WHAT ARE THE WAYS IN which human beings bear the unbearable -- death, abandonment, betrayal? This question underlies much of Alice Boissonneau's haunting second novel, A Sudden Brightness, a recollection by a woman about to leave a BC mental hospital in the mid-1950s.
Clare Klein is a woman struggling to regain a lost identity after years in an institution. To re- establish herself on the "outside," she must have a job. Once a nurse, she can now find work only as a ward-aide or housekeeper -
yet even these say "references required." A talented artist, she has lost conviction. And then, there's Sarah, her much loved teenage daughter who has been boarded out in Vancouver, with whom she yearns to reunite:
I don't know what to say to her, I am
her crazy mother....
Her fingers tight over the acrylic
table-edge as she asks when I'll be coming out?
I try to explain about
the waiting, that likely sounds stupid to her."
Waiting - with its attendant fears, frustrations, paralysis, and dread - is central to the world Boissonneau creates. Indeed, underlying Clare's departure from the institution is a flood of memories of previous departures - those during wartime Canada, in the grip of events beyond her control. Waiting for her husband's return from overseas. For the birth, in his absence, of their child. For the war to be over.
It is here, in her portrayal of Canada at war and the events closing in on Clare as she attempts to support herself and her young daughter that Boissonneau is brilliant. Eschewing plot, she juxtaposes the two parallel worlds - wartime Canada and the institution - her narrative moving seamlessly back and forth over time. Her prose is graceful, precise, as she reveals Clare at the juncture of past and present, the war years mirroring her current state of mind. Here's Clare, pregnant, alone, leaving Toronto, home, while her husband is at the front:
"Everything flashing, the train windows
like green ice. I felt a deadening in the
veins as if from some constricting drug....
Then the train keeping on in a steady
grind, covering space with a clack of
wheels turning and turning.
Moving over the prairie, mourned and droned,
past buildings ranged on a white plate-like
flatness. The empty open part making
me feel small, extinguished, except
for some tiny hard center."
Wisely, Boissonneau keeps you wondering till the end what finally precipitates Clare's breakdown and it's not -- for this reader, at least -- what you expect. Hers is a familiar world -- especially from the perspective of women alone, disenfranchised -- yet she has an ability to convey despair without melodrama that makes her work riveting.
Boissonneau is also the author of a memoir, There Will Be Gardens (Exile, 1992), and the novel Eileen McCullough (Simon & Pierre, 1976) which was a finalist for the Books in Canada First Novel Award, and the Toronto Books Award.
