‘The Only Man in the World’ by Faith Johnston

Reviewed by Brett Josef Grubisic

Ordinary lives rendered ordinarily are a hard sell, just ask Hollywood. There, if the camera’s gazing at a pretty, carefully-maintained suburb, viewers have learned to expect, at minimum, a secret lurking in someone’s basement, and perhaps a closet sociopath too. Or else: a Stepford-y housewife who’s a contract killer/crystal meth cook/brothel keeper on the sly (and whose pained expressions reveal she’s suffering from terminal cancer). And where in the rating would soap operas sit without the constant parade of histrionic episodes—comas, kidnappings, murders, bitter divorces, workplace blackmail schemes, and passionate-then-disastrous infidelity? Even lowly sitcoms inform us that ordinary lives are simply not worth paying attention to unless wacky circumstances and eccentric, larger than life neighbours constantly barge into humdrum households and cue the laugh track.

While film and television sell visions of accelerated chronic action and feverish drama, the truth, thankfully, is that virtually nobody over the course of an entire lifetime has a boss who’s an assassin with two wives (twins separated at birth, no less) who reside in different cities. For the landslide majority, days are filled with routine: wake, commute, work, commute again, eat, converse, relax, sleep. This portrait is a mainstream middle class actuality, sure, but would viewers be interested in quotidian realism of this sort? Gauging by the popularity of police procedurals, medical dramas, and feuding vampires on TV, the answer is clearly no.

Literary fiction plays by its own set of rules, of course, and arguably attracts an audience with fewer expectations pertaining to entertainment value.

Still, answering the question about whether everyday routines interest or engage a reader with Faith Johnston’s debut novel under consideration, I’m of two minds. Yes, portraying a full but relatively normal life without stooping to facile or incredible plot twists, cliff hanger dramatics, and life-altering eurekas in order to pander to an audience reared on Hollywood’s amphetamine storytelling is commendable in theory. But no, not every character’s existence has enough substance to warrant being recounted in a biography-like form; and no, a novel composed of selected domestic moments from decades of life-as-usual is not innately gripping or necessarily enthralling. (It’s 8:31am Monday January 28, 2013 and I just finished a breakfast of oatmeal and experienced a quiet weekend of steady rain in Vancouver. Reality, yes. Do I want to read an entire story about that? Offhand, not really.)

Fourteen chapters—which read as discrete but linked stories—comprise Faith Johnston’s novelistic The Only Man in the World. Conveying the routine life of Heather York (peeking briefly at her late adolescence in the early 1960s and concluding with the aftermath of her second husband’s death in the first years of the new millennium), Johnson’s thematic material brings to mind a minor-key and far less experimental variation of Carol Shields (and, to a degree, Alice Munro when she began to publish in the late 1960s).

Agreeable, unassertive, polite, dutiful, and scarcely iconoclastic (or even a challenger to the status quo), Heather comes across as, well, nice. Reliable and generous, she’d be valuable as a friend or an employee.

Reading the pleasantly crafted episodes from her life, though, I wished for more. Though for a short novel there are abundant descriptions of scenery, there’s not much of the exceptional about Heather’s days that Johnson aims to explore. And if excavating ordinariness is the point, then delving into the nature of business-as-usual to reveal fresh insights would be beneficial.

Johnston’s ten-page vignettes focus primarily on relationships (Heather as mother; Heather as wife; Heather as caregiver for relatives), and Heather’s thoughts and interests rarely stray from that tissue of concerns. As a result, the occasionally solitary Heather can come across as colourless, spectral. Johnson defines Heather so consistently through her relationships that without them she appears to lose solidity and purpose.

A teacher in Ottawa, Heather travels to Cuba in “A Sailing Lesson,” in order to test the depth of her new romance with Les; and despite misgivings, she commits when Les speaks of love: “Like an atheist singing lustily at a funeral, she has become a believer, temporarily, at least. As if her life somehow depended on the steadiness of his love. As if she could not walk away.” In “The Life of Riley” Heather has relocated to Winnipeg and is looking for a job. Before an interview she panics and walks off to a mall, where she briefly considers dyeing her hair. She returns home to Les, now her second husband, and feels pleased that he’s a pillar in her life.

Les goes on a camping trip with a friend in “The Berry River.” While he’s away Heather reminisces about the time she accompanied him. When he later pulls into the driveway unharmed, her heart flutters in relief. She visits her daughter in Montreal in “Petites Filles” and returns home to happily discover that Les and her stepchildren have cleaned up (a sign, perhaps, of her finally fitting in). Set in the Rockies, “The Cinder Path” illuminates a scene from Heather’s early life, a lonely and isolated summer of cleaning rooms in the Banff Springs Hotel. The story’s momentum leads to the concluding sentences: “And that is how Heather met a solid, reliable man who was studying science and intended to become a veterinarian. She discovered that he was not inarticulate at all. He was simply a man who took his time. And now, more than twenty years later, he is taking his time with someone else.”

Other stories relating to Heather’s caring for elderly relatives in Saskatchewan (one of whom, the cantankerous alcoholic George, served as a father figure; her own died in World War II) stand out on their own and suggest a family drama of a different shape. Yet because the bulk of the episodes in The Only Man in the World are tied together with the domestic theme of romance, marriage, and motherhood, these intriguing bits remain peripheral.

Decade after decade, Heather gets by, changing little and seemingly asking for the bare minimum. And unlike the comparable protagonist of David Bergen’s The Age of Hope, she appears to pass through those years of tumultuous history with barely a glance at the outside world. It’s tempting to consider that Johnston has penned a kind of feminist ghost story, The Woman Who Wasn’t There, but the narration dedicates few words to deeply exploring Heather’s consciousness or the cultural implications of her identity. Ultimately, the novel can be respected for daring to choose an unfashionable subject (life as it’s usually led). Oddly, though, truly enjoying it would require a complex, intellectually-stimulating character who attracts greater sympathy, or a narrator capable of revealing daily routines and an ordinary life to readers in extraordinary ways.

Turnstone | 176 pages |  $19.00 | paper | ISBN # 978-0888014054