‘A Large Harmonium’ by Sue Sorensen

Reviewed by Elizabeth Bricknell

Sue Sorensen is funny and clever and no one knows it better than she. We know her; she is the one who says what everyone else is thinking— or at least she’s writing it down. “I wonder,” she writes, “how many hidden Jane Austen adaptations there are besides Clueless and Bridget Jones’ Diary.” Well, hers may not be a Jane Austen adaptation, but it begins as Bridget Jones as a forty-something literature professor named Janet Erlicksen. This novel will have you laughing heartily in the beginning, wishing you had continued on with that Masters in English by the middle, and rolling your eyes by the end as you would if some toffee-nosed git were expounding on the Saskatchewan by-election of 1944.

This is a largely plotless novel, focusing instead on the day-to-day musings and minor experiences of our heroine, the shining star of her department. The “Large Harmonium” of the title is an instrument acquired by Ms Erlicksen’s husband, a music professor, in his department, nothing more. This long-suffering sap’s only flaw is not picking up on her neurotic moods all the time. They indulge in a mutual patter of calling each other “parsnip,” “radish” and other root vegetables as terms of endearment and have a sex life Napoleon and Josephine would envy. They have a small son named Maximilian Frederick Erlicksen-Des Roches, whom Erlicksen presumes rattles the daycare workers with pleas for T.S. Eliot. She attends a Tupperware party where she buys the corncob holders, reminding me of a friend who attended one and pleaded guilty to only having a Coors Light in her fridge.  One wonders why she has no close friends of her own, not one female intimate outside her sympathetic colleagues, but that becomes apparent as the novel unfolds.

In chapter two, she does an amusing, if patronizing, critique of how mothers are portrayed in children’s books:

That mother in Good Dog, Carl who leaves the baby alone with the dog and heads out, all dolled up, with her good purse and those purple gloves…she’s very similar to the mother in The Cat in the Hat, who also leaves the children alone, also clicking in and out of the house in a natty outfit and high heels. She doesn’t go to the dentist. No, sir.

(Is she not a single mother going to work?)

…And then there are pathetic mothers. What about Charlie’s useless mother in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? Surely anyone could do better than the cabbage soup they are supposed to survive on every day.

(Perhaps not, when Italians survived on dandelions under Mussolini’s reign….)

Chapter five begins with:  “I am reading my way through the novels of Charlotte Brontë, mostly, I think, so I can feel superior to her.”

(The audible THUMP you may hear here is when I finally fell off my chair.)

Chapter seven: “I had hoped to teach some of George Orwell’s non-fiction, which I think is superior to his fiction, but there is not an entire Orwell book that I like.”

Then, perhaps realizing how immodest she’s sounding, she plays the self-deprecating card (“only forty-two and my knees creak” etc.) which, like reading about Hagar Shipley’s grey pubic hair in The Stone Angel, is unexpected and off-putting. She has already cast herself as an intellectual blowhard, so attempts to downplay her narcissism, which worked for her at the beginning of the novel, ring entirely false.  Her only neuroses have to do with her appearance, generally in contrast with women she feels are more attractive, and the one occasion when she has a little too much to drink. The average reader is simply not familiar with Chaucer, Norse gods or Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. To make matters worse, Professor, or I should say, Dr., Erlicksen, (PhD) peppers the novel with poetry she “accidentally” stumbles upon that she wrote in grad school:

From “Jacques Derrida Takes the Chicken Out for Supper“:

…When you go for walks, does a tree
exist? Or has the word created
the tree?
…If you came over for a chicken dinner tonight,
would we enjoy ourselves?
…What does it mean? This chicken, this paralysis, this love, this tree.

The book is as thinly veiled as Salome, as Sorensen is also an English professor, and she has followed the proper formula in writing what you know; but if your protagonist is a know-it-all, your audience is limited. If Sorensen wants an audience wider than self-involved patched-elbow intellectuals—and even they will take offense at her heroine’s often fractious statements (better than Brontë?)—she will have to take it down a notch. The talent is there; the Canadian modesty is sadly absent.

The recipe for the perfect comic novel — humour and confidence leavened with proletarian humility — is an art form. Sorensen is so close we can taste it. I look forward to her second novel.