TERMINALLY MISGUIDED NORMA PACKS A GALE-FORCE PUNCH
Norma
Sarah Mintz | Invisible Publishing $22.95 | 170pp
For a novel 30 pages shy of 200, Norma is surprisingly abundant. Reaching for metaphors, the novel is meaty, a thicket; Norma brings to mind osmium, the densest naturally occurring element. It's intense.
Part of that is a design choice: a series of brief sections, Victoria author Sarah Mintz's debut novel contains no chapters. Breathing space of a sort, the white emptiness between one chapter and the next ordinarily signals a break in the action; the nothingness is a momentary suspension. In Norma, it's Norma non-stop.
The novel's abundance isn't only an absence. It's a presence: Norma's outpouring.
As though she's spent too much time manic and alone yet brimming with assorted thoughts, the flow of the narration — the flood of it — never abates. Norma has so much to say, so many notions to express; and as though the hourglass sand is running low, she's eager to express as large a volume as she can. Her “swarming wordless urges and aches” demand an audience.
The first two sections set the tone. In the first Norma describes herself — as 67, as having short grey hair, as having a body that's “a murky site of mutant growth,” as feeling possessed by one running thought she's always in the middle of, as having once been occupied with hobbies, a job, a home, and a marriage, but now “feeling turned out by youth and betrayed by middle age.”
The second section begins with an excerpt of dialogue between Amelia Landover and Derek Demarco. As Norma explains, they're characters in Paradise Bluffs, “a short-lived 1980s American soap opera with an enduring, primarily Eastern European fan base.” Initially only needing to “keep busy,” Norma's now paid employment involves downloaded personal material from transcription services websites. The material also draws her in, so that, in her words, she loses “an hour if not a day if not a week” looking at a website that ranks the thousands of outfits worn by a character on Paradise Bluffs.
As Norma's thoughts unload and discharge, they reveal a woman perplexed by herself. She seeks purpose, fulfilment, and a direction but often winds up wandering local supermarket aisles or, as she says, peering at the “wealth of worlds” on the internet. Plus, she often recalls her enduring albeit unimpassioned marriage.
And the death of Hank, her husband: “And it's not that I'm happy he's dead, it's just that I don't know why I don't feel worse. Maybe I do. Maybe it's grief that causes me to sit in front of the computer day after day, transcribing off-air American soap operas.” Norma misses “the heat of him, the stink of him beside me like a sack of medical waste.”
While the novel samples a variety of the online material that absorbs Norma — from inmate phone calls to surveys — Mintz captures Norma's halting pace and missteps as she stumbles into the future while replaying uncomfortable scenes from her past.
As Norma proceeds, Mintz weaves in scenes of Norma's woeful self-evaluations: “Body like a dull slab,” Norma states, “aimless fool.” “I'm not beautiful. And I'm not a breeder. Hank and I never had children.”
Marred, rambling, incomplete, and terminally misguided, Norma captivates on the page.
Any fan of Canadian fiction will link Mintz's character with Hagar Shipley, the raging force of Margaret Laurence's The Stone Angel. There's a family resemblance, certainly. With their anguish and sharp humour, the women of Malarky and Bina, Anakana Schofield's novels, spring to mind as well.
This “lumbering ruin in a sea of waxed plastic” who is “not bitter, not bitter. No. Just old” serves credibly as a declaration from Sarah Mintz, the author of a starturn by a prickly and deluded gale-force character whose every sentiment enlivens the page.