Reviewed by Julienne Isaacs
Breakups and new beginnings are subjects eternally ripe for the writer’s picking: far from forbidden fruit, they are the bargain-bin apples of the literary produce aisle. But the fruit metaphors end here, because Rosemary Nixon’s Are You Ready to Be Lucky goes beyond pulp romantic fiction and its attendant clichés and stock characters, into adventurous, funny and surprisingly sober new territory.
In its opening pages, Lucky follows newly-divorced forty-something Roslyn as closely as a candid camera as she “steps lively” from a dreary divorce into a party and a new relationship with the suave, more-British-than-the-British Duncan Bloxham.
Subsequent chapters switch perspectives: in “The Costa Blanca News” we see Roslyn and Duncan through the eyes of their neighbor, the depressive Nell, a British transplant to sunny Spain. The chapter “The Sewers of Paris” offers up the voice of Stella, Roslyn’s best friend, as she analyzes her own relationship woes and buys a fish-tank as a consolation prize for losing her latest lover. “In Which Floyd’s Odometer Surpasses the Million Kilometre Mark and Friends and Acquaintances Reduce Their Clutter: A Milesian Tale” (whew) adopts various characters’ perspectives in short blips as it records their activities over the span of several weeks. Roslyn’s Czech contractor, Floyd, is given increasing attention over the course of the novel, and the final chapter, “On Tilt,” is narrated solely in his voice.
It sounds chaotic and eclectic, and it is: but Nixon pulls it off. This might be due to the fact that Lucky isn’t really a novel so to speak, but a collection of intimately related short stories. Add to this Nixon’s acute attention to language at the phrasal level, how she weaves words together like a beat poet. There is a lot going on in every single sentence of Lucky, and half the meat of the book is in the poetic density of the prose. To put it plainly: you may get so distracted by Nixon’s beautiful weave of syllables that you forget to care what they say—but the message is worth attending to.
Take, for instance, the opening paragraph of “The Costa Blanca News”:
White lizards scrabble. Spanish sun plunges from a blood-scraped sky. San Fulgencio’s burnt-fish air. Bird of paradise rusts on tiled porch steps, myrtle-seed, rosemary, olive and níspero. Waft of chips and mushy peas. The Mediterranean, reeking of corroded iron, whacks its shores like the snap of a dishrag. Two dogs fuck in a stony garden.
Before you are formally introduced to Nell, the narrator of this slender chapter, you sense some of the ingredients of her dissatisfaction in this 50-word paragraph: British norms stubbornly persisting in an exotic context. Sexual unfulfillment layered with the threat of violence. And above all, loneliness as keen as Nell’s own vision.
Nixon’s gift for packing lots of meaning into small spaces translates, often, into wonderfully funny moments in Lucky, as when Roslyn, five weeks into her new relationship with Bloxham, begins to realize he isn’t all starched shirts and expensive gifts:
Duncan’s big on extinguishing the lights. Economy, not romance. If Roslyn walks from the sofa into her study nights to grab a book, she’ll be feeling her way back a moment later into a room plunged in darkness. Her house, along with her dog, has taken on a furtive air.
Later, when Roslyn is observing her son’s bride at his wedding, Nixon demonstrates her gift for cutting descriptions that are all the more devastating for their economy: “Andrea. She stands at the path’s head, her silky red hair tumbling over bony shoulders jagging out of sockets of lace.”
Lucky isn’t Nixon’s first turn at the wheel: she’s appeared in many Canadian literary journals and published two collections of short fiction—Mostly Country and The Cock’s Egg, along with a novel, Kalila. The latter handles a dark subject: parents dealing with the birth of a terminally ill baby. In recent interviews, Nixon describes Kalila’s deep stems in her psyche, and how the novel took 15 years to write. Lucky, according to Nixon’s interviews, is something of a palate-cleanser in its sprightly forays into humour and raunch.
Despite her gift for the absurd, which is amply demonstrated in Lucky, Nixon knows how to write sadness. Roslyn, on page 10, is one part positive energy and one part ruthless ambition:
Roslyn tries to look like the kind of person who is fun, yet speaks encouragingly to people. Six weeks since her divorce. Does she look divorced? Well, look it or not, she and Harold are kaput. Life lurches on. She skids off a sidewalk so snow-covered she wasn’t expecting its edge. Roslyn pictures herself a potted plant, flinging its diseased parts forth for pruning.
A few months down the road, the pruning has begun to cut to the quick. Standing in the back yard of a ramshackle house she’s hired Floyd to fix, Roslyn asks him,
“How do you deal with it?” she blurts, “the grief? Your exes?”
Floyd looks away. The wind keens, high and reedy. “I leave it inside me,” he says. “In its own place.”
He gets up and begins to sand. Roslyn stays on her garden chair in her bare feet and listens to the swish-swish of the rasp. In her imagination she gives him everything. And then it comes, the swift strange swoop of grief.
Roslyn’s journey from pink-cheeked, sexually eager divorcée to something more nuanced is the crowning achievement of Are You Ready to Be Lucky, and the vital thread holding the narrative together. Lucky is less successful in its occasionally awkward shifts between viewpoints. And some perspectives, like that of the one-dimensional Bloxham, aren’t worth the word-count Nixon gives them.
Even Floyd’s chapters, while “meaty” in their own right, can feel like intrusions on Roslyn’s story. The chapter “A Graceful Hind, A Lovely Doe” approaches perfection in its delicate treatment of Roslyn’s emotions at her son’s wedding: “The wind lifts the canopy roof, ruffles their clothes. Roslyn moves in her son’s embrace. Hope, like a planet, circling into view.” After this, we are dropped cold-turkey onto Floyd’s tractor, to wander through his memories of a messy family history, and meet his cat, Alba: “ ‘Hey, Alba!’ Best pussy he’s ever had, Floyd likes to say. Alba’s stuck with him for sixteen years, through two marriages, a bankruptcy, and three polyp removals.” This shift feels too abrupt, and consequently frustrating.
Each chapter of Are You Ready to Be Lucky? succeeds on its own merit. But when they are woven together so tightly, and you can sense Roslyn imperceptibly moving at the edges of the other characters’ narratives, it’s difficult not to want her front-and-centre, fascinating us with her deft movements from humour to sadness, her capacity for both error and for grace.
Freehand | 232 pages | $21.95 | paper | ISBN # 978-1554811380
‘Are You Ready to Be Lucky?’ by Rosemary Nixon
Book Reviews
Breakups and new beginnings are subjects eternally ripe for the writer’s picking: far from forbidden fruit, they are the bargain-bin apples of the literary produce aisle. But the fruit metaphors end here, because Rosemary Nixon’s Are You Ready to Be Lucky goes beyond pulp romantic fiction and its attendant clichés and stock characters, into adventurous, funny and surprisingly sober new territory.
In its opening pages, Lucky follows newly-divorced forty-something Roslyn as closely as a candid camera as she “steps lively” from a dreary divorce into a party and a new relationship with the suave, more-British-than-the-British Duncan Bloxham.
Subsequent chapters switch perspectives: in “The Costa Blanca News” we see Roslyn and Duncan through the eyes of their neighbor, the depressive Nell, a British transplant to sunny Spain. The chapter “The Sewers of Paris” offers up the voice of Stella, Roslyn’s best friend, as she analyzes her own relationship woes and buys a fish-tank as a consolation prize for losing her latest lover. “In Which Floyd’s Odometer Surpasses the Million Kilometre Mark and Friends and Acquaintances Reduce Their Clutter: A Milesian Tale” (whew) adopts various characters’ perspectives in short blips as it records their activities over the span of several weeks. Roslyn’s Czech contractor, Floyd, is given increasing attention over the course of the novel, and the final chapter, “On Tilt,” is narrated solely in his voice.
It sounds chaotic and eclectic, and it is: but Nixon pulls it off. This might be due to the fact that Lucky isn’t really a novel so to speak, but a collection of intimately related short stories. Add to this Nixon’s acute attention to language at the phrasal level, how she weaves words together like a beat poet. There is a lot going on in every single sentence of Lucky, and half the meat of the book is in the poetic density of the prose. To put it plainly: you may get so distracted by Nixon’s beautiful weave of syllables that you forget to care what they say—but the message is worth attending to.
Take, for instance, the opening paragraph of “The Costa Blanca News”:
White lizards scrabble. Spanish sun plunges from a blood-scraped sky. San Fulgencio’s burnt-fish air. Bird of paradise rusts on tiled porch steps, myrtle-seed, rosemary, olive and níspero. Waft of chips and mushy peas. The Mediterranean, reeking of corroded iron, whacks its shores like the snap of a dishrag. Two dogs fuck in a stony garden.
Before you are formally introduced to Nell, the narrator of this slender chapter, you sense some of the ingredients of her dissatisfaction in this 50-word paragraph: British norms stubbornly persisting in an exotic context. Sexual unfulfillment layered with the threat of violence. And above all, loneliness as keen as Nell’s own vision.
Nixon’s gift for packing lots of meaning into small spaces translates, often, into wonderfully funny moments in Lucky, as when Roslyn, five weeks into her new relationship with Bloxham, begins to realize he isn’t all starched shirts and expensive gifts:
Duncan’s big on extinguishing the lights. Economy, not romance. If Roslyn walks from the sofa into her study nights to grab a book, she’ll be feeling her way back a moment later into a room plunged in darkness. Her house, along with her dog, has taken on a furtive air.
Later, when Roslyn is observing her son’s bride at his wedding, Nixon demonstrates her gift for cutting descriptions that are all the more devastating for their economy: “Andrea. She stands at the path’s head, her silky red hair tumbling over bony shoulders jagging out of sockets of lace.”
Lucky isn’t Nixon’s first turn at the wheel: she’s appeared in many Canadian literary journals and published two collections of short fiction—Mostly Country and The Cock’s Egg, along with a novel, Kalila. The latter handles a dark subject: parents dealing with the birth of a terminally ill baby. In recent interviews, Nixon describes Kalila’s deep stems in her psyche, and how the novel took 15 years to write. Lucky, according to Nixon’s interviews, is something of a palate-cleanser in its sprightly forays into humour and raunch.
Despite her gift for the absurd, which is amply demonstrated in Lucky, Nixon knows how to write sadness. Roslyn, on page 10, is one part positive energy and one part ruthless ambition:
Roslyn tries to look like the kind of person who is fun, yet speaks encouragingly to people. Six weeks since her divorce. Does she look divorced? Well, look it or not, she and Harold are kaput. Life lurches on. She skids off a sidewalk so snow-covered she wasn’t expecting its edge. Roslyn pictures herself a potted plant, flinging its diseased parts forth for pruning.
A few months down the road, the pruning has begun to cut to the quick. Standing in the back yard of a ramshackle house she’s hired Floyd to fix, Roslyn asks him,
“How do you deal with it?” she blurts, “the grief? Your exes?”
Floyd looks away. The wind keens, high and reedy. “I leave it inside me,” he says. “In its own place.”
He gets up and begins to sand. Roslyn stays on her garden chair in her bare feet and listens to the swish-swish of the rasp. In her imagination she gives him everything. And then it comes, the swift strange swoop of grief.
Roslyn’s journey from pink-cheeked, sexually eager divorcée to something more nuanced is the crowning achievement of Are You Ready to Be Lucky, and the vital thread holding the narrative together. Lucky is less successful in its occasionally awkward shifts between viewpoints. And some perspectives, like that of the one-dimensional Bloxham, aren’t worth the word-count Nixon gives them.
Even Floyd’s chapters, while “meaty” in their own right, can feel like intrusions on Roslyn’s story. The chapter “A Graceful Hind, A Lovely Doe” approaches perfection in its delicate treatment of Roslyn’s emotions at her son’s wedding: “The wind lifts the canopy roof, ruffles their clothes. Roslyn moves in her son’s embrace. Hope, like a planet, circling into view.” After this, we are dropped cold-turkey onto Floyd’s tractor, to wander through his memories of a messy family history, and meet his cat, Alba: “ ‘Hey, Alba!’ Best pussy he’s ever had, Floyd likes to say. Alba’s stuck with him for sixteen years, through two marriages, a bankruptcy, and three polyp removals.” This shift feels too abrupt, and consequently frustrating.
Each chapter of Are You Ready to Be Lucky? succeeds on its own merit. But when they are woven together so tightly, and you can sense Roslyn imperceptibly moving at the edges of the other characters’ narratives, it’s difficult not to want her front-and-centre, fascinating us with her deft movements from humour to sadness, her capacity for both error and for grace.
Freehand | 232 pages | $21.95 | paper | ISBN # 978-1554811380