Tapping into fear and failure
“After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one’s own relations,” Oscar Wilde once wrote.
The complex and messy relationships that constitute family have been at the heart of literary comedy and tragedy for as long as there has been comedy and tragedy — and families.
Amy Jones brings both together beautifully in We’re All In This Together, her debut novel about the Parkers, a strange, estranged and struggling family from Thunder Bay. They fight, they lie, they revel in petty jealousies and long-ago slights — that is, when they’re actually speaking to one another at all.
In other words, they’re a fairly normal family. That’s the charm in this sophomore effort from Jones, whose collection of short stories, What Boys Like, won the 2008 Metcalf-Rooke Award.
The dysfunctional family reunites when matriarch Kate survives — barely — the 40-metre plunge over the waterfalls on the Kaministiquia River in a barrel.
Her stunt is captured on a video that goes viral, leaving her family to deal with the fallout as the “Conqueror of Kakabe- ka” lies in a coma in hospital.
At the core there’s Finn, the twin who fled the “redneck” town with a betrayed heart; her twin sister Nicki, the wild-child betrayer now with a flock of children of her own; Shawn, the homeless boy Kate took in as a delinquent teen; and Walter, Kate’s long-suffering husband.
It’s a story told by a rich and real cast of characters, brought to life by eye for what makes us all so very human.
Despite a couple of tired stereotypes — the stressed-out cutter mom, the adult child who never moved out of mom and dad’s house — the story is so entertaining that the universal truths frequently Jones drops don’t interrupt the fastpaced events but, rather, illuminate them.
At times laugh-out-loud funny, We’re All In This Together deftly taps into the fears and failures of all of us. Dene Moore is a writer and editor based in British Columbia.