Y
By Marjorie Celona
Hamish Hamilton (imprint of Penguin sa国际传媒), 368 pp.; $30
Victoria authors have been showing off lately. Esi Edugyan's Half-Blood Blues, reviewed here last August, won the 2011 Scotiabank Giller prize. The long list for the 2012 Giller has just been announced, and Marjorie Celona's first novel Y is on it. Y has been drawing a lot of attention, and there is indeed much to like about it. Though her subject is often grim, Celona's writing is always accessible. Y will appeal both to adult readers and to young adults who can handle a more serious novel about a protagonist their own age. The book has a few first-novel kinks, but Celona has the dexterity to work them through.
Y is the story of Shannon, abandoned as an infant at the door of Victoria's downtown YMCA. It is also the story of her mother, Yula, and how she becomes desperate enough to leave her newborn. Yula's story careens toward Shannon's birth while Shannon describes growing up in a series of foster homes, struggling to understand her past.
Celona was born and raised on Vancouver Island. She received her MFA from the prestigious Iowa Writer's Workshop. Among a multitude of great names, Iowa alumni include John Cheever, Jane Smiley, Francine Prose and Kurt Vonnegut - and that's just in fiction. (Raymond Carver dropped out.) Celona lives in Cincinnati now, but Y is firmly grounded in the landscape of Victoria. With Celona's characters, we take the drive up and down Douglas Street many times, rhyming off familiar landmarks along the way.
I have to pause here and admit something. Books set in Victoria have an unfortunate effect on me. They make me want to factcheck. I can't explain it or excuse it. After all, facts are not the province of the novel. Consider the gardening wonk who told Virginia Woolf that she put the wrong flowers in To the Lighthouse. Woolf was justifiably irritated. Fiction takes place, not in the real world, but next door to it, in the house of what-if. Yet the questions bubble up in my mind, half-nostalgic, halfpunctilious. How old was I when they rebuilt that store? Does that sunrise account for daylight savings time?
I mention this because Y is an almost fanatically detailed book. Sometimes this detail is illuminating, rhythmic and lovely, as when Yula makes dinner: "Every time her hand moves from salt to chicken to lemon to thyme, she wipes it with a paper towel." Elsewhere, incidents and details accrue without quite adding up to a clear intention. Around page 285, I set down the book, smoothed out its pages and said to it, quietly but firmly, stop telling me about everybody's shoes.
As a narrative choice, this excess of detail makes some sense. Shannon knows she lacks key information, but she doesn't know what object, person or moment might yield the revelatory fact. Still, I sometimes felt that the book itself had not yet found the focus it needed.
These issues seem like the tics of Celona's exploration into the novel form rather than serious structural problems, for she also writes tight, expressive descriptions: "a deserted road the width of a double bed" says all kinds of things about the pain in Shannon's family. Shannon notices "western red cedars, their bases wider than automobiles, their trunks like red ropey cords of muscle." This kind of detail illuminates a character's preoccupations and binds a novel together.
Y began life as a highly praised short story, and it's a testament to the author's skill that it never feels like it's been stretched to fill a book. Two moments in the novel make me feel confident that there are more good things to expect from Celona. First, about twothirds of the way through Y, an earlier event is radically retold by another character. It's an uncanny moment that disrupts our trust in Shannon's feverish, confident - we now realize overconfident - narration. Then, in Y's final sequence, Celona resolves a nagging question about the novel's storytelling. Throughout, the "I" of the novel is split. There's Shannon's "I" recounting her own story, and then there's the "I" that seems able to enter into Yula's consciousness, without tonal clues about how this is working - is it magic realism? Fantasy? Celona solves this simply and movingly in the novel's denouement.
I liked her adroit work to undermine my reliance on Shannon's version of events, and would have enjoyed even more ambiguity. Y is, after all, about memory, that most unreliable narrator.
Victoria writer Julian Gunn is a graduate student in English literature.
