Quill and Quire

REVIEWS

« Back to
Book Reviews

The Romantic

by Barbara Gowdy

Barbara Gowdy’s new novel is not called The Pragmatist for a reason. Its heroine, Louise Kirk, loves in a fantastic, humongous way, and with the kind of searing heat usually seen only in acetylene welding torches. Louise’s father, with his talent for charades and wordplay, isn’t a worthy target, and love seems to slide right off the furnished sheen of Grace, her mother, a woman so icily beautiful and distant the only way Louise can provoke a reaction is by memorizing jokes from a book called A Thousand and One Side-Splitters. (“Beauty is in the eye of the *beer* holder” is one classic.)

In their 1960s Ontario suburb, Louise’s mother lives a life of polite disdain for all around her. She perches on a chair away from the other wives during their games of charades. Her hates are many: “women who sewed their own clothes, bottle blonds, slobs, the royal family. Babies.” Her life is dedicated to cleanliness to the point where she waves the vacuum nozzle in the air to suck up dust before it settles. And one day she disappears. “I have gone. I am not coming back,” reads the farewell note. “Louise knows how to work the washing machine.”

But Louise, who narrates the novel, repeatedly tells us that she doesn’t know how to use the washing machine. (Did her mother know her at all?) As a 10-year-old, she also doesn’t know where to place this burden of emotion. “My love is a fact,” she states plainly. “Like the law of gravity.” There’s no arguing with her.

Gowdy’s last novel, The White Bone, was populated by elephants. With The Romantic she has eased back into the world of the emotional, irrational biped. The return suits her. Louise, who we follow from age 10 to 26, is a character so vibrant she threatens to balloon up and take over the book entirely, but as she did in the memorable Mister Sandman, Gowdy gives her supporting cast a chance to nudge in.

The first and most unlikely recipient for Louise’s affection is Mrs. Richter, a German housewife who moves into the subdivision. Louise secretly trails her when she shops, subliminally suggesting what kind of apples Mrs. Richter should buy. “‘Nine times out of ten,’” says Louise, ”she does what I command. So then I think, ‘Turn around and see the girl in the pink shorts, love her, want to adopt her.’”

Love her, love her – it’s a theme that rattles through the novel. Soon her real love emerges in the form of the Richter’s adopted son. Object of affection is too tame a title for Abel, the shy kid who spends time in the local ravine studying vegetation. Over the course of the book Abel becomes the receptacle of the wholesale, uncut emotion Louise is exporting by the cubic tonne. The novel cuts between the duo’s childhood encounters, their later teen years when Louise almost bears his child, and a reunion in their twenties. When he plays piano her heart flutters. When he touches her thumb, she’s electric. “All the nerves in my body are flocked there.”

Abel himself is a romantic. a compendium of rose-tinted attributes. He has an outsider’s aura, an ability to befriend anyone, an effortless wardrobe of bellbottoms and t-shirts that carry the faint tinge of marijuana, a drinking problem that threatens to consume him, and a sense of surrender in his life that makes him impossible to let go of.

In her tender accumulation of detail, Gowdy captures what it is to love someone in a way so forceful it can’t possibly be returned. During the teenage portions of the book, Louise’s single-minded purpose and insistence on regular phone calls is a cringing reminder of what love was like at that age. In the later sections, with Abel’s drinking on the rise and his recurring blackouts, the tone becomes darker.

Like Mister Sandman, the writing is energetic, but The Romantic never strays too far from its tragic tone. With Abel moving in and out of her life, Louise eventually does meet the right man. But Troy, a draft dodger from North Carolina, is a music admirer rather than a musician – he’s the one she should be with instead of the one she really wants. All roads lead back to Abel. Though the momentum of the story slows down to a near somnambulant pace at the end, the considered conclusion doesn’t feel like a cheat. Even Louise’s final discovery about her mother is handled with understatement.

A character like Louise could easily receive a wildly different treatment at the hands of another author – a grand gesture of romance, a leap in front of a train. Gowdy takes us out of the story quietly, ushering Louise through various trials and stripping her of most (if not all) of her romanticism in the process. It’s only at the end The Romantic reveals itself – a rich and mournful study in the way love works, and sometimes, ultimately, doesn’t.

 

Reviewer: Craig Taylor

Publisher: HarperFlamingo Canada

DETAILS

Price: $38.95

Page Count: 376 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 0-00-200505-0

Issue Date: 2003-1

Categories: Fiction: Novels