Lisa Moore’s 2005 novel, Alligator, sounded vaguely interesting, vaguely grotesque. Grief over a husband’s death, the widow dieting, the daughter watching beheadings on the internet. This novel won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Canada and the Caribbean, an award of places so strangely juxtaposed that it didn’t register with me.
So the Booker longlist came out and Moore’s second novel, February, was on it. After the nearly perfect experience of reading Cathy Marie Buchanan’s The Day the Falls Stood Still, I’m interested in Canadian writers. February was available at my library. And so I spent yesterday warily glued to this wildly uneven novel.
Moore has a lively, original voice, and I very much enjoyed the first two-thirds of this alternately lyrical and schmalzy novel. The narrative jumps back and forth in time, delineating the thoughts, feelings, and history of Helen O’Mara, whose life is defined by the death of her husband, Cal, on an oil rig on Valentine’s Day in 1982. The sinking of the Ocean Ranger traumatized Helen and her children. Desperately in love with Cal, she feels “outside” after his death and only goes through the motions of being a good mom. She imagines the accident over and over. She remembers Cal on her wedding night, at the beach, playing with the children. She directs her anger at the oil rig company, but never at Cal, never feeling that irrational fury at the dead for having deserted her.
Motherhood is the key of the book because, well, Helen already has three children and then discovers she’s pregnant with a fourth after Cal dies. She and Cal have been very fertile. Helen was pregnant when they decided to get married.
“She was knocked up, but that wasn’t why they got married. Or maybe it was. They didn’t choose to get married; they did it for their parents or they did it for the big party or they did it because deep in some not-often-used part of their brains, they believed in ritual. Lapsed Catholics, they believed sub-consciously that a wedding could weld them together. But they were already welded and Helen had missed her period and she’d told Cal and he’d held her.”
Later, she almost has her fourth baby in a taxi, accompanied by her terrified son, Johnny, who believes she is dying. Johnny feels responsible for the baby and has a problem with intimacy later in life. After he spends a week with a 35-year-old graduate student in Iceland, she calls him to tell him she’s pregnant and in the last months of her pregnancy. He asks, “Why didn’t you have an abortion?”
Not to be insensitive, but I wondered the same thing.
It turns out pregnancy is a kind of O’Mara thing. Helen’s daughter, Cathy, got pregnant as a teenager and planned to give the baby away for adoption. Helen prayed that her daughter would keep the baby, and Cathy does keep the baby. And Johnny always liked his niece, so…
And when Johnny calls his mother for help, Helen does not tell him to forget the messed-up, sniveling pregnant one-week stand he barely knows. No, the baby is her future grandchild.
Everybody in this family is just so nice. After 200 pages this thoughtful, sad novel turns into an absurd episode of Friends, the one where Rachel has the baby. Helen even has her own wedding gown business. That’s just sort of thrown in.
So this book is something about death and babies…and babies…and babies..!
Moore does have some insights into the feelings of older women. As the mother of four, Helen doesn’t date and has no prospect of getting married until her children are grown. When she finally tries online dating, she is rejected. But eventually, in the last 100 pages, Moore creates a Harlequin romance for the whole cast, and that’s where she gains or loses control over the book, depending on your point of view.
It turns out that Moore is also the co-editor of Great Expectations: Twenty-Four True Stories about Childbirth. Surprise!
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I LOVE this: “the nearly perfect reading experience”.
Cathy
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http://cathymariebuchanan.com/
http://www.facebook.com/cathymariebuchanan
Cathy, The Day the Falls Stood Still is my favorite new book of the year!