Living the dream
BARBARA GOWDY'S LITTLE SISTER CASTS A WEIRD SPELL ON ITS PROTAGONIST – AND ITS READERS
It would take only a few minor adjustments, in tone and narrative, for Barbara Gowdy’s Little Sister to qualify as a horror novel. The protagonist, Rose, 34, owner and manager of a repertory cinema ( easily recognizable to Toronto film buffs as the Revue), has the preternatural ability to enter the psyche and the body of another human being, in this case a books editor named Harriet. The extent to which Harriet recognizes this event – Rose calls it an “episode” – is unclear, and so is Rose’s ability to initiate or control it. There seems to be some growth in awareness, however. It was during her fourth episode, Gowdy writes, “that Rose grew aware of herself, not as a glint at the edge of Harriet’s consciousness, but as a separate consciousness, a fully integrated component.” Rose knows only that the episodes are summoned every time she finds herself in the middle of a thunderstorm.
But Little Sister is not horror. Fiction writers who work with normal human characters perform much the same trickery in their imagined worlds – sometimes even extending it to other members of the animal kingdom, such as Gowdy’s elephants in her novel White Bone. To hear some writers talk, the relations between them and their characters are positively uncanny, the characters occasionally tak- ing the author by surprise with their unexpected responses. Author and character, it seems, need only a nudge to experience their own episodes.
But Rose, in this novel, is not a novelist. Gowdy is the novelist. And she must provide a few clues as to what she’s up to. Are these episodes merely dreams? Rose’s mundane boyfriend, Victor, believes they are – but he would. “The episodes were not some exotic form of dream life,” Gowdy writes. “They were actually happening. Every time she thought she was entering Harriet, she really was.” True, it was a miracle defying flesh and blood, but as Rose tells herself, “This is how a miracle feels.”
Is Rose a psychotic? Certainly brain chemistry may have something to do with these hallucinatory antics. At one point, Rose researches something called a silentmigraine. Rose reads: “Some silent- migraine auras escalate and systematize to the extent that they become tantamount to unrestrained states of credible illusion or dreaming.”
Victor likes this hypothesis, too, which is enough to sink it in Rose’s estimation.
Perhaps sex is the culprit. In Harriet’s body, she experiences a wonderful orgasm, a bout of “unearthly pleasure,” which might be enough to wreak havoc with her nerv- ous system ever after. With Victor, she always faked her orgasms. “Was the husk of her body able to feel anything?” Rose wonders. Is she condemned to love only men she can feel sorry for?
Harriet’s eyes may be the real clue. They are the same eyes possessed by Rose’s deceased younger sister Ava when the two girls roamed their family’s country house. The novel’s title proclaims the subject of the novel: the younger sibling whose death lies at the back of every emotional crisis in Rose’s waking life, and indeed behind any episode.
This in itself is not a great mystery – almost from the very moment that the reader learns Rose had a younger sibling who suffered from a dark fate, the mystery is for all intents resolved. Anyone who has a younger sibling is liable to feel guilty, deserved or not, thereby abetting the author's economy of sympathy. The little sister in this case almost stands as a symbol of innocence and vulnerability.
Gowdy’s problem is not making Rose a living, breathing, sympathetic character but rather a vivid one. The same with Harriet. What can an author do with a character that is close to being a zombie, with a will at the mercy of another person? What can an author do with a little girl who is a symbol of innocence and vulner- ability? Are Harriet and Ava real people? Or can they be made to seem real? Can Harriet and Ava and Rose, too, for that matter, avoid a fatal touch of masochism?
Thanks to Gowdy’s imaginative intelligence, the Rose and Harriet duo is never r i dic ulous. What drives the novel, however, is not so much their interaction as Rose’s encounters with the indisputably real individuals who populate her world – the meeting of her 11- year- old self with a girl named Shannon who channels the force of the universe and in general impresses Rose with her mystic, woodland lore is alone worth the price of admission. Rose, Gowdy writes, had “never met a genius before.”
Equally compelling is Rose’s mother, Fiona, who suffers from the onset of dementia. The boyfriend Victor, a self- centered, apprentice writer, and Lloyd, a noble- hearted ex- con, help keep the theatre alive. These are basically comic characters – an inch or two away from being tragic. The theatre itself is a comic backstop that prevents Gowdy’s main story from dissolving in improbability.
Of course it helps if a reader is like Lloyd, who tells Rose, “I’m good with weird.” Gowdy also requires readers who are “good with weird.” As long as she maintains her judicious mixture of warmth and weirdness, however, she should have no trouble casting her own spell on such readers.
There is, finally, a moral to the story. It is simple. Rose articulates it. “Get your own head straight,” she muses, “before hanging around someone else’s.”
ANYONE WHO HAS A YOUNGER SIBLING IS LIABLE TO FEEL GUILTY, DESERVED OR NOT.