Challenging Addiction in Canadian Literature and Classrooms by Cara Fabre (review)

Challenging Addiction in Canadian Literature and Classrooms studies six Canadian novels from 1983 to 2007 that centre on experiences of addiction and self-starvation by women protagonists in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Using Marxist, feminist, and anti-colonialist theoretical perspectives, author Cara Fabre investigates how capitalism, patriarchy, and settler colonialism intersect to shape the protagonists' relationships "to substances, their bodies, and their social realities." She argues persuasively that in these narratives, addiction and self-harm are refigured as "social suffering" and as strategies of adaption to particular social and political forces rather than as "individualized pathology" or "physical and moral disease."

Fabre's analyses of the novels are challenging and thought-provoking, especially her detailed considerations of the roles social class and consumer capitalism play in these narratives of addiction and self-harm. The parameters of the study, however, are not well enough defined in the title or introductory chapter. Especially problematic are the abbreviated titular references to Canadian literature and addiction. Readers are led to believe that the book is a broad literary analysis, when it is instead a discussion only of novels, published fairly recently, that are entirely woman focused. (One text is by a male author, but all protagonists are women.) Fabre points very briefly to the masculinist emphasis of many addiction books, including trip narratives by the Beat generation, to justify her study's concentration on women. However, her analysis of the intersections of gender, class, and colonialism in Canadian addiction narratives could have been enriched by a foray into books about men as well as women: Tomson Highway's Kiss of the Fur Queen springs immediately to mind. A second problem is the lack of titular reference to anorexia. Fabre briefly explains that in the texts under study anorectic behaviours are constructed, as with addiction, as being "adaptive to familial, social, and institutional regimes." As she makes clear in later analysis, though, addiction and anorexia have differing origins and manifestations and, thus, must be rhetorically separated.

A more specific and informative title would have helped to make the study's parameters more clear, as would an introduction that rehearsed more definitively the contrasts between masculine and feminine narratives and between addiction and anorexia. The introductory theoretical discussions are complexly and often repetitively worded, with a proliferation of lists of qualities, questions, domains, principles, barriers, trends, critiques, and claims. The attention required to comprehend these inventories perhaps explains why a few grammatical and spelling errors slipped by the editors, such as "than" instead of "then" and Edgar "Allen" Poe instead of Edgar "Allan" Poe. However, the chapter after the introduction straightforwardly outlines and critiques common models of addiction and self-harm, including Alcoholics Anonymous and medical and cultural studies models, and ends with a discussion of this particular study's emphasis on intersectionality.

Intersectionality is productively evident in the compelling central chapters. In them, an adaptation of Judith Butler's theories helps to interpret addiction and anorexia as performative behaviours, while a Marxist analysis explains bodies as products and demonstrates the importance of social class and institutional power in addictive relationships. The first of these three chapters discusses how Christy Ann Conlin's Heave (2002) and Heather O'Neill's Lullabies for Little Criminals (2006) present alcohol and drug use as "emotionally adaptive behaviors" that respond to the young protagonists' poverty and sexual exploitation; addiction becomes their method of escape and survival. Fabre demonstrates that Heave critiques the classist bases of the Alcoholics Anonymous model of recovery and that both novels underscore the problems of the carceral model of treatment. The third of these chapters investigates intersections of race, colonialism, and addiction, exploring how In Search of April Raintree (1983) by Beatrice Culleton Mosionier and Monkey Beach (2000) by Eden Robinson "refigure addictive behaviours among Indigenous peoples as negotiations of estrangement within capitalist colonialism." The protagonists again are young, female, and poor, but they live in Indigenous communities transformed by colonialist economic practices, and while...