Doubleday Canada, July 2020
In this brief, amusing and romantic novel about grief and letting go, Fay haunts her husband Alec after she dies in their Vancouver home.
Alec can't see Fay.
He looks straight through me. I wonder how many times I've used that expression without truly understanding how wretched it could feel.
Fay does a lot of memory surfing. In the following passage, she relives meeting Alec for the first time, in a pub in Montreal:
My eye is drawn to a man on the far side of the room sitting at a table by himself. He's older than me, I think, and he's handsome. There's something distinguished about him, but also a little rugged. His dark curly hair looks like it's trying to escape his head. His beard is dark, reddish, and full. He's reading an old, cloth-bound book. I can see the gold lettering on the cover. The Gist of Swedenborg.
Based on this description, plus a few other clues, I assume that these characters are White. The reference to Emanuel Swedenborg, a mystic who had visions of a spiritual world, dovetails neatly with the novel's premise.
Fay has many regrets, thinking that she has squandered her days.
How did I go through my life and make all these decisions without realizing they were decisions? Why did nothing ever feel final? Until now. All my choices have been made.
While I wouldn't describe myself as entirely unsentimental, romance tends to make me gag. There's a lot of yearning for physical intimacy in this book, and those parts didn't work for me. This description of being married didn't either:
I came to realize that I really did like being married. I liked the idea that we had chosen each other. That as improbable as it all might seem, all the days before we met had been leading up to that one day that was the start of our life together.
Since Fay's death, Alec has remarried and has a 13-year-old stepdaughter, Dee. ("The only good thing about being thirteen is that unlike being dead, it doesn't last.") At the start, Fay is totally self-absorbed, but she changes over the course of the story. Much of the credit has to do with her interactions with Dee, who is the first to see Fay as a ghost.
I am in Dee's room. I leave Frankenstein on her nightstand. I took it from Alec's study, so perhaps she will think it came from him. That doesn't really matter. What matters is that Mary Shelley will help her more through her dark days than any twee tween nonsense about the sexy undead.
Does the fact that Mary Shelley was nineteen when she wrote Frankenstein make her a young-adult author? I open the book and read: "Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world."
A torrent of light. I have broken the natural laws by my return. And there are, as always, consequences.
"Till death do us part" from the dead spouse's point of view gives this novel a unique twist. It's bound to provoke rumination on mortality, the loved one's we've lost, our fears of being forgotten, and about being our best selves.
Giller chances: LOW - It's wispy. The content is conducive to discussion, so this would be a good pick for a book club looking for something light.
This post is part of a series. I'm on the Shadow Giller jury this year, so I'm reading as many qualifying Canadian titles as possible in order to come up with my own longlist prediction before the official one that will be announced on September 8, 2020. To see my other reviews that are a part of this project, click on the Shadow Giller tag. Also, please visit our Shadowing the Best of CanLit website to see what the rest of the Shadow Giller jury are up to. Thanks for visiting my blog.
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