directional choices — an undeveloped turn toward the paranormal and a search for an unknown father — Spurway showcases a capable hand at the mechanics of comedy. Her minor characters tend to be grotesques or caricatures, but they’re also both memorable and believable.
As for Spurway’s biggest challenge — comedy in which the pathos of imminent death is never far from sight — the author’s decision to channel the story through the voice of Stacey serves her well. Angry, petty, disillusioned, sharptongued, battered and bruised by the years, prone to snap decisions and judgments, and yet not a little scared of dying at 40, she’s a complex and contradictory figure whose narrating tones relay very human traits — fallibility and indomitability, blindness and insight — via homespun, salty language.