Inventive storytelling a little short on insight
Death. Grief. Regret. Anger. Coping. Family. Contemporary womanhood. Life mistakes (huge and consequential through to trivial). Heady topics, they’re foundational to a slim debut novel by Red Deer’s Hollie Adams.
If that list brings to mind Canadian fiction by Miriam Toews (All My Puny Sorrows) and Caroline Adderson (Ellen in Pieces), rest assured that, for better or worse, Adams opts for a distinctive approach in Things You’ve Inherited From Your Mother.
Two facets and tones compete. The first, and most serious, is the ongoing plight of Carrie Fowler, an Alberta woman whose days can’t be described as contented. Between pivotal events — getting pregnant in high school and, decades later, the death of her cantankerous mother from ovarian cancer — she’s stumbled from one problem to the next without really having figured out the whys. Or how to remedy her affinity for reckless choices and impulsive reactions.
Instead of delving into the nature and causes of Carrie’s dysfunctional coping mechanisms, or mapping the contours of her complicated relationships with immediate family, Adams opts to depict Carrie’s panicky and scattered mind state through yet another of the mourning woman’s halfbaked projects.
Having lost her job and drinking perhaps a bit too often, Carrie distracts herself by clowning for others. She will write a quippy “how-to self-help manual. For daughters dealing with their impossible dying mothers.”
Carrie’s how-to undertaking is humour-stuffed across seven chapters — from the first, “If It Wasn’t For The Dying, You Might Kill Your Mother,” to the last, “Achieving Closure, Or Alternatively Punching Anyone In The Throat Who Tells You That You Need Closure But When You Ask What Closure Means They React As If You’ve Just Asked Them To Explain The Concept Of Colour To A Blind Person.”
As a reading experience, Carrie’s scattershot book — not to mention Adams’ portrayal of Carrie — feels like a crazed and wildly unfocused amateur standup routine: “Mothers ... am I right, or what? And my muffin-top ... don’t even get me started. ”
Readers understand Carrie is working overtime at cracking wise to sidestep her emotional pain (guilt, regret, etc.) More and more examples do not add much. For an inventive and unusual means of telling a story, Adams can be commended. But giving us less of the knee-jerk shtick, and deeper insight into the pained creature behind the mask, would benefit reader and story alike.