Reviewed by Julienne Isaacs(published April 24, 2013)
Winter-weary readers hungry for the sight of something green may find a kind of rest in Victoria-born Marjorie Celona’s debut novel, Y. Celona now lives in Cincinnati, and her novel has been published in the US and the UK in addition to Canada, where it’s shortlisted for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award. Set on Vancouver Island, the narrative travels via bus, car and bicycle through Victoria’s down-at-heel hippy neighbourhoods and suburbs littered with chain stores and malls, around the city’s misty waterfront and side streets scented with cigarettes and marijuana, and finally up the Island’s northward Malahat Highway into the deep green woods that once awed Emily Carr. Y is a B.C. novel without a doubt, but its central tale—the life of a child abandoned at birth on the steps of the Victoria YMCA and shunted between foster homes—carries the reader into the heart of a universal brand of loneliness.
This is not to say that Y is an issues novel, or worse, a fictionalized “misery memoir.” Celona avoids the pitfalls of those genres. She chooses, instead, to hone in on her characters’ particular strengths and weaknesses, their habits and compulsions. Rather than loading individual scenes with too much gravitas, she keeps the pace steady, shifting back and forth through time and space, never settling too long on sadness.
Y begins just hours into the life of Shannon, the novel’s narrator and protagonist, who describes her abandonment from a detached, bird’s-eye view. She is not alone for long on the steps of the Y, however: an early-morning regular, Vaughn, has witnessed everything, much as he wishes he hadn’t:
All his life, he’s the one who notices the handkerchief drop from an old woman’s purse and has to chase her halfway down the block, waving it like a flag. Every twitch of his eye shows him something he doesn’t want to see: a forgotten lunch bag; the daily soup spelled “dialy”; a patent leather shoe about to step in shit. Wait! Watch out, buster! All this sloppiness, unfinished business. Me. I’m so small he thinks “minute” when he squats and cocks his head.
Vaughn is the novel’s seer, a passive oracle who can feel the motions of fate but prefers not to meddle in events. When he finds the hours-old Shannon wrapped in a ragged grey sweater, he has a choice: to reveal or to mask the identity of the woman who has abandoned her. For his own reasons, he provides the police with a false description. And Shannon’s fate—to grow up without her mother, traveling from foster home to foster home, carrying the sweater with her in a shoebox—is sealed.
In alternating passages, Shannon paints her own portrait from babyhood into adolescence, and that of her mother, Yula, in the days prior to her birth. By the end of the novel, Shannon has found a kind of closure for her questions about her beginnings, but her story—and her mother’s—remain compelling. What forms an individual’s identity? Y asks. Does it come from our families, from our history, or from our personal choices? It’s to Celona’s credit that each of these possibilities is carefully considered in this novel, and none of them entirely wins out.
While Y bears faint resemblance to Mary Lawson’s Crow Lake, with its explorations of troubled family history and the problematic tendency of memory to conceal as much as it reveals, this novel keeps its own counsel. Shannon is far from the mopey, introspective ‘type’ often to be found in family dramas—stocky, wild-haired and tough, she exudes creative, restless energy. Even when she has found refuge in a stable home under the care of the frugal Miranda, Shannon remains unpredictable, escaping at night to drift toward the waterfront, talk to homeless people smoking hash in parking lots, and bum change for bus fares. She struggles with institutionalized education, partly due to a lazy eye and partly due to a horror of literary analysis, but left alone, she compulsively sifts and sorts through the belongings of the people around her, searching for clues about her life and internalizing the secrets she uncovers.
Yula’s story, by contrast, feels at least for a while like a breather from Shannon’s troubled childhood. A teenager of surprising resourcefulness, Yula has settled with ex-con Harrison in the sleepy Malahat woods, where they await their new baby’s arrival. Gradually, it becomes clear that not all is well, that the past has bearings on the present. Ultimately, Yula is brought to her brutal choice on the steps of the Y.
Y’s best moments are its off moments, when it is not too obviously focused on revelations of the self. When Celona allows her characters’ habits and mannerisms to speak on their behalf and spends time fleshing out the ordinary settings of their lives, she achieves a steady pulse that gives the story emotional energy. In one beautiful scene, Shannon and Vaughn, who she has recruited to help find her mother, take a break to go boating on the ocean:
I take a deep breath and try to remember this moment, the heat on my face, the grit under my feet, the strength of the waves. I run my hands through the pebbles and sand, searching for sea glass. One thing leads to another. There are tide pools between the larger rocks, tiny rivers connecting them to the sea.
Between its two principle characters—Shannon and Yula—Y offers plenty of mystery, plenty that is unsaid and only guessed-at, and no ends are ever completely tied off. In places, however, Celona plays it safe, spelling things out when they could have had stronger effect buried under the surface. Vaughn is the only semi-mystical figure in the novel, and his power is best left smoldering, only partially revealed—but Celona doesn’t want to leave his role ambiguous. She gives it to us straight:
By now Vaughn is used to the way his life works: he is the seer. When the cars collide, he knows it two minutes before it happens… Sir, what did you see? Vaughn pauses before answering. He feels time slow, and he feels himself float up. From up here, he sees what he needs to: the sequence of events that will befall me if I am raised by my mother. It’s all too clear. He wasn’t meant to intervene. He has seen the look in my mother’s eyes; he has seen women like her before. Whatever my fate, he knows I am better off without her.
Celona’s tendency to explain the potent ambiguous is also apparent in the ending of the novel. The final scenes, rewarding on multiple visceral levels, are brought to a less satisfying conclusion with a sudden switch to future tense, as Shannon calmly delineates the course her family relationships will take in subsequent months. While this is arguably a means to link the story’s future to its past and present, it feels heavy-handed in a novel which is, in most other ways, beautifully balanced.
“We get what we’re given, nothing more, nothing less,” Shannon concludes. In Y, we are given a moving glimpse into a life worth observing.
Hamish Hamilton | 368 pages | $30.00 | cloth | ISBN # 978-0670066377
‘Y’ by Marjorie Celona
Book Reviews
Winter-weary readers hungry for the sight of something green may find a kind of rest in Victoria-born Marjorie Celona’s debut novel, Y. Celona now lives in Cincinnati, and her novel has been published in the US and the UK in addition to Canada, where it’s shortlisted for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award. Set on Vancouver Island, the narrative travels via bus, car and bicycle through Victoria’s down-at-heel hippy neighbourhoods and suburbs littered with chain stores and malls, around the city’s misty waterfront and side streets scented with cigarettes and marijuana, and finally up the Island’s northward Malahat Highway into the deep green woods that once awed Emily Carr. Y is a B.C. novel without a doubt, but its central tale—the life of a child abandoned at birth on the steps of the Victoria YMCA and shunted between foster homes—carries the reader into the heart of a universal brand of loneliness.
This is not to say that Y is an issues novel, or worse, a fictionalized “misery memoir.” Celona avoids the pitfalls of those genres. She chooses, instead, to hone in on her characters’ particular strengths and weaknesses, their habits and compulsions. Rather than loading individual scenes with too much gravitas, she keeps the pace steady, shifting back and forth through time and space, never settling too long on sadness.
Y begins just hours into the life of Shannon, the novel’s narrator and protagonist, who describes her abandonment from a detached, bird’s-eye view. She is not alone for long on the steps of the Y, however: an early-morning regular, Vaughn, has witnessed everything, much as he wishes he hadn’t:
All his life, he’s the one who notices the handkerchief drop from an old woman’s purse and has to chase her halfway down the block, waving it like a flag. Every twitch of his eye shows him something he doesn’t want to see: a forgotten lunch bag; the daily soup spelled “dialy”; a patent leather shoe about to step in shit. Wait! Watch out, buster! All this sloppiness, unfinished business. Me. I’m so small he thinks “minute” when he squats and cocks his head.
Vaughn is the novel’s seer, a passive oracle who can feel the motions of fate but prefers not to meddle in events. When he finds the hours-old Shannon wrapped in a ragged grey sweater, he has a choice: to reveal or to mask the identity of the woman who has abandoned her. For his own reasons, he provides the police with a false description. And Shannon’s fate—to grow up without her mother, traveling from foster home to foster home, carrying the sweater with her in a shoebox—is sealed.
In alternating passages, Shannon paints her own portrait from babyhood into adolescence, and that of her mother, Yula, in the days prior to her birth. By the end of the novel, Shannon has found a kind of closure for her questions about her beginnings, but her story—and her mother’s—remain compelling. What forms an individual’s identity? Y asks. Does it come from our families, from our history, or from our personal choices? It’s to Celona’s credit that each of these possibilities is carefully considered in this novel, and none of them entirely wins out.
While Y bears faint resemblance to Mary Lawson’s Crow Lake, with its explorations of troubled family history and the problematic tendency of memory to conceal as much as it reveals, this novel keeps its own counsel. Shannon is far from the mopey, introspective ‘type’ often to be found in family dramas—stocky, wild-haired and tough, she exudes creative, restless energy. Even when she has found refuge in a stable home under the care of the frugal Miranda, Shannon remains unpredictable, escaping at night to drift toward the waterfront, talk to homeless people smoking hash in parking lots, and bum change for bus fares. She struggles with institutionalized education, partly due to a lazy eye and partly due to a horror of literary analysis, but left alone, she compulsively sifts and sorts through the belongings of the people around her, searching for clues about her life and internalizing the secrets she uncovers.
Yula’s story, by contrast, feels at least for a while like a breather from Shannon’s troubled childhood. A teenager of surprising resourcefulness, Yula has settled with ex-con Harrison in the sleepy Malahat woods, where they await their new baby’s arrival. Gradually, it becomes clear that not all is well, that the past has bearings on the present. Ultimately, Yula is brought to her brutal choice on the steps of the Y.
Y’s best moments are its off moments, when it is not too obviously focused on revelations of the self. When Celona allows her characters’ habits and mannerisms to speak on their behalf and spends time fleshing out the ordinary settings of their lives, she achieves a steady pulse that gives the story emotional energy. In one beautiful scene, Shannon and Vaughn, who she has recruited to help find her mother, take a break to go boating on the ocean:
I take a deep breath and try to remember this moment, the heat on my face, the grit under my feet, the strength of the waves. I run my hands through the pebbles and sand, searching for sea glass. One thing leads to another. There are tide pools between the larger rocks, tiny rivers connecting them to the sea.
Between its two principle characters—Shannon and Yula—Y offers plenty of mystery, plenty that is unsaid and only guessed-at, and no ends are ever completely tied off. In places, however, Celona plays it safe, spelling things out when they could have had stronger effect buried under the surface. Vaughn is the only semi-mystical figure in the novel, and his power is best left smoldering, only partially revealed—but Celona doesn’t want to leave his role ambiguous. She gives it to us straight:
By now Vaughn is used to the way his life works: he is the seer. When the cars collide, he knows it two minutes before it happens… Sir, what did you see? Vaughn pauses before answering. He feels time slow, and he feels himself float up. From up here, he sees what he needs to: the sequence of events that will befall me if I am raised by my mother. It’s all too clear. He wasn’t meant to intervene. He has seen the look in my mother’s eyes; he has seen women like her before. Whatever my fate, he knows I am better off without her.
Celona’s tendency to explain the potent ambiguous is also apparent in the ending of the novel. The final scenes, rewarding on multiple visceral levels, are brought to a less satisfying conclusion with a sudden switch to future tense, as Shannon calmly delineates the course her family relationships will take in subsequent months. While this is arguably a means to link the story’s future to its past and present, it feels heavy-handed in a novel which is, in most other ways, beautifully balanced.
“We get what we’re given, nothing more, nothing less,” Shannon concludes. In Y, we are given a moving glimpse into a life worth observing.
Hamish Hamilton | 368 pages | $30.00 | cloth | ISBN # 978-0670066377