Kate Kennedy Reviews:

Marta Balcewicz, Big Shadow, Book*hug Press, 2023
Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette, Trans. Rhonda Mullins, To the Forest, Coach House Books, 2023

We meet Judy, the protagonist of Marta Balcewicz’s debut novel, Big Shadow, in the summer between high school and her first year at the local university, where her mother works. Judy’s time has been commandeered by her cousin Christopher and his friend Alex, who assign her to watch the clouds overhead at the country house they’re looking after in Alex’s mother’s absence. They are waiting on the arrival of something they call the Big Shadow. There is a sense at first that it all may well be ironic—there’s an appealing archness to the way the two speak to one another and to Judy—but by the end I am less sure, though there are allegorical glimmers of climate change or some less-defined apocalypse. Balcewicz’s scene-setting matches this archness and sense of wan foreboding with its bleached summer staleness: a ‘pastel-yellow diving board,’ a ‘compact Honda the colour of a human bone’—all fitting for a bored teenager adrift in a heat wave in a place where the action she expects of adulthood is decidedly lacking.

During a much-needed rainstorm, Maurice Blunt appears in Judy’s midst. A visiting writer with a summer session contract, Blunt is a New York City poet and member of a mid-seventies band. He name-drops Jim Jarmusch and Patti Smith. In Judy he sees a fellow misanthrope and invites her almost immediately to visit him in the city. In Maurice Judy spots an opportunity to sidestep her own life, the way ‘characters walk out of unwanted jobs in movies.’ Working quickly, she steals from a stack of cash Alex’s mother has left to pay the gardener, unofficially begins auditing Maurice’s class and borrows a copy of How What Happened Happened, a book about the New York punk scene that will serve as her guide to the people and places of Maurice’s world.

On her first trip to New York the following weekend, Judy discovers that Maurice is just as likely to go out all night as to forget to leave entirely, rattling around his tiny apartment, shuffling papers and playing albums. His interest in showing Judy the city quickly segues into figuring out a part for her in his current attempts to reignite his career. It is decided she will be his videographer, though what the end product will be is not entirely clear to Judy. In one wonderful scene, the two visit an artist to borrow a video recorder, entering a strikingly minimalist apartment and encountering the artist at work, all too aware of the image he wants to project. Judy imagines how it will sound in the telling, once she has established herself as an artist: ‘“This is how I started out,” I would say one day.’

The book hits a small lull between the second and third visits to New York, once everything is in motion. In fairness, Judy herself experiences this lull, her dramatic departure from the quotidian revealing itself to be more of the same. In the face of this disappointment, she begins to separate out what she wants from what she has been offered: ‘I wanted this freedom, the apartment, and its mess for myself so badly.’

The book transpires in the late ninetiess, when the internet had answers but was not considered the answer and when possession of a cell phone was not assumed. There are long messages left on answering machines in kitchens, notes left in pockets and VHS tapes sent through the mail. I admit I got a little nostalgic. B​alcewicz accurately depicts this era while simultaneously capturing the out-of-time quality that characterizes certain periods of our lives. She uses her narrative power well, bouncing ahead to the aftermath before things have entirely got going: ‘For a long time, maybe until the very end, I wasn’t clear on where I stood with Maurice Blunt.’ This formal sturdiness is something I enjoy: when a writer shows you all the story’s exits, confident you’ll want to remain inside.

Big Shadow is not cut and dried in terms of its lessons or even as a coming-of-age narrative. In some ways Judy has all the wisdom she needs to navigate this adventure before she meets Maurice, who after all is fairly harmless and mostly just wants someone to skulk around with him, to validate his past. Judy is not wise beyond her years, per se, but Balcewicz, unlike authors like Sally Rooney and Hermione Hoby, chooses not to make her protagonist utterly lost. Judy skims adulthood on this first pass, making mental notes of what she wants of it for herself and what she doesn’t. I think that skimming will be familiar to as many readers as outright lostness is.

Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette’s third novel, To the Forest, begins, ‘When they strung the yellow crime-scene tape around the park, I left the city, with my family under my coat.’ This is a pandemic novel, but one that keeps its anxieties running just below the surface, articulated in a lyrical register. The narrator, her partner and their children, together with another family, leave Montreal (presumably) for a rural property the narrator has inherited, just down the road from her parents’ house, and their experience of the lockdown is coloured by the lively novelty of spending a winter and then spring outside the city. 

T​he narrator explains her family’s history with the house: how her widowed grandfather flew to Canada from Paris to woo the house’s owner, Mary, and how she subsequently spent much of her childhood along this road. More recently, she recalls not making it to the hospital and giving birth to one of her children on the highway, right outside a Couche-Tard, the convenience store clerk running back inside for shoelaces to tie off the umbilical cord.

In between these installments of the past, the novel captures the early days of the pandemic, when the world seemingly shut down, and the trials particular to parents of young children—on top of sheer coping, the responsibility of shaping other people’s experience of this time. The narrator gardens for stress relief, to, as she says, ‘sweat out the screaming I can’t do here.’ But in a gentler moment she acknowledges with some satisfaction that she is, daily, ‘a small manufacturer of other people’s happiness.’

As winter becomes spring, the cold weather and the mastery of grocery lineups, mask mandates and the fiasco of online schooling give way to collecting fiddleheads, going for river swims, searching the kids for wood ticks and raising chickens.

Alongside the richness of daily life are quiet tragedies: a man with a terminal diagnosis must ask his brother for help dying; the neighbourhood’s snowplow driver is killed in an accident with his wood splitter. Affairs quietly take place, too. The narrator recalls a lover she calls the Japanese painter, who may belong to her present—or her past. If there is an occasionally frustrating degree of ambiguity, however, it’s more than made up for in elegant turns of phrase. For example, after a rendezvous at the house of a lover she calls only the woodsman, the narrator returns home to her family, ‘late by great fistfuls of flesh.’ (I congratulate translator Rhonda Mullins for her skill in bringing through the satisfying poetry of a line like this one.)

Having determined, more or less, to double down on her marriage, she finds new delights on the homefront, noting, ‘I’m the one who decides on the grandeur of the ordinary.’ It is a line ostensibly about parenting but perhaps equally about what makes it into this novel we are reading.

Balcewicz and Barbeau-Lavalette are two very distinctive stylists, and while they depict women at different stages in life, in reading the two back to back I found it hard not to compare the knowns of the pandemic and marital dissatisfaction with the unknowns of the Big Shadow and adult life, the threats and the possibilities each extend. Both novels excel in defining the feel of phases, how they are thought of later, and how we begin to tell of them at the time.

—Kate Kennedy