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Magnified World

by Grace O’Connell

Toronto writer (and Q&Q reviewer) Grace O’Connell tackles serious subjects in her debut novel. Carol Pierce, who has been profoundly troubled for a long time, commits suicide by walking into the Don River with her pockets full of stones from her New Age gift shop. She leaves behind her husband, Chris, a university professor, and her 23-year-old daughter, Maggie. Not long after her mother’s death, Maggie begins to have blackouts that seem to herald an alternate reality intruding on her fragile psyche.

The novel opens with Maggie’s first blackout, and O’Connell unequivocally shows the depth of confusion it engenders: “It was two hours after I was supposed to have opened [the shop] and I had no memory of anything after going to bed the night before. The brown canvas shoes I had on were pinching my toes. I’d never seen the shoes before in my life and it seemed obvious that I was dreaming.”

The ways in which Maggie tries to regain control over her life, while knowing full well that the loss of her mother can never be overcome, form the backbone of a novel that moves seamlessly between the real world and Maggie’s alternate consciousness. The effect is so well done that the reader finds the multifaceted world of the novel “magnified” many times.

For example, Maggie gets sympathetic postcards from someone named Gil, a man she has never met. The people she thinks she can count on – her best friends Andrew and Wendy, for example – appear one way to her and another to the reader. Even Maggie’s psychiatrists have their own agendas. One of them knew Carol in her young, hippie-like days, and while Maggie longs to learn more about her mother, she feels enormously conflicted about discussing her with the doctor.

O’Connell has a deliriously good style, swooping through layers of consciousness and comprehension with elegance and even a bit of humour. The painful experience of going on with one’s life after a loved one commits suicide is examined by stripping bare multiple layers of perception to try to find stability in an unstable emotional world.

 

Reviewer: Candace Fertile

Publisher: Random House Canada

DETAILS

Price: $22.95

Page Count: 336 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 978-0-30736-037-3

Released: May

Issue Date: 2012-5

Categories: Fiction: Novels