Watching You Without Me by Lynn Coady

Watching You Without Me by Lynn Coady
Anansi, October 2019

Suspenseful domestic drama.

Karen Petrie has lived away from Nova Scotia for 10 years, and comes home when her mother dies of cancer. Karen's older sister Kelli, who has developmental disabilities, has up until this point been cared for by their mother. In addition to settling her mother's estate, Karen's most important task is to sort out Kelli's future. Kelli has caregivers who come in to help with such things as bathing and exercise, and one of those helpers is Trevor. There is something off about Trevor.

        I sipped the beer he'd cracked open and handed me moments before. Every so often an alarmed yet muted part of my brain would sort of sit up, look around at what was going on, and demand an explanation. But then I'd just stare at Trevor's blond forearms with their tendons hypnotically flexing and contracting beneath the freckled skin and after a while that part of my brain would lie back down again. 

As you can see in the previous passage, Karen's narrative voice is wry and self-mocking. She's immersed in a fog of grief and guilt. Even so, she is intelligent and is able strategize during the times when the fog lifts. Occasional references to the Nova Scotia setting help to ground this story, even though it mostly takes place inside a house.

        I knew, also, that Trevor was not a man who could turn down a proffered cup of tea. That was the traditionalist in him, the slavish follower of Maritime social etiquette -- he could no more turn his nose up at tea than he could a rye or two with a buddy after work.

Contemporary Canadian society is multi-ethnic and I appreciate novels that recognize that fact, along with something we need to talk about more openly: the undercurrent of racism which exists across the country. 

        Yet my mother was nice in the tradition of many a Nova Scotian lady of her generation and upbringing -- it could be a stiff, dogmatic niceness of the schoolmarm stripe, a niceness of propriety and parochialism outlined with a filigree border of intolerance. I may as well come out and say that my mother could be irredeemably racist in that same nice-lady way, but even so, manners came first and she set great store in "keeping one's opinions to oneself." Once when I was visiting, the Sri Lankan family that had moved in down the street invited her to a party for a newborn baby ("I suppose you wouldn't call it a Christening," she mused to me). And my mother, by god, she defrosted a shepherd's pie, blotted her lipstick, and floated down the sidewalk on a cloud of benign tolerance. "They were so welcoming!" she enthused to me afterwards, dumping all the delicious-looking food they had sent her home with into the garbage.

There are similarities between Watching You Without Me and another contender from the Scotiabank Giller Crazy for CanLit list: Andrew David MacDonald's When We Were Vikings (review link here). Both are about someone with disabilities being cared for by a sibling after their mother dies of cancer. Both have a element of outside threat. Coady's work, however, has the craft of an experienced writer. The characterization is superb, and the novel feels more layered and real.

Giller chances: MEDIUM HIGH - Lynn Coady was awarded the Scotiabank Giller in 2013 for her collection of short stories, Hellgoing. Winning this year with Watching You Without Me is a longshot, but I can see it making the longlist.

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.