A non-binary, digital coming of age
Crocker’s debut novel balances sly wit with emotional risk
“All I Ask,” the debut novel from award-winning St. John’s short story writer Eva Crocker, begins with a violation. Twenty-something Stacey is still in bed when she is awakened by “the doorbell ringing and a pounding that shook the house.”
Her roommate isn’t home, and she’s confronted with members of the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary, waving a warrant and barging into her house. She returns, repeatedly, to the fact that she isn’t wearing a bra, that she’s not wearing her contacts, so she can barely see, as she struggles to keep her cats inside while the men — all men — search her apartment for “illegal digital material.”
The novel opens with the chilling lines “They took my computer and phone so they could copy the contents. They called it a mirror image. They said it was the fastest way to prove I wasn’t the suspect and also I didn’t have a choice.”
That opening chapter seems, initially, to be the set-up for a particular sort of novel; it isn’t. While the police raid and its effects run throughout the story, they’re not what the story is about. “All I Ask” is a powerful coming of age cri de couer, rather than a thriller or novel of wrongful prosecution.
With sly wit and sharp emotional acuity, Crocker explores the next few months in the lives of Stacey and her circle, including her best friend Viv; Holly, the mysterious and alluring recent transplant to St. John’s; and Kris, who repairs bikes and with whom Stacey shares an instant chemistry. The novel delves deeply into Stacey’s life and past, everything from early sexual experiences to the cyclical changes in her body, while at the same time encompassing a vital, passionate and often fraught community.
This intimate immediacy not only connects the reader to the central characters — it opens the novel up to a broader generational examination.
Stacey and her friends live in a postbinary world, where old constructs of gender identity and sexual attraction, along with external moral judgement, no longer seem to exist. But it’s also a world of disenfranchisement and insecurity. While they all have training and degrees, the members of Stacey’s community are struggling to get by; Stacey herself, despite a theatre degree, works in the box office rather than on the stage, picking up occasional work voicing radio ads.
It’s a world of uncertainty set against a historical backdrop of the environmental protests against the controversial Muskrat Falls hydro-electric project in Labrador, and the not guilty verdict against Doug Snelgrove, a police officer accused of sexual assault.
“On the stand, he said he’d known she was drunk; he said that he had sex with her while he was on duty, while he was in uniform with a gun attached to his pants.”
“All I Ask” unfolds with a casual, almost aimless quality, a slow drift through a series of moments in these lives. It’s a wickedly funny, sexy, joyous novel, threaded through with sadness, uncertainty, and emotional risk.
More than anything, though, it’s a novel that is unafraid to show its heart, always broken, always healing, always open.