Charity begins at home
Family dramedy asks, why are we so mean?
“Charity,” the new novella from esteemed Vancouver writer and editor Keath Fraser, begins in the aftermath of a revelation: Greta, a medical student in her mid-20s, has begun dating Rudy, a retired air conditioner specialist who, at 88, is roughly “four times her age and half her weight.” The news causes hysterics in her father Patrick, who pictures the couple as “like mating the family’s pet goat to a rubber raft” and in her stepmother Denise, who narrates the slim volume. It’s a manic laughter, though. “Howling? We could as well have wept.”
From that introduction, a reader might expect a domestic dramedy, a sharptongued account of family dysfunction. While the novella definitely delivers on that level, “Charity” is ultimately something much deeper.
Greta — “a perfectionist about everything but her weight” — is a gifted student, a dedicated ocean swimmer and given to a philosophical questioning of the world. Denise, Patrick, and Judy, Greta’s birth mother, are shocked when she announces that she and Rudy are joining Doctors without Borders to work in Africa. They are more shocked, however, when she returns, alone.
What initially seems to be a simple, somewhat familiar story becomes something more philosophical
What may be surprising to the reader, though, is that for all her outsize qualities, Greta is barely present within the novella. Rather, she serves as an absent centre around which the narrative revolves. Denise’s narration, for example, focuses on the young woman, but we rarely hear Greta’s voice in the present of the novel; she exists solely through the awareness of others, through rumour and memory, recounted conversations and fleeting encounters.
What initially seems on the surface to be a simple, somewhat familiar story becomes something more philosophical, an exploration of the relationships between parents and children, and between youth and age.
In Denise’s consciousness, past and present blur together and cause and effect operate as a circle, rather than a simple line. Character actions overlap and refract; Rudy babysitting Greta as a child (which, to be fair, might explain some of her parents’ confusion about their later romantic relationship — or, as Denise puts it, “imagining him now, bobbing up and down atop our daughter … discomfited us”) folds into a memory of Rudy babysitting Denise when she was a child, each incident gaining force and resonance through the repetition and refraction. It’s a powerful, complex construction beneath an often-funny, occasionally tragic narrative voice.
Threaded through it all, however, is a single question: to what charity does the novella’s title refer? Fraser never completely answers that question. He offers a relentless counter-example: if charity begins at home, as the saying goes, what is the reader to make of the repeated, cruel comments and descriptions of Greta’s weight from those closest to her? He also offers bread crumbs and suggestions, including a foundation which Denise starts, and an ongoing interest in the Christian virtues — “and the greatest of these is charity” — but the essence of the answer is left to the reader.
Like Carol Shields’ “Unless,” and its meditation on goodness, “Charity,” is a powerful work of philosophical and moral inquiry, rooted in skilfully wrought characters and sly storytelling.