Secrets are hidden in plain sight
Montreal’s Catherine Mckenzie sands the edges off a romantic triangle
Four novels in less than four years, a Huffington Post blog for which she’s reading a novel a week for a year, plus a Montreal law practice. Catherine McKenzie: She’s a machine!
Her latest is Hidden. And, for the record, it’s got a good pace, simple plotting and likeable characters. It doesn’t much matter what I write; Hidden is going to be, like Spin, Forgotten and Arranged before it, an international bestseller.
That’s because McKenzie has found her niche, chicklit (easy to chew and loses its taste after five minutes, as my wife says), and is on her way to becoming a brand. We’ll know she’s arrived when her name on the cover is larger than the title.
With a publication date of mid-June, it’s a beach read, or one for the 19th hole — golf being a kind of metaphor in Hidden, though I’m not sure for what.
So there’s my caveat and my bias. Now for the storyline.
Jeff ’s dead. His wife, Claire, is in deep mourning. So is Tish, Jeff ’s co-worker. The wife’s grief is understandable. But why the co-worker? Could she be hiding some- thing? Yup. It’s not spoiling anything to say that Jeff and Tish are close. (Sorry: were close. He’s dead.) And although it may be a spoiler to indicate just how close, it goes to the heart of one of McKenzie’s themes in Hidden: Can a person love more than one person at a time and still be loyal to either? What’s more detrimental to a relationship: maintaining a lie or revealing a truth?
Throughout the novel, Jeff and Tish have an email and video conference romance that doesn’t go beyond suggestion. McKenzie has created an elaborate tease, a guessing game. While we’re asking “will they,” Claire is asking “did they?” Whether they did is revealed in an epilogue, narrated by Jeff, meaning he’s taken his secret to the grave. But one other person knows, and that would be Tish. And her knowledge of it, her promise to reveal nothing, to keep it “hidden,” sends a conflicting message. If secrets remain hidden, the possibility of conversation, real communication, which is the heart and soul of a mature relationship, is defeated, and all opportunity for forgiveness is tabled.
That’s just my opinion, of course. And one open to bookclub discussion.
What is not open to deliber- ation are Hidden’s intra-textual errors, which indicate this machine needs oiling. “Is this what my life is going to be like now? Every little thing reminding me of him,and not being able to tell him about any of it?” Tish asks early on, before she even knows Jeff is dead. Later, Tish drives her car to work to delete a series of email messages between her and Jeff. But her car was already at work. She’d got a ride home.
A character, saying goodbye to Claire and Jeff ’s brother, Tim, uses the word “ta.” Tim, who lives in Australia, comments: “‘Ta’? Does she think she’s the Queen?” Yet anyone Down Under wouldn’t react that way. From Sydney to Melbourne and from Christchurch to Wellington, New Zealand, “ta” means thanks, not goodbye.
Most egregious is the dishonour McKenzie does one of her three main characters by actually mistaking her name. This happened three times in a reviewer’s copy; only two were caught before the book went to viral-print. Hidden is narrated in alternating chapters by Jeff (did I mention he’s dead? His primary role is thus expository), the widow Claire and the wishful Tish. A change in typeface in the first line of each chapter is how the reader tells who’s who. Other than that, the voices of the two women are remarkably the same. Only the details of their life stories differ.
“Any good novel takes us on a journey where we discover, on many levels, truths about ourselves and our world in ways that are, at the same time, unexpected and familiar,” Walter Mosley told the New York Times Book Review in June. Celebrated mostly for his mysteries, Mosley knows from “hidden.” Knowing what to reveal and when is how a novelist keeps a reader turning the page. Who is Pip’s benefactor? What’s that noise in Mr. Rochester’s attic? What is Mr. Darcy’s beef with Mr. Wickham?
I had the good fortune, before McKenzie’s Hidden, of reading Heron River, the latest novel by Hamilton, Ont., author (and my neighbour, as it turns out) Hugh Cook. Told in multiple voices, all of them distinct and compassionately rendered, it’s a novel about the possibilities in and for life when secrets do not remain hidden. There isn’t a false note in it. Cook worked on Heron River on and off for 10 years. It sold about 1,000 copies.