‘The Juliet Stories’ by Carrie Snyder

Reviewed by Jessica Michalofsky

In a typical coming-of-age novel, a sensitive young protagonist sets out into the world, typically after some loss, in order to find his or her place in society. Like Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Carrie Snyder’s novel, The Juliet Stories, balks that trend.  Not because the novel is fragmented by time—think about the gorgeous ten-year disruption in the middle of Woolf’s novel. Or because Snyder’s stories are linked; in fact, the stories form a strong narrative arc, beginning when the Friesens, Gloria and Bram, and children, Juliet, Keith and baby Emmanuel, arrive in 1984 post-revolutionary Nicaragua to protest the American involvement in the war, and ending some twenty years later with Juliet raising children of her own—but because by the end of the novel, as in To the Lighthouse, it is the very rejection of societal roles that forms the protagonist’s identity.

Similar to Woolf in style, Snyder’s stream-of-consciousness prose gives the reader a view of Nicaragua from the inside. To ten year-old Juliet, Nicaragua is a place of curious contradictions and terrifying freedoms. Out of view of their activist parents, Juliet and sibling Keith have ample opportunity for exploration and unstructured play. They tour the broken city, dodging ox carts and little Russian cars; they eat shark roasted over an open fire in a sea cave with some Nicaraguan boys. They see Daniel Ortega speaking to a crowd, and watch their parents become “lost in song and drink, cause and dream.”

But what most frightens and exhilarates Juliet are not the obvious fears of war, which always seems fairly distant, but rather what changes she can sense in herself and those around her since coming to Nicaragua. When Gloria slips out of her role as mother within the larger context of the optimism of revolution, Juliet, who “loves and craves definitions,” doesn’t know how to view her:

At home in Indiana, Gloria was just her mother, warming homemade soup on the stove…. But here, in this strange city, Juliet glimpses the stranger Gloria could become, giddy in her jubilation, separate and apart from her children; hardly a mother at all.

The novel is bisected by a major tragedy—Keith’s becoming seriously ill—necessitating the Friesens’ return to North America, and the latter stories take place in dull-by-comparison southern Ontario where the family divides under the twin weights of grief and accumulated acrimony. The stories in Part 2, “Disruption,” move about wildly in time—from Juliet’s raucous teen years to her experience as a mother. But, essentially, the fulcrum of the novel rests on a turning point—leaving Nicaragua—and in Juliet’s mind, the trajectory and tenor of her life afterward is forever changed.

Here’s where the similarities between Woolf’s novel and Snyder’s really struck me.  Whereas in Woolf’s, the central action and resolution of the conflict is based on perpetually voyaging toward the lighthouse but never really getting there, in Snyder’s, the central conflict is based in the disruption and grief associated with perpetually leaving the unsettling independence that Nicaragua represents.

While the Nicaragua stories in Part 1, “Amulets,” are more exciting for their palpable lyricism, their wide-eyed appraisal of a country and a family united by conflict, the stories in Part 2 make up for this in their introspection, their mature portrayals of a family divided by grief.  Juliet too, as she develops, becomes a more complex character.  No longer writing letters to Ronald Reagan or plays about communism (Keith plays Reagan with gusto, “I declare a war on sharing”), the adolescent Juliet comes to understand, via her emerging sexuality, “that she knows things no one else knows, or knows she knows.”  Stuck in her grandmother’s southern Ontario apartment after the family returns to North America, Juliet reads books she finds on her mother’s bedside table— classic tales of strong female characters sidestepping societal roles—The Diviners, Surfacing, and Lives of Girls and Women, “books that confuse and mystify” and frighten her “in a way she cannot explain.”

But much like Lily in Woolf’s novel, Juliet comes to her rejection slowly, always returning to the source of her disruption—Nicaragua— in concentric circles, so that by the end of the novel, the grown Juliet resembles the unstable portraits of women who confused her earlier in the novel, women whose contradictory roles as sister, daughter, mother, lover, and writer she could not understand.

If you prefer your prose straightforward and your stories wrapped up neatly, you may find yourself pleasantly challenged (and enchanted) by Snyder’s impressionistic language and plot fragmented by time and geography. While not an arduous read, The Juliet Stories nonetheless asks that the reader make connections—among a child, what she experiences, and the adult she becomes. Snyder reminds us that the effects of some journeys take a long time to be fully felt.

Anansi | 304 pages |  $22.95 | paper | ISBN #978-1770890022