Reviewed by Shawn Syms
Much like its protagonist Lydia Templar, The Incomparables, the first novel by accomplished Toronto writer Alexandra Leggat, is moody and demanding. The book alternates between a traditional narrative approach and unconventional shifts in time, place and perspective. Its unusual plot unfolds in prose that veers between the terse and the lyrical – and is densely atmospheric. This is not easy reading.
Leggat, a creative writing instructor, is the author of three well-received collections of short fiction including most recently the poetic, raw and succinct tour-de-force Animal (Anvil Press) – recipient of a Trillium Book Award. The Incomparables shares with Animal a predilection for intense and neurotic characters. And there are times when its use of language rivals that of the stunning Animal, a book whose spare and effective sentences recall Carver and Hemingway. But those moments are notable for their comparative rarity in a novel that is stylistically erratic in a way that reflects its main character’s fractured psyche.
Lydia is a wardrobe designer for a Shakespearean theatre company where her husband is an actor who has an affair with his leading lady. She loses her job for the way she expresses her displeasure – through sadistically manipulating the costumes that the cast must wear onstage, including husband Charlie and his paramour co-star Imogen. As the novel opens, Lydia is travelling away from the city and her lost job to stay in the large country estate where she grew up, with her mother, who provides a cheery foil for a perpetually peevish daughter. Smarting from the loss of her husband and vocation and still unrecovered from the prior death of her father, Lydia learns that her childhood home has been converted to a bed and breakfast where her mother is hosting an unusual group known as “The Counsellors.”
Raiden – resident along with his family members Junko, Pipit, Kaito and Little Nan – runs the “Dragon Staff Certificate Program,” a sort of quasi-Buddhist educational regimen that he has been providing for local children and the occasional bartender. The family is preparing their high-strung and reclusive matriarch Junko for an unusual marriage ceremony that has more to do with Lydia’s own life history than is initially apparent, when she is asked to pick up needle and thread once more to fabricate outfits for the wedding.
As plots go, this falls clearly into the domain of the convoluted and implausible. Perhaps it is all hallucination on the part of Lydia, who struggles to cope with the world around her: “She has to learn to curb the chaos… and she has no idea how.” For even though the narrative moves back and forth between the perspectives of multiple characters – in some sections, from one paragraph to the next – it is firmly based in Lydia’s interiority.
And while her persona is an interpersonally prickly one, it’s also very sensual. For Lydia, touch is central, and she uses her relationship to fabric as a way of experiencing the world. As she tells Counsellor Kaito, “I revere textiles because of the textures, the weaves, it speaks to me, lets me feel.” Though Lydia consistently wrestles with how to deal with other people, her comfort with the world of textiles give her a way in: “There were so many variables affecting how fabrics hung, their weight, texture and drapeability, like people. We are, after all, a type of fabric,” she says, an observation that, in context, feels at once gruesome and comforting.
Deploying an unreliable and challenging primary narrator in a novel that thematically concerns relations between the conscious self and the exterior world is intrinsically difficult. But the use of sensual details gives the reader access into, and a certain level of sympathy for, the character of Lydia.
When she returns to her childhood home, “her fingertips glide across the brocade chairs” as “the aroma of the leather furniture and remnants of grandfather’s pipe tobacco permeate the room.” Her observations of the natural world can also be vivid and evocative: “The sun appears through the trees in rippled slices. Pineapple, freshly cut.” Other characters grasp her personality and read it back to her – says Counsellor Pipit: “Your white knuckles, the jumpness, the strangling of the towel, is you.”
But these moments of succinct observation only appear occasionally – and they are crowded against the claustrophobia of Lydia’s personality and the novel’s overreaching metaphysical ambitions in the form of The Counsellors as Zen koans personified. Much of Leggat’s other best writing is characterized by simplicity and precision. The Incomparables would have benefited from a bit more of each.
Anvil Press | 320 pages | $20.00 | paper | ISBN # 978-1927380628
‘The Incomparables’ by Alexandra Leggat
Book Reviews
Much like its protagonist Lydia Templar, The Incomparables, the first novel by accomplished Toronto writer Alexandra Leggat, is moody and demanding. The book alternates between a traditional narrative approach and unconventional shifts in time, place and perspective. Its unusual plot unfolds in prose that veers between the terse and the lyrical – and is densely atmospheric. This is not easy reading.
Leggat, a creative writing instructor, is the author of three well-received collections of short fiction including most recently the poetic, raw and succinct tour-de-force Animal (Anvil Press) – recipient of a Trillium Book Award. The Incomparables shares with Animal a predilection for intense and neurotic characters. And there are times when its use of language rivals that of the stunning Animal, a book whose spare and effective sentences recall Carver and Hemingway. But those moments are notable for their comparative rarity in a novel that is stylistically erratic in a way that reflects its main character’s fractured psyche.
Lydia is a wardrobe designer for a Shakespearean theatre company where her husband is an actor who has an affair with his leading lady. She loses her job for the way she expresses her displeasure – through sadistically manipulating the costumes that the cast must wear onstage, including husband Charlie and his paramour co-star Imogen. As the novel opens, Lydia is travelling away from the city and her lost job to stay in the large country estate where she grew up, with her mother, who provides a cheery foil for a perpetually peevish daughter. Smarting from the loss of her husband and vocation and still unrecovered from the prior death of her father, Lydia learns that her childhood home has been converted to a bed and breakfast where her mother is hosting an unusual group known as “The Counsellors.”
Raiden – resident along with his family members Junko, Pipit, Kaito and Little Nan – runs the “Dragon Staff Certificate Program,” a sort of quasi-Buddhist educational regimen that he has been providing for local children and the occasional bartender. The family is preparing their high-strung and reclusive matriarch Junko for an unusual marriage ceremony that has more to do with Lydia’s own life history than is initially apparent, when she is asked to pick up needle and thread once more to fabricate outfits for the wedding.
As plots go, this falls clearly into the domain of the convoluted and implausible. Perhaps it is all hallucination on the part of Lydia, who struggles to cope with the world around her: “She has to learn to curb the chaos… and she has no idea how.” For even though the narrative moves back and forth between the perspectives of multiple characters – in some sections, from one paragraph to the next – it is firmly based in Lydia’s interiority.
And while her persona is an interpersonally prickly one, it’s also very sensual. For Lydia, touch is central, and she uses her relationship to fabric as a way of experiencing the world. As she tells Counsellor Kaito, “I revere textiles because of the textures, the weaves, it speaks to me, lets me feel.” Though Lydia consistently wrestles with how to deal with other people, her comfort with the world of textiles give her a way in: “There were so many variables affecting how fabrics hung, their weight, texture and drapeability, like people. We are, after all, a type of fabric,” she says, an observation that, in context, feels at once gruesome and comforting.
Deploying an unreliable and challenging primary narrator in a novel that thematically concerns relations between the conscious self and the exterior world is intrinsically difficult. But the use of sensual details gives the reader access into, and a certain level of sympathy for, the character of Lydia.
When she returns to her childhood home, “her fingertips glide across the brocade chairs” as “the aroma of the leather furniture and remnants of grandfather’s pipe tobacco permeate the room.” Her observations of the natural world can also be vivid and evocative: “The sun appears through the trees in rippled slices. Pineapple, freshly cut.” Other characters grasp her personality and read it back to her – says Counsellor Pipit: “Your white knuckles, the jumpness, the strangling of the towel, is you.”
But these moments of succinct observation only appear occasionally – and they are crowded against the claustrophobia of Lydia’s personality and the novel’s overreaching metaphysical ambitions in the form of The Counsellors as Zen koans personified. Much of Leggat’s other best writing is characterized by simplicity and precision. The Incomparables would have benefited from a bit more of each.
Anvil Press | 320 pages | $20.00 | paper | ISBN # 978-1927380628