Something spooky to believe in
From the outside, the Ross-Sjoblad family — at the centre of Edmonton writer Todd Babiak’s winning new novel “The Spirits Up” — seems to have everything together. They have an enviable existence, with a nice house in a good neighbourhood (all the better to ride out the first autumn of the COVID-19 pandemic). Benedict is an inventor, whose work on a mini-reactor might just change the world, while Karen has her own design business. They are the parents of two teenage daughters, the beautiful 15year-old Charlotte and the wise-beyond-her-13-years Poppy.
But appearances are deceiving. After a surprising act of violence on Halloween night, the family’s stresses and secrets begin to emerge. Benedict has been neglecting his family, and his company is about to go broke. Karen — yes, she knows the cultural connotations of her name — knows just how dire the family’s financial situation really is and is contemplating having an affair with her yoga instructor, “twenty-nineyear-old Jak without a C, who claimed he had never in his life used deodorant.” Charlotte, suffering from a chronic illness, withdraws more and more into herself. Her bedroom is outfitted as a laboratory, and she shares a diagnosis with her father: “Together, they had been inducted into a club that had not existed when he was fifteen: the spectrum.” Meanwhile, Poppy deals not only with the trials of early adolescence and social ostracization, but also an incipient eating disorder.
Oh, and to further complicate things, the bloody Halloween attack seems to have awakened something in the house, and each of the family members starts to see spectral figures, terrifying visages that seem to feed off their fears.
Babiak — who is currently living in Hobart, Australia, with his family, and whose novel “The Garneau Block” was longlisted for the 2006 Giller Prize — handles the varying characters, subject matters and genre approaches with an ease that belies the complexity of the novel.
With the reader focused on the rounded, fully developed characters, the machinations of the narrative structure, shifting between gentle satire, family drama and haunted house story feels effortless in Babiak’s hands. “The Spirits Up” is a smart, funny, occasionally scary novel that should satisfy most readers.
But scratch that surface, even slightly, and there is something more significant at work in “The Spirits Up.” As the weeks pass, and autumn begins the inexorable slide toward Christmas, the novel raises larger questions of meaning and belief, of what is truly important. There are repeated overtones of “A Christmas Carol,” “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” and “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” and a conclusion which, while not entirely credible on a rational level, rings true for the book, and for this family. It’s a perfect novel for the fall season, from the spooky season to the festive.