The Prairie Bridesmaid (review)

The Prairie Bridesmaid is the first novel by Winnipeg writer Daria Salamon. The novel follows the protagonist, Ukrainian Canadian Anna Lasko, as she tries to untangle herself from a long-term, dysfunctional relationship. While Anna tries to ditch the man she loves to hate, her girlfriends grapple with weddings and babies and whatever else life has to throw at them. As these thirtysomethings make sense of dating, motherhood, marriage, and relationships, they try to help Anna take charge of her life, and in the background is Anna's grandmother, her indomitable baba who is slowly going blind, but who refuses to leave her farm where she lives her life by her own rules. The only other character with the wisdom and spunk of baba is Buddy, the talking squirrel, who has colonized Anna's house and gives her advice just as good, if not better, than that which she receives from Lorna, her poorly dressed therapist. The novel reads like a series of vignettes in Anna's life, all building up towards two climactic events — her friend's wedding and her own ultimate breakup from Adam. Behind the scenes runs the parallel story of Anna's sister, Nat, who has run away from Canada to a polygamous marriage in Iran.

While this brief plot summary may lead one to believe that this novel is high in melodrama, Salamon's deft wit prevents the narrative from dripping with bathos. Even though the characters' lives read like a survey of traumas - pedophilia, abortion, single motherhood, adoption, therapy, anorexia and its twin, obesity, emotional abuse, a lesbian affair, and neonatal surgery - the writing skims the surface of these topics with a self-aware irony and comic timing that prevents the otherwise lurid from becoming so. In fact, Salamon takes these issues and turns them into the humourous detritus of everyday life. In this way, Anna's parents showing up at her house in the middle of the night to hunt for night crawlers in her moist garden is treated with the same light-hearted tone that suggests we are toying with the absurdism that Salamon uses to explain Adam's increasing emotional abuse and dysfunctional anxiety attacks. When Anna's friend Julia meets her birth mother and discovers her Métis heritage, her friends point out the potential tax benefits of her new status and comment that such a heritage explains her beautiful hair. We are not thrown into the kind of navel gazing that focuses on the integrity of the self or the existential crisis that could be mined through the discovery of an unknown ethnic and cultural heritage. Instead, the import and impact of the more dramatic and traumatic elements of the text are left to the reader's imagination. Salamon deals lightly with elements that would weigh heavily on another author.

Yet this writing style - its wit and brevity - that is one of the novel's greatest strengths, is also, unfortunately, one of its weaknesses. While Salamon allows us to skate over the surface of the dark and troubling waters beneath, keeping the story light, but never letting us fully forget the dangers that lurk beneath the surface, she also prevents her narrative from delivering a meaningful emotional climax. If the various vignettes all lead to Anna and Adam's breakup or the wedding for which Anna is the prairie bridesmaid of the book's title, then these events, when they happen in the novel, should resonate in some way. However, when Anna seems to have a total breakdown at the wedding, her crisis is treated with the same dry wit as the rest of the novel. The writing in this important narrative moment is crisp and the insights, poignant and wittily expressed, but we are prevented from empathizing with Anna or caring about the depths to which she is sinking. As a result, when she emerges from this proverbial dark night of the soul to board a plane to Iran to be with her sister, the triumph of that achievement is somewhat muted. [End...