Given the certainties of death, misfortune, and betrayal, why do we persevere in trying to build lives of usefulness and contentment? Toronto’s Camilla Gibb looks for answers in her second novel, The Petty Details of So-and-so’s Life.
The book’s principal voice belongs to Emma Taylor, daughter and sister, lover and student (and, throughout, neurotic dreamer). Emma and her brother, Blue, endure traumatic childhoods that prepare them for lifelong anxiety. Their parents abandon them – father Andrew falls into madness and runs away; mother Elaine self-medicates with alcohol. As teenagers, the children toy with abandon themselves. Emma runs off to live with a boy she meets at the library. She reinvents herself within his bookish family, while Blue seeks escape out of school and into drugs while sticking tenaciously to home and family. They are (respectively) mind and body seeking soul.
These are shifting sands to found a novel upon, and the placid and introspective Emma doesn’t propel the plot with anything approaching persuasion. She functions better as embodiment of the novel’s themes – the tensions of nature versus nurture, free will versus fate, the frangibility of identity – as she witnesses her life unfolding over her own shoulder. As Emma follows the arc of the typical bildungsroman (she grows up, she leaves home, she sets out on her own), she cycles through various roles and selves: child co-conspirator, sexual rebel, bristling autodidact, neurotic student, survivor.
Gibb the author shares her creation’s detachment. Sifting through the lives of her characters, Gibb is always at a remove, swinging into and out of omniscience, pointing up the artificiality of the fiction. Interior monologue and authorial explication overwhelm dialogue, and the development of tension relies on an unlikely revision of Emma’s father, from delusional architect to abusive sexual monster.
This is a novel of ideas, not action, though Blue and his stripper girlfriend serve to ground Emma’s more far-flung neuroses. Passive Emma is ultimately most interesting in the light of the eccentrics around her. Headstrong, haunted Blue becomes a tattoo artist, planting seeds of ink into the skin of local toughs. As his vision blooms into art, he convinces Emma to let him mark her. She agrees uneasily: she worries that the tattoo will fix her cherished anonymity, her ability to transmute, into permanence.
Blue is hounded by the possibility of Andrew’s return to their lives (which arouses first compassion, then unearned horror) and his narrative arc, though somewhat overstated, does hold real tragedy. Amid all the bleakness, Emma’s lover Nina symbolizes the transformational potential of art. In the book’s most successful image, she sculpts alongside Emma, who is assembling the skeleton of an emu. The tentative interlocking of old bones, the testing of their tensile strength, the teasing out of a whole from the parts, is a visible metaphor for their unfolding romance.
Love is a refuge for both Emma and Blue, just as it was for Molly in Gibb’s powerful debut, Mouthing the Words. But Emma knows love is not enough to redeem the past: “You don’t choose your family, it’s true, but you can’t really choose to unchoose them either, no matter how much you might want to do so in your head.” Unlike Blue, she comes to recognize the limited effectiveness of youth’s grand gestures. Instead, she struggles to embrace the more grown-up, less romantic search for meaning in the everyday. Her interest in archeology (Gibb has a PhD in archeology) mirrors her new reliance on living in the moment. A prof chides her:

“Archeology is about the details.”
“You don’t dream of finding something bigger?”
“Well, of course you always have the hope that you’re going to be the one to make some huge discovery, but the big stuff is mostly intangible …. It’s in the details. The petty details, of yours, mine, whoever’s life, and how to make them all add up.”

What The Petty Details of So-and-so’s Life adds up to is Emma’s discovery that destruction is not final, that with death comes a new beginning. In the end she feels her solid shape where she used to feel like nothing more than liquid flowing in and out of the holes in other people’s lives. Emma accepts that every petty choice can be redemption, and that true horror comes only from accepting the hand we are dealt.