‘The Art of Sufficient Conclusions’ by Sarah Dearing

Reviewed by Victor Enns  (originally posted November 7, 2013)

Last night two dreams. The first was a heavy rain, beating on the roof of our house and pouring out of the downspouts as peeling Letraset spelled should, over and over again, into a galvanized steel bucket. The second was at sea, me overboard, a life buoy thrown marked SS Sufficient Conclusions, while the novelist as mermaid danced backwards on her tail saying, “it’s only a book you ninny, a book will never save you! Just write the damn review.”

The Review

Regular review editors hunger for an adjective or two in the first sentence, and not just any adjective, but one that provides a solid understandable value judgment, saving the reader the time and trouble of reading the rest of the review.

Adjectives for Sarah Dearing’s third novel might include acerbic, a bit creepy, fast-paced,  funny (both funny ha ha and funny strange), contemporary, almost original, philosophical, psychological, pop culture, sure, but a little deeper, drawing the reader to consider the implications of having your own genome traced, nuanced: that is a light touch when needed but often enough a whack upside the head.

Suitability of the form to the content and a pledge

We are rushed into the novel quickly by Abbie Strafe, rattling on in a fast-paced, humorous monologue, a cross between say comedian Elvira Kurt and dramatist Caryl Churchill. This book would make a fine four-hander stage play, which would be more interesting than, say, a memoir, but yes the book, the words in it, and the story are so well suited to the form of the novel only an idiot would need the clue “A Novel” on the cover.  And if the publishers were aiming for that demographic, “A Mystery” would sell more copies.

Either the author or editor should have looked harder for an epigram;

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,”[1] from Joan Didion’s The White Album, continues the special pleading from the cover, insisting, contrary to my dream last night, that this story will save, like Scheherazade, at least the author’s life if not the reader’s.  I am tired of reading stories telling me how important stories are, especially the one in my hands. I pledge on my (mostly unread) copies of Writing and Difference and Of Grammatology, never to refer to this again.

Story/Plot/Narrative strategies: It’s a quest novel

Writers and readers often figure there are a limited number of stories that writers rehash for eternity. Sometimes I can come up with a dozen. Usually though the reductive question is, is this a stranger-comes-to town-story or a quest? Someone leaving town looking for something, like a father, for instance, who dies in the first chapter when Abbie is ten, as an adult, and wants to know him better through his leavings – genetic and material (usually written). Abbie is looking for her father, herself and the Truth. Her father’s boyhood is told as a story within a story,  as Abbie searches archival materials including newspapers, the films in which her father appeared as a child actor, and the diaries of the sculptor for whom he modeled.

Main Characters: 

Abigail Strafe, or Abbie, protagonist seeking to find herself in her father

Julian: Antagonist, Abigail’s lover and a genetic researcher who has his own genome traced and finds out he’s a prime candidate for early on-set Alzheimer’s

Martin: Julian’s friend in London, who often takes over Julian’s girlfriends when he’s done with them

Will: Abbie’s Dead Father

Secondary Characters:

Will’s Stage Mother; who rents Will to Francis Osborne, sculptor, who spends more time with the boy than is considered natural today,

Surprise and Refreshment of the form

Despite the insistence of reviewers of this novel who have read the back cover copy, it is not genre bending. I don’t give a fig if Abbie is a stand-in for Dearing or whether the story is “both real and fictional” (also on the back cover).

The story within a story, for example, goes back in Canadian literature as far as James De Mille’s A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder published in 1888, though of course Shakespeare also used the device quite successfully.  I am not kvetching here: Dearing does a fine job of using all the tools available to a writer in the 21^st century including absentee father, girrl meets boys, pastiche, lists, sex, humour, and science.  The writing about desire and sex is refreshingly direct and natural, as is the inclusion of ideas and science as part of everyday thinking and conversation.

Quotations

“I’d wager any astute child recognizes the misery of existence long before an encounter with cruelty.”

”I actually enjoy the feeling of intense yearning. I luxuriate in it and can barely endure it a second more…  I think if I could choose a state of existence, it would be to live perpetually in the moments before orgasm.”

Or after…. “Martin’s breathing becomes that of a sleeping man, as does the weight of his arm on the slope of my hip. I can sense his fingers lost in the air above my belly, like a caress interrupted, and shift my restless flesh to catch it. I don’t sleep all night, not wishing to miss a moment, waiting for his hand to recognize what lies within its reach.”

Most rewarding theoretical approaches

a) Psychoanalytic
b) Gender studies

Secondary reading

The Panopticon by Jenni Fagan; what I’m reading now, featuring a strong female character, though only 15 and in England. Anais Hendricks is also an orphan, looking for whatever traces her parents have left, hoping to forge an identity to survive “the experiment.”

Conclusion

I read The Art of Sufficient Conclusions easily, happily and quickly.  It was fun. On reflection I think I enjoyed its pace, its psychologically rendered characters, the battle of the sexes reflected in clever dialogue, and Dearing’s use of humour to give the story credibility and an authenticity that could so easily be lost in sentimentality (it is about an orphan), pretension, or earnestness. Recommended.