‘Low’ by Anna Quon

Reviewed by Elin Thordarson

Nova Scotia writer Anna Quon begins her second novel, Low, with two quotes on darkness: “Darkness within darkness. The gateway to all understanding,” from Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, followed by a Slovakian proverb, “In the darkness all cows are black.” The literary convention of beginning a piece of writing with an epigraph generally works to set the tone of the book, to foreshadow what is to come. It can remind us that writers are readers too. It is one great, big “consider this,” a request for a conscientious reading.

In Low, a novel that explores mental illness and recovery, family, and identity, the special coupling of the two epigraphs creates a glimpse of what we cannot enter, the inner world of someone else. Twenty-year-old Adriana Song, the protagonist, is a Canadian born of a marriage between a Chinese man and a Slovakian woman who then finds herself a patient at the Nova Scotia psychiatric hospital. We turn the page from darkness and Adriana is just beginning to open her eyes in a hospital bed after a suicide attempt, as her mother, dead now for eight years, is “floating down the [hospital] halls in a fluttering white shift.”

Adriana is being haunted by the memory of her mother. She was only eleven years old, “when her mother, Viera, wrathful as a hurricane, died and left the Song family in her wake.”  Typically Adriana’s visions of her mother are of an accusatory, vengeful woman. “Her mother appeared to her in self-pitying moments, to chastise her, and in times of guilt and misery.” This is the memory she has of her, the story Adriana tells herself about her mother. It is familiar, it is dependable, and it is “severe as a winter storm.”

The undergraduate psychology textbook that sits unread on Adriana’s desk at home lies open on an illustration of the human brain, all its parts labeled. The seahorse shaped hippocampus is the “seat of memory,” without which all life would lose meaning. And when Adriana and her best friend, Jazz, visit a clairvoyant one night, her own memory of her mother, and her world, get turned upside down. “You have a wraith following you,” the spiritualist tells her, “she says that… you have everything you need… that there’s nothing you need.” What follows is a landslide inside Adriana, “an opening of longing, so keen and unfamiliar and irresistible that it was almost unbearable.” If what the spiritualist tells Adriana is the truth then her life up to that point had been an empty parking lot. Used up, hollow, and it is all she has. Her hippocampus has dislodged itself, Adriana feels, somewhere sloshing around in her head. This is when Adriana swallows, one at a time, the tablets in a bottle of sleeping pills.

The majority of Quon’s novel is set in the Nova Scotia psychiatric hospital, the “N.S.” Here we encounter a core cast of characters in various stages of healing from what life has thrown them, both patients and hospital staff alike. But it is the Song family, that come in and out of the hospital setting to visit Adriana, that makes this novel not just another “girl, interrupted” tale.

In fact, it is the moments, here and there, when we follow Mr. Song’s point of view that are the most tender. Low becomes a story about the hard attachment of family. The tiny Song family constellation has become realigned, as “pinned against the darkness” as they are.  Adriana’s little sister, Beth, was only a few months old when their mother, Viera, died of cancer. She was sent to live with an Aunt Penny in Toronto, while Adriana and Mr. Song stayed behind in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. And now history is beginning to repeat itself with the death of this Aunt Penny. Beth, now only eleven years old herself, has returned to live with a father she barely knows and an older sister in a mental hospital. Family, Adriana realizes from inside the walls of the Nova Scotia psychiatric hospital, is the “gravitational bond that [keeps] a person from being swept off, alone, in the ineluctable expansion of the universe.”

Anna Quon draws on her poetry background for her writing of Low in creating clear sensations with her imagery. What better way than literature to get a sense of what it is like to be another person, after all? The poetic language Quon uses to describe Adriana’s despair is approachable, honest, non-manipulative, and overall effective: “as though she were wandering in a treeless slough”; “as though she were lined with cement”; “like a heap of broken shells”; and my own personal favourite, “she felt hollow, her heart thrumming in her chest like grasshoppers in an ice cream pail.”

Sometimes the points in Quon’s character development are taken up and discarded too quickly. Sometimes the ground Adriana’s coming of age covers is outside the scope of what the reader expects. But in the end Low is written by someone very qualified in the qualities of feeling. Anna Quon is someone who is asking her reader to try to feel his or her way through Adriana’s story, from the epigraphs to the very last page.

Invisible | 288 pages |  $19.95 | paper | ISBN # 978-1926743325