A Jest of God Book

Alex Colville, "Summer in Town"

When I picked up this book to start reading it, I giggled at how incredibly Canadian it is. Adorned with the above Colville painting, winner of the 1966 Governor General's Award, set in Manawaka, Manitoba, with an afterword by Margaret Atwood. It doesn't get too much more high-brow Canuck than this!

This is the second in the Manawaka series, following The Stone Angel. Like The Stone Angel, this book features a female protagonist, and her very interior struggles. Rachel Cameron is 34, a primary school teacher living with her hypochondriac, guilt-tripping mother. She is trapped in their apartment, fittingly situated over a funeral home.

The claustrophobia extends past their home, into the small community of Manawaka, where she fears the judgment of all the watching eyes, where she constantly berates herself for the most minute action, questioning herself and tying herself tighter and tighter into her secretive self-made prison of anxiety. She is possibly the loneliest character I've read in a long time.

She desperately wants to be seen as a good person, to be a good daughter. But she also wants love, sex, connection, even motherhood, though those seem to be impossibilities. When Nick Kazlik enters her life, though, she has hope for the future.

This book is actually a coming-of-age story, even though the person in question is in her mid-thirties and should have come-to-age a long time ago. She's depicted as coltish on long, tottering legs, she's sexually inexperienced, living much like an adolescent under the strong thumb of her mother. She starts to see that "people get the lives they want" - and if this is the case, how will she make that happen for herself? In desperation, she asks for God's help. The "answer" she gets is a joke on herself and anyone who cares about what other people think.

I love Margaret Laurence's writing. I love the strong voice she gives to women, to Canadians, and how modern this still reads, even though it was written over half a century ago.

Alex Colville, "To Prince Edward Island"