Fiction 2

FICTION 21 . Tefs, Wayne, Geoffrey Ursel, and Aritha Van Herk, editors. Due West: Thirty Great Stories from Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba. Coteau/NeWest/ Turnstone. 385. $9.99 Temar, Yeshim. Tnte Romtlnce with a Sailor. Vehicule. 128. $13.95 Thomas,Rosie. Every Woman Knows a Secret. Little, Brown Canada. 378. $24.95 Trower, Peter. Dead Man's Ticket. Harbour. 237· $17.95 Turner Hospital, Janette. Oyster. Knopf Canada. 382. $29.95 Vanderhaeghe, Guy. The Englishman's Boy. McClelland and Stewart. 344. $27.50 Watmough, David. Hunting with Diana. Arsenal Pulp. 172 . $16,95 Wyatt, Rachel. The Day Marlene Dietrich Died. Oolichan. 208. $15.95 MANINA JONES The past year had been an auspicious one for first novels, an encouraging situation which may in part be due to the fact that several of the year's most remarkable and widely heralded first novels come from writers already seasoned by their work in other genres: Ann-Marie MacDonald (Fall on Your Knees) is already a celebrated dramatist, Anne Michaels (Fugitive Pieces) is well known for her poetry,WaysonChoy (The Jade Peony) and Gail Anderson-Dargatz (The Curefor Death by Lightning) are recognized for their short stories, Dionne Brand (In Another Place, Not Here) acclaimed for her poetry. Each of these first-time novelists is already being recognized on the national and international stage, and the names on this list by no means exhaust thepool of promising initiates to the novel this year. While the year has for the most part been short on flamboyant formal experimentation, its best work offers subtle explorations in genre, narrative structure, style, and voice, and opens up provocative thematic categories too. In a time when the economics of the publishing industry seem to be encouraging formal conservatism, some novelists are finding ways of writing themselves into public view at the same time as they tangle with the constrictions of that lamentable bind in intricate and engaging ways. A nwnber of novels turn to the problems, pleasures, and politics of the past for their subject matter, negotiating personal and public memory, domestic and civic relations across time, in a manner that ranges from conventional to extremely creative. While suchcategories always tend to collapse into one another (as we'll see), this discussion begins by considering those novels that tmravel intimate personal, often domestic or familial memories and relations, and then considers a number of novels whose narratives develop out of historical incidents and situations, a group which offers a disparate set of riffs on the historical novel. The review also considers a much smaller selection of works that distinguish themselves as cornie novels and, with a due sense of irony, concludes by looking at several books that share a concern with madness and disintegration. 22 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 One of the most dramatic debuts of the year is Ann-Marie MacDonald's Fall on Your Knees (Knopf Canada, 566, $29.95). This novel is epic in the historical range of its narrative, which traces the fortunes of the Pipers, an eminently dysfunctional Cape Breton family, over the first half of this century, beginning with the meeting and marriage of James Piper, a ScotsEnglish piano tuner and Materia Mahmoud, a daughter of prosperous Lebanese immigrants. It relates their story and the story of their offspring through the First World War, the Depression, Cape Breton coal strikes, as far as Harlem after the Second World War. But Fall on Your Knees is both composed of and about intimate relations: it unravels family and personal history with all the frissons, secrets, and shock-effects of soap opera, taken to quite astonishing levels of artistry and complexity. In this, MacDonald develops a unique form offiction that mightbe called 'Cape BretonGothic,' weaving in, as it does (among many other things), the belated disclosure of dark family secrets, literally haunting questions about miracles and spirituality, in addition to references to Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, progenitors in its own dark literary past. The narrative of Fall on Your Knees incorporates many threads that are tied in one way or another in the family secrets of the Pipers. The story is so tantalizingly tangled that it is difficult to offer much in the way of...