‘The Son of a Certain Woman’ by Wayne Johnston

Reviewed by Richard Cumyn from uncorrected proof

“Most of the people who knew my mother either slept with her or wished they had, including me….”

After reading this, the first part of the opening sentence of Wayne Johnston’s newest, strangest and most personal novel, and before looking at the publisher’s information that came with the book, I scribbled “shades of Owen Meany” in the margin.

Like the author of A Prayer for Owen Meany, and like Charles Dickens, John Irving’s literary father, Wayne Johnston is a practitioner of the More is More school of writing. A third again longer than it needed to be, The Son of a Certain Woman is repetitious, overly explanatory, statically staged and sophomorically profane. It is also a biting critique of the Catholic Church and the school system run by Christian Brothers in St. John’s, Newfoundland during the 1950s and 60s.

The narrator, Percy, is the physically challenged son of an absent Odysseus named Jim Joyce and a fiercely independent woman named—you guessed it—Penelope. Issue of such a loaded literary lineage, Percy is destined to become an incorrigible teller of tall tales, a “mythomaniac,” as he calls himself.

Born June 24, the feast day of St. John the Baptist, circa 1950, Percy suffers from a congenital condition called FSS, “False Someone Syndrome,” an easier name to remember than the doubly hyphenated one acknowledging the discoverers of the disease. It has left him with a port-wine stain covering his face and navel, a bulging lower lip, and oversized hands and feet that will continue to grow out of proportion to the rest of his body. Compensating for these grotesque physical limitations, Percy is highly intelligent, and despite his distorted appearance, he develops a normal adolescent boy’s libido. He acknowledges early that he will never have a normal love life, hence his Oedipal yearnings for Penelope. “She wasn’t just my best bet, she was my only bet” for sexual consummation and happiness, he tells us. “I was in love with her, body and soul.”

Also in love with beautiful, “Black-Mick” Penelope, “the Sophia Loren of the Mount,” are her boarder, Jerome “Pops” MacDougal, and Jim Joyce’s sister, Medina. Pops teaches chemistry at Brother Rice High School across the street from the house and pronounces Penelope’s name so that it sounds like “pain elope.” He pays more in rent than he is required to, and as a perk enjoys limited access to his landlady’s bed. “Enjoy” is not the word Penelope would use, but she needs the income to supplement what she earns as a typist working from home. Medina, meanwhile, is a daily visitor who sneaks back into the house at night to be with Penelope in the biblical sense after Pops has fallen asleep. Percy’s father, Jim fled the scene two months into the pregnancy when he learned that his fiancée and his sister were lovers, “lizzies” in the reductionist vernacular of the time.

An irreverent comedy, drawing-room farce were it not for the menace dominating the second half of the book, the action is centered on Penelope’s house at 44 Bonaventure, and includes the basilica, the nearby parochial schools, and the surrounding Mount neighbourhood on the slope above the St. John’s harbour. Peering out from the middle of the love-triangle is Percy’s perspicacious eye. At the peak sits Penelope, an autodidact who quotes Yeats and from her back step delivers a scathingly ironic “Second Sermon on the Mount” against church and community hypocrisy. Forming a base of mutual antipathy are Medina, an illiterate hospital worker who doesn’t understand her lover’s bookish references, and Pops, a good-hearted but weak secularist who owes his livelihood to the Church and who has become the school vice-principal by dint of seniority rather than merit.

Inevitably Percy learns the truth about his mother and his aunt. Risking persecution for their love and even incarceration in jail or the “Mental,” as they call the insane asylum, they take him into their confidence and swear him to secrecy. Under normal circumstances, given the era and the place, such intimacy would probably not have existed. But Percy has no one else to confide in and this is not the Cleaver household. He tells his mother everything, every slight, every physical attack he has suffered, and every taboo desire he feels. A most liberated woman for her times, Penelope addresses Percy’s sexual frustration in ways that could be read as charitable or immoral. Either way, Johnston convincingly portrays the madness of a teenage boy’s priapic preoccupation, whether its treatment is deemed incest or health-promoting therapy.

At one point Penelope says, “Pardon my hyperbole,” which could be the subtitle or defining phrase of this novel. Her son becomes a teller of outrageous, often contradictory stories about his condition, his family and the larger world. Why does he feel compelled to make things up?

I wanted to be known as the Joyce Boy for reasons other than my face, my hands and my feet. I wanted to pre-empt teasing, head off my tormentors with the promise of information that was of the sort that grown-ups kept from children….I wanted to have some power over others to make up for the power that even the least of them had over me.

It takes far too long, the first half of the book, to establish its defining conflict, which pits the power of the Church, in the person of the school disciplinarian, Brother McHugh, against the freedom of the residents of 44 Bonaventure to live as they wish. McHugh is an ice-hearted villain. Pink, fleshy, prematurely white-haired, serenely hateful of the children he is supposed to be nurturing, this imperturbable, chewing-gum mincing, reptilian combination of Gradgrind and Squeers personifies the intrusive scrutiny and sickening abuse of their flock by the Christian Brothers. We think of surveillance as being a present-day problem, but The Son of a Certain Woman reminds us that the Church has been spying on and unduly manipulating its adherents a very long time.

Percy uses the first-person voice to relate the graphic, inventive cruelty he suffers. Because it lacks emotional range, however, his ironic humour comes across as perverse and self-mocking. Assuming that this is an adult looking back on a difficult childhood, we naturally want to know if or how this ordeal has formed his character. Wayne Johnston doesn’t give us that longer perspective. Does Percy grow up to be a novelist, pornographer, comedian, priest? Each seems equally possible.

Despite his intense self-regard, Percy proves he is capable of looking beyond himself, as when he recognizes “[t]he evening-out of all things, all people, as time moved once more into night as inexorably for others as for me….” Empathetically shifting the narrative point of view but maintaining his egocentrism, he gives us his grade-one classmates’ perception upon meeting him: “…this is the sort of thing you see when you venture out into the world without your mother for the first time, a boy whose face is purple and whose lower lip is three times fatter than the upper one….” Only when contemplating nature does Percy feel normal and unexceptional: “At such moments I felt I had as much right to be there—and to be as I was—as anything else.” Wayne Johnston’s descriptions of the city he clearly adores, the harbour and surrounding seascape, are gorgeous and far too few.

In its scramble for meaning, the book presents a hodgepodge of mythic and biblical allusion. Penelope fends off a multiplicity of suitors of varying potency. She refers to her house as a Trojan Horse and its residents “the Greeks, living secretly among the enemy….” Percy is Telemachus the domestically attentive son awaiting his heroic father’s return. He is clever Hephaestus, the hideous offspring of Zeus and Hera. He is the Ugly Duckling waiting to turn into the swan that will defile Leda and engender Helen of Troy. He is Yeats’s “rough beast” poised to take the place of Christ in “The Second Coming.” He is the fairy-tale Beast to his mother’s Beauty, though he knows her kiss cannot transform him. He is St. Percy of the Buses, an outrageous rebel Christ threatening the status quo by inspiring insurrection among the bay crowd, school children brought in from outside the city. Warns malevolent McHugh, “The frenzy…is something I have seen before, children running en masse to their destruction like the swine of the Gadarene. It is something that must be put down or disorder will prevail.”

Catechist to Percy’s catechumen, McHugh becomes the Grand Inquisitor, breaching the boundaries of doctrinaire instruction to interrogate the boy about his family’s intimacies. Ultimately Percy is David to McHugh’s Goliath, although his projectile weapon will be messier and a lot more titillating than a slung rock to the forehead.

What does it all come to? Aside from being a rallying cry against corrupt authority, a warning to the despot to let it be and to leave people alone, Percy’s story eventually runs out of myth-based explanations, for his suffering and for existence in general. Matching wits with McHugh across the Byzantine catechism’s chessboard, Percy posits what might be the best answer of all:

The world might be like a game God gave Himself for Christmas that he doesn’t play with anymore. We might be stored away in the basement of the universe with a bunch of other games He got bored with.

Knopf | 433 pages |  $32.00 | cloth | ISBN # 978-0345807892