Taking joy in the Spectacular
‘Baroness von Sketch Show’ writer explores generational trauma in new novel.
With her new novel, “The Spectacular,” Toronto writer Zoe Whittall explores the complicated, often fractious lives of three Canadian women.
The novel orbits, initially, around Missy Alamo, the stage name of Melissa Wood, who we first encounter in Montreal in the late 1990s when she is 22. Missy is preparing to go on tour with her band and is seeking, with increasing desperation, a tubal ligation. Confident she will never want children, Missy wants to “experience every spectacular, vivid detail of life on the road, to play our best songs, to jump out into the crowds, to fly on top of their outstretched fingers, to kick one leg in the air during the endless final solos, to be grabbed and kissed by the life of it all, to have a great time.”
At about the same time, but separated by actions more than a decade in the past, Missy’s mother, Juniper, who was named Carola Neligan at birth, is dealing with the fallout from a sex scandal involving the guru at the remote yoga centre in New Hampshire where she has lived and worked for a decade (after leaving her husband, daughter and the commune they had built). In the nearby town to give a statement for the police investigation, Juniper visits a record store, to buy a copy of Missy’s band’s album (“I’d written down the name of Missy’s band, the Swearwolves, on the back of an envelope after I’d seen her on TV”). The band is on the cover of Spin magazine, riding high with a hit single, called “Not Looking for You Anymore,” which is, as the article in Spin states, “about her mother, who abandoned the family.”
Meanwhile, in a small town outside Montreal, Missy’s grandmother Ruth (Juniper’s former mother-in-law, who emigrated from Turkey in the 1950s) does her best to reunite the mother and daughter, while harbouring her own secrets, not only about the past, but about her very limited future and her plans for the end of her life.
Shifting between the characters, and moving easily through multiple time frames — from Turkey in the 1920s to San Francisco in the 2010s — Whittall vividly captures the breadth of a family’s experiences, but that breadth is a means to an end: she is able to not only explore generational trauma, but also dissect the impact of nurture (and the lack thereof) over time. There are no easy conclusions here: are Missy’s sexual adventurousness and substance use, for example, an outgrowth or a reaction to her early childhood in her parents’ commune, or are they a familial echo of the alcoholism that claimed her maternal grandparents? Does Missy genuinely believe, as she tells Spin magazine, “Some people are meant to be mothers, and some people are meant to be free,” and how is that observation reflected in the lives of her mother and grandmother? What, in fact, does freedom mean?
“The Spectacular” is a deeply thoughtful, deeply felt novel, ceaselessly questioning and genuinely empathetic to its characters’ actions. What should not be overlooked, however, is how fun it is, with moments (particularly in Missy’s storyline) of powerful joy and (mostly in Juniper’s sections) wicked, almost black humour (“He f--ks like a bass player,” for example, is one of the sharpest, funniest single sentences I’ve read in a long time. But that might just be me).
Whittall — whose last novel “The Best Kind of People” was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and who was awarded a Canadian Screen Award for her work on “The Baroness von Sketch Show” — brings all of her talents to bear on her new novel, and the result is a singularly impressive piece of fiction.