Fiction

Letters in Canada 1987 We note some changes in the contributors to various sections of 'Letters in Canada.' Mark Levene will be leaving us, and Dennis Duffy (English, Toronto) will join Michael Dixon in writing the annual section on Fiction. This will also be the final contribution by Pierre Hebert in the Romans section. Next year Janet Paterson (French, Toronto) will be succeeding him. Finally, we are happy to welcome Barbara McEwen (French, Brock), who is now writing the Theatre section. We thank those who are leaving for their contributions to the Quarterly, and we look forward to working with our new contributors. We also note Hugh MacCallum's departure as chairman of our Advisory Board (since 1983). The Quarterly has benefited immensely from his advice and assistance. It is a pleasure to welcome W. David Shaw (English, Toronto), who joins us, with this issue, as chairman of the Advisory Board. Fiction 1 / MARK LEVENE A consortium of muses doubling as literary agents, a cloud of knowing that crosses the nation's regions - something directs writers along similar paths at a given time. For writers of first novels, this is the year of first movers - of fathers, of mothers, of history as it moulds the dimensions of individual and family experience, and of the violence that may be the expression or the alternative to despair. In Marion Quednau's The Butterfly Chair (Random House, 202, $19.95), the winner of the 1987 W.H. Smith/Books in Canada Award for First Novels, all these elements find remarkable concentration and unity. A five-part novel pitched at an often unbearable level of guilt, agony, and devotion, The Butterfly Chair is unusually accomplished in its weaving of the personal and the historical, in its control of voice, and in its ability to shade the narrator's pinched, angry sensibility with tones of generosity and compassion. But it is the opening section, 'Family,' that is thoroughly masterly. Here, in terse, unemphatic language that seems a kind of coiled sanity, Else balances the UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 58, NUMBER I, FALL 1988 2 LETTERS IN CANADA 1987 sense of their having been 'a fortunate family' with her father's assaults against her mother, the blows sounding 'much the same as the flapping of wet sheets on the clothesline.' Despite her father's apparent success as an architect, 'our landscape was troubled with my father's imagined halls and towers ... and with his endless bitterness.' With appalling calm she recounts his release from hospital, the separation of her parents, and his deepening sense of betrayal. Finally, she recalls the murder-suicide on a country road in December. The details are painstaking, almosthallucinatory in their precision, and contain the promise that this is the story that must be relived, brought into the present, that her hypotheses about her parents' emotions will become both tribute and reconciliation. In Part II, 'The Bathtub,' the narrative returns to the present, where Else is not only uncomfortable, but also decidedly unpleasant. She chooses as a lover a man whose experience parallels her father's: Dean is an architect who sails, who wants her to follow him to anothercity, who is certain that his fantasies 'would suffice for both ofthem.' Sure only about the inexorability of the past, Else toys with destructive repetition. She , inflates her own anger, provokes Dean's, and underneath a feminist rhetoric, 'hones' her fragility 'like a hunter's weapon.' But the butterfly chair, the centre of the third narrative section, provides 'a positive reminder that she is part ofa struggle against the ending ofthings,' and in it she becomes more fully immersed in the struggle to retell and thereby understand the past. The bond with a horrifying death gradually becomes an intimacy with enigmatic life as Else accumulates details from h~r father's friends, psychiatrists, and former students. The brilliance of this sequence is the emerging information about her parents and the revision it entails in our perception of the novel's opening section. The first use ofthe phrase 'the German' makes us realize that at the beginning Else had not clarified where her parents had come from in Europe. By making the war...