Oddball family tale shimmers
Barbara Gowdy is consistently adept at portraying tough bonds between her related characters
I’ve considered Barbara Gowdy a genius at depicting family dynamics ever since encountering “Disneyland,” her 1988 story about a (com)promised Cold War-era holiday that winds up as a suburban bomb shelter test-run. “Disneyland” eventually became a chapter in Falling Angels, a terrific, unsettling and blackly comic debut novel about, what else, one messed-up family.
Gowdy seems consistently adept — a whiz, really — at portraying the tough inexplicable bonds that, for better or worse, hold mom, dad and the kids together.
True, hers are quirky, damaged and sometimes oddly shaped families, as Mister Sandman and The Romantic illustrated. And, of course, they’re families under duress. Even White Bone, her one-of-akind animal tale, traced a familial crisis — a clan of African elephants facing its own extinction.
Set over a week of early summer thunderstorms in 2005, Little Sister displays Gowdy’s ongoing — and immensely enjoyable — productivity with regard to family portraiture.
Chronic dieter Rose Bowan, long “accustomed to keeping her hopes low,” operates the Regal, a run-down Toronto repertory cinema and former vaudevillian theatre that her extroverted father was inspired to purchase.
Rose began helping out right after university as he grew terminally sick with cancer. Her current business partner and mounting responsibility is her mother, Fiona, a septuagenarian firecracker of a woman whose dementia is encroaching in steady increments (as seen in her forgetfulness and disinhibition).
Alert when she’s able, Fiona recognizes that, one morning soon, she “won’t know a pack of cards from a pack of wolves.”
As well, there are passing references to Rose’s younger sister, Ava, who died two decades earlier, when Rose was 11.
Subsequent chapters reach back to 1982 and describe the Bowans’ relocation to Windy Acres (a farm whose house reminds the girls of the Bates manor) and the days leading up to the fatal accident that still haunts Rose.
Despite the funereal air of heavy gloom, Gowdy’s wry observations, comic remarks and vital characters provide a welcome, enlivening counterbalance. And the lovely writing practically shimmers on the page.
Almost immediately, the novel takes an unexpected turn — with a Twilight Zonelike conceit — during the first of the story’s thunderclaps.
At work, Rose experiences an episode of what her know-it-all “tortured writer” boyfriend later tells her is a silent migraine. In fact, it’s much more.
For a small window — a few minutes at most — she appears to inhabit (silently, helplessly) the consciousness of another woman, an editor at a local publishing house that, years ago, rejected Rose’s father’s manuscript (he had written a history of the Regal).
Both morally challenging and “an indescribable thrill,” these psychic events astound Rose, not least because she can’t make sense of them.
The woman she momentarily inhabits, Harriet, “a petite, sad, croaky-voiced businesswoman with really sharp eyesight,” gives Rose not only a view of an entirely different life but the direct physical sensations as well. For instance, the deeply felt eroticism of Harriet’s affair with a married co-worker amaze Rose, whose own experiences are relatively flat.
Likewise, the woman’s exotic dilemma — an unplanned pregnancy — becomes Rose’s preoccupation. Oddly too, the woman has eyes that remind Rose of her deceased sister.
Clearly, the wild mix — uncanniness, historical echoing and otherworldly clairvoyance on top of death, sadness, guilt and a week of booming weather — could become a ludicrous, off-putting mess in lesser hands. Or subpar Nicholas Sparks gimmickry.
The absolute measure of Gowdy’s talent, though, is that she can interweave the disparate parts with consummate finesse while also grounding Rose’s preternatural momentary inhabitations of Harriet into the real, everyday world.
It’s Rose and her quests — for atonement, for greater happiness, for a fuller life — that anchor all the novel’s strands, and Gowdy capably points to relationships between Rose’s past losses, the shape her existence has taken and the episodes involving her guest appearances in Harriet’s consciousness.
Gowdy might be using a kind of science fiction premise, but the enjoyable bounty of her novel does not result strictly from the novelty of the idea.
Rather, it’s how Gowdy uses the device to explore a character’s life and her ability and willingness to change, grow and get past old wounds (while bracing herself for new ones to come).
As always, Gowdy tells a great story in a commanding voice. In addition, this time around she introduces a new device that allows her to explore rich and rewarding territory. Brett Josef Grubisic is the author of three novels, including From Up River and For One Night Only.
Gowdy might be using a science fiction premise, but the enjoyable bounty of her novel does not result strictly from the novelty of the idea