The novelist as babysitter

“It’s a small town,” remarks a character in Libby Creelman’s 2008 novel The Darren Effect, referring to St. John’s, a city whose almost claustrophobic literary smallness has been mentioned by most members of its famous Burning Rock writers’ collective. The group’s alumni include Creelman, Michael Winter, Lisa Moore, Jessica Grant and now Claire Wilkshire, the latest to publish a novel about getting too cozy with the neighbours. Wilkshire also adheres to another Burning Rock dictum: St. John’s is ever a town conspicuously devoid of quotation marks.

In her debut novel, Maxine, Wilkshire’s eponymous protagonist does her best to barricade herself from the outside world in general, and in particular the overt friendliness of her new neighbour Barb. It’s just been over a year since the 9/11 attacks, which coincided with the sudden death of one of Maxine’s closest friends. The conflation of these two events inspires Maxine to quit her job and escape her tidy life by spending a year writing a novel.

She’s done very little writing, though, and the little she’s doing is thwarted by her neighbour. Barb shows up at Maxine’s door unannounced, stages driveway ambushes whenever Maxine leaves the house, and coerces Maxine to babysit her nine-year-old son Kyle. Maxine is surprised to discover, however, that she likes Kyle’s company and that, as his parents struggle with their own problems, he actually needs her. Even more surprising is that she grows to need him too. Kyle helps Maxine with her writing, cheers her on as her word-count grows and urges her to enter writing contests.

Maxine is an unlikely novelist. Although we’re told she holds an English degree and has worked with words as a corporate communications officer, she doesn’t seem passionate about language or stories, and she hardly reads at all. Maxine regards novel-writing as an “acquirable skill,” like sewing or gardening; she just wants to learn something new. Yet she also uses writing to escape the tedium of her life and surroundings — to travel, even if it’s in her own imagination, to where her excessive caution prevents her from going in reality. We see glimpses of Maxine’s novel, and they’re not very promising. She’s invented an alter-ego named Frédérique, who is everything her creator isn’t, but Maxine is as aimless as a writer as she is in her real life, perpetually unable to think up a plot.

Wilkshire’s narrative is unabashedly self-aware. One of Maxine’s friends tells her that the plot of her novel will probably end up involving “a politician, a death, a prize winner and a missing child,” a wink to the reader who will discover that Wilkshire’s novel does just that. Later, Maxine notes that her own novel is “all over the place, like a department store on Christmas morning,” and the reader understands, for Wilkshire’s novel seems just as disorganized. It is as though Maxine and Wilkshire were both faced with the same conundrum: here is this character, but now that I’ve brought her to life I’m not sure what to make her do.

Her novel is like a department store on Christmas morning

Wilkshire’s solution is a madcap scheme involving a fraudulent literary prize and a whirlwind trip to Paris. There are vividly funny scenes that had me laughing out loud, and Wilkshire has an ear for dialogue — Maxine records overheard conversations in her notebook. Still, I longed for more. Wilkshire clearly possesses literary skill beyond Maxine’s middling talents, and I wish she could have shown more mastery of her material. The plot’s sudden tragic turn near the end is treated too lightly to be taken seriously, and seems incongruous with the rest of the book.

For a novel so self-aware, Maxine seems unsure of where it’s going. Just as Maxine would benefit from getting out more, so too might Claire Wilkshire benefit from ceasing to hide her obvious talents behind her lessskilled literary creation.