When it rains, it metaphors
Clouds get in the way of a life filled with pleasure and loss
Rain is not only multi-faceted, but multi-existent, in a mix of flavours, temperatures and tones
IOne Hundred Days of Rain By Carellin Brooks BookThug 192 pp; $20
t doesn’t take much for ubiquity to slip into invisibility. If anything, we probably stop noticing what surrounds us by default: we need to be prodded, if not shocked, into recognizing that even absence itself takes a shape.
Absence, in the shape of a divorce, pushes the unnamed narrator of Carellin Brooks’ One Hun
dred Days of Rain to look skyward — or, well, outward, maybe. One of the things that rather quickly becomes apparent about rain, through her eyes, is that it’s futile to reduce it to mere, dull synecdoche. Rain is not only multi-faceted, but multi-existent, coating pavement and soaking fabric and blotting out light in a mix of flavours, temperatures and tones. There is more than one instance here where rain approaches either the great grey infinite or an obliterating force — not really seeming to care which, so long as it can be everything.
It’s obliteration that seems to inspire Vancouverbased Brooks’ narrator’s obsession with rain, a particularly bad split that begins with a brief stint in jail. She is released with orders to avoid making contact with her ex, or with any knives not explicitly meant for cooking. Firmer details are hard to come by, and the mess is compounded by a son, flaring fights with both M, her most recent ex, and an earlier one who actually fathered the child, the recurring presence of an old flame, and occasional dalliances with a new one. In the case of the narrator’s relationships — it should be said here that there’s a strong tinge of autobiography to the book, though with the standard caveats about emotional truths and narrative facts — the rain washes nothing away, just seems to bog everyone down.
The interpersonal aspects of the narrator’s story are in verisimilitude with life’s frustrating tendency to stubbornly repeat in the same pattern, even as time passes and circumstances change, but at least the rain is always shifting. It’s maybe most obviously read as a metaphor for a certain kind of malaise, if not outright depression, some days pounding and all-encompassing, some days, mercifully, breaking. At times the mildew it produces in a series of sub-par apartments threatens her access to her son; at others it makes even just travelling through the city a horrible slog, clothes so drenched they’re impossible to dry.
Brooks has a poet’s taste for both economy and enigma, and is especially enamoured of phrases that float up toward some universal, needs-to-be-parsed truth, purposely opaque or cleverly paradoxical. The best of these are often tightly tethered to the narrator’s situation at hand — and usually describing rain. Elsewhere, her lyrical turns of phrase are overwrought and signify pretty much nothing, as when on a trip to the lawyer for another round in the divorce fight, the narrator reflects on “constructing her own misconstructions”; that’s just cuteness masquerading as profundity. Much better is when she hits on rain as “the very shade of negation,” a force that washes out not just the world around it, but itself.
There are times when Brooks threatens to overload the metaphor, when rain becomes so much that it’s effectively nothing. At times it seems like this might be the metafictional point, that any truly suitable stand-in for life necessarily has to be so complex and varied that it’s essentially shapeless, dictated only by the whims of the metaphorizer. I’m not quite sure that’s what Brooks is going for; if she’s doing a bit of having her metaphor and critiquing it, too, there’s scant evidence. Mostly, the rain remains a low-key but hypnotic gesture, something that holds our attention even as we struggle to actually see it curtaining off the world. The lingering moments are those when the rain manages to connect the entirety of the world in its sheets, when Brooks describes a world either lost in or entirely made of rain. It’s in these flashes of insight where she gets closest to revealing something essential: all this rain is simply the water we’re all swimming in, whether or not we really notice it.