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Harmony

by Joanna Goodman

Anybody who has sat beside a child in pain, unable to do anything to help, will find the opening of Joanna Goodman’s novel Harmony compelling reading. Six-month-old Evan was born with club feet, we learn, and Goodman plunges us right away into a world of suffering and worry about what will happen to Anne and Elie’s precious little boy.

Anne and Elie should be interesting people in their own right, too. She makes tables that are really works of art – her studio is called Anne of Green Tables – and he is a Lebanese immigrant who is slightly older, very rich, good looking, and able to quote Jane Austen or W. H. Auden whenever the opportunity arises. In the background is tragedy: Elie’s brother was kidnapped and probably killed during the Lebanese civil war, while Anne’s mother, when Anne was a child, abruptly fled with her daughter from some kind of idyllic community in B.C. called Harmony.

You’d think all of this would make a terrific, moving read. But somehow the whole is much less than the sum of its parts. Anne is chronically dissatisfied and unable to respond sexually to goodhearted Elie. She flirts compulsively with other men, though, and finds fault with Elie for everything from the lumps he leaves when he mixes the baby’s cereal to the way he plans a surprise celebratory supper.

In the end, everything works out – Evan’s feet are almost normal, the mystery of Anne’s mother’s flight is revealed, and Elie and Anne finally get it on. This all sounds like a classic feel-good ending, but I shut the book annoyed at Anne’s shallowness and tired of being jerked around by Goodman’s plot twists. There is great material here, but Goodman has written a very ordinary book.

 

Reviewer: Mary Soderstrom

Publisher: Penguin Canada

DETAILS

Price: $18

Page Count: 352 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 978-0-143-05608-9

Released: June

Issue Date: 2007-7

Categories: Fiction: Novels

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