BOOK REVIEW

Corked

by Kathryn Borel, Jr.

Parents. Can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em – can’t sell ’em to roving bands of zombies. So what’s a girl to do? As Kathryn Borel, Jr., discovered, at some point in our adult lives we need to take our parents in hand. We need to heal old wounds, speak from the soul, establish a more honest relationship. But how can parent and child truly connect without digging up a painful mess of feelings? And what if they are radically different people? How do you deal with a father who isn’t really there – whose sole preoccupation in life is, of all things, wine? And what if Dad is saddled with a daughter who was born with absolutely no talent for appreciating wine, and – this is the heart of the matter – who can never find the right words for things? How can she get through to her father when she can’t even stick two adjectives together about a crappy Burgundy? 

An excellent means of achieving real intimacy is to herd your obstinate parent into a car; keep him fed, watered, and supplied with breathtaking views and jolly locals; tour the winemaking regions of France; hope for a rapprochement by the time the car rental is up; and then collapse gratefully back into one’s own life. In other words, a road trip. This memoir is about two people in motion, driving, imbibing, quarrelling, and singing their way around some impossibly scenic country.

Philippe Borel – Kathryn’s charming, confounding, 66-year-old pop – is a distinguished French-born hotelier with almost absurdly European manners and attitudes (“Problems are for those who lack champagne,” for example, or, “I love making people feel like sheet about themselves”), a bum knee, and a maddening on-off switch: one minute he’s cold and exacting, the next he’s singing a made-up song at the top of his lungs. Most importantly, Philippe is a wine monster. Wine is more than an obsession – for him, it provides and expresses life’s enchantments. And the tribute we pay to this singular gift of the vine is using the right words to describe it. For 30 years, as the family moved from Paris to Texas to Quebec, Philippe’s dining ritual has been to take notes on the wines he selects and drinks: the bon mot is key to the experience.

Philippe’s daughter has a busy, privileged life, but also has issues. As a student in Montreal, she ran over and killed an old man; she is preoccupied by mortality and gripped by constant fears. It has not escaped Kathryn’s attention that her father has expended more energy on bunches of grapes than on his own daughter.

The book starts with father and daughter in an expectant mood, dancing cheek to cheek in a Montreal hotel, savouring the prospect of their rustic, educational tour of Alsace, Burgundy, Côtes du Rhône, and Languedoc. She has qualms about their journey (Kathryn is the queen of qualms), but before long they are motoring out of Paris in a jaunty Citroën.      

The whole enterprise very nearly goes off the rails at their first wine tasting, in Alsace. The elder Borel is cranky and has a stomach bug. Kathryn has performance anxiety, dreading her father’s estimation of her wine-tasting skills. Down in the estate’s cellar, as the proprietor sets out the bottles, Kathryn’s father is in perfect harmony with his host (“It’s so clean, almost like licking a stone – fresh, full of minerals.” “Oui, oui!”). But our girl chokes – she can hardly speak, she feels she’s faking everything. Back at the hotel, it all ends in tears. 

In the winemaking process, highly sophisticated varietals are packed into a confined space and forced to break down, interact, and ferment until something new is born. This transformation parallels Kathryn’s experience with her father (to her credit, the author doesn’t belabour the analogy – that’s the reviewer’s job). At the beginning they’re confused and resistant, but after a while, Team Borel starts to make it work. Their trip proceeds as it began – bumpily – but by the last page, the journey has paid off. Kathryn makes a sort of scratchy peace with a parent who specializes in disruption. As for Dad, we realize that, like most of our parents, he’s earned the right to be uncooperative, mystifying, and – most maddening of all – uncommunicative. 

With two such vivid personalities, the author’s wonderfully propulsive prose style, plus barrels of fun wine facts, it’s hard to see how this heady chronicle could go wrong, and mostly it doesn’t. Its chief problem is that our heroine’s angst sometimes shades into ungratefulness – many readers will think, with some justification: what’s so bad about a free trip to planet ooh la la, even if Dad is a nut? The writer is so busy with her clamorous self-regard – her interior monologues are like a cross between Sylvia Plath and The Jerky Boys – that we want to tell her to slow down and enjoy herself. And her noisy disquiet is amplified by the fact that the trip itself is relatively uneventful. There are no surprises here – no flat tires, lost wallets, unexpected pregnancies, or crazed hitchhikers; none of the twists of fate that a really excellent travel memoir needs to mould its characters.

But our affection for these two adventurers carries us through. Toward the end of the trip, Philippe writes a heartbreakingly direct note to his daughter, explaining his admiration for her. With that letter, the right words are all out in the open; Borel succeeds in conveying the flavour – the full range of sensations and impressions – of our crazy attempts to relate to our crazy loved ones.

Reviewed by Adair Brouwer (from the December 2009 issue)

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