Exploring quiet desperation
Novel peels back facades to reveal anguish and violence that lurk just below the surface, with devastating results
As We All Love the Beautiful Girls — the second novel from Ottawa writer Joanne Proulx — opens, the Slate family seems to have it all; Proulx spends the book’s first few pages offering glimpses into what seem nearly blessed lives. Mia and Michael are happily married, with a certain level of financial freedom: Michael is partner in a property management company and Mia, having left a job in banking, is now trying to build a career as a photographer. They might not be able to afford a spontaneous weekend in Whistler, but they own their own home and make do with skiing vacations closer to home in the company of their friends Helen and Peter — Michael’s partner — and their daughter Frankie. Their son, Finn, 17, is a good student, popular, who receives secret nocturnal visits from Jess, the beautiful girl next door, who years before was his babysitter.
Their idyllic lives are shattered, however, with the events of one night in late February. Early that evening, Mia and Michael are informed that not only has Peter been embezzling from the company, he has actually written Michael out of the partnership, stealing the firm out from under him. Later that night, intoxicated and fleeing a debauched house party, Finn passes out in the snow, and loses his right hand to the cold.
While this sounds like it might be the setup for a standard triumph-against-adversity narrative, a fall- and-rise story, Proulx has something considerably stronger, and subtler, in store. The shifting fortunes of the Slate family put each character through their own individual struggles, pushing them to the breaking point, and beyond.
Mia and Michael pull apart, each driven away from the marriage and each other. Mia experiences an attraction to their lawyer, a former colleague going through his own divorce, while Michael spends his evenings at a deserted baseball diamond with a local teenager, a gangstawannabe who catches Michael’s hits with Finn’s old glove.
Finn, meanwhile, struggles with his injury and alienates everyone who tries to help him, focusing his attention on Jess, who is involved in a long-term relationship with his best friend’s older brother. The affection quickly turns to obsession and a confusion that hovers on the edge of despair. With We All Love the Beautiful Girls, Proulx — whose first novel, Anthem of a
Reluctant Prophet is being adapted for film — moves firmly into John Cheever territory, exploring with a keen eye and incisive prose the suburbs of quiet desperation, peeling back facades to reveal the desperation and violence that lurk just below the surface. When that violence comes to a head, the results are as devastating as they are unexpected.
Building out of the family drama, the novel serves as a powerful examination of race and class, effective because it’s so personal. Proulx isn’t working with sweeping indictments or societal commentary, but weaving the commentary through unexamined privilege and world-view. It’s striking because it’s not a conversation we’re used to having.
To counter the undeniable privilege of the characters in We All Love the Beauti
ful Girls, Proulx roots the novel’s emotional and narrative concerns firmly in the characters themselves. While from an outsider’s point of view, for example, the fact that Mia might have to give up her photography career and return to work in the bank to help with the family’s finances might seem like a self-indulgent, borderline bourgeoisie issue (i.e., #firstworldproblems), our immersion in and understanding of her character reveals the true emotional and psychological costs of that dilemma.
Similarly, Jess, who describes herself as “the brown girl . . . The girl who lives in an apartment. The one with no father and a mother who’s never around,” opens the novel and its characters up to issues of race, class and money.
She’s one of the strongest characters in the novel, at once well-developed and enigmatic; it’s startling, at the ill-fated party, when Finn describes her, internally, as “Thai. No, Indonesian. Or maybe half. I’m not sure. Jess never talks about her dad.” It’s an especially telling line from someone who claims to be wildly in love with her.
Proulx excels with precisely that sort of subtlety and gradual revelation. As one reads We All Love the Beautiful Girls, impressions of the characters will shift and change, a verisimilitude that is the result of careful attention and unflinching honesty. Are they horrible people, at times? Of course they are — aren’t we all? But being horrible doesn’t make them bad; it makes them human, and all-too relatable. Robert Wiersema’s latest book is Seven Crow Stories.