‘Thirteen Shells’ by Nadia Bozak

Reviewed by Angie Abdou

Thirteen Shells marks a departure for Nadia Bozak. Her first books of fiction, Orphan Love (2007) and El Niño (2014), work as two-thirds of a Border Trilogy that has earned Bozak comparisons to J.M. Coetzee and Cormac McCarthy. Fans waiting for the conclusion of this trilogy might be disappointed by Thirteen Shells, a quieter and more domestic book.

Thirteen Shells falls very much in the tradition of Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women. Like Munro, Bozak uses linked short stories to explore the life of one girl as she grows from early childhood to young adulthood. Even the book’s setting, a Southwestern Ontario city called Somerset, will remind readers of Munro’s Jubilee. Somerset is a city that thinks like a town, an almost claustrophobic conservatism pervading the text and restricting the characters. Two hours from both Toronto and the U.S. border and boasting a Kellogg’s plant as the main employer, Somerset’s real-life equivalent can be only London, Ontario. When the parents get divorced and the father moves to Toronto, Bozak astutely captures the way two geographically close cities – Toronto and London – can feel like entirely different worlds.

The collection’s protagonist is named Shell, after her mother’s love of seashells. Tired of answering what Shell is short for, she answers “Nothing. It’s just Shell. Not Sheila or Shelley or Michelle or she-sells-sea-shells-by-the-sea-shore, so don’t even try.”  The thirteen Shells correspond to the way readers see the protagonist in each of the thirteen stories. Bozak encourages readers to think about identity (fractured and whole) and the way the isolated episodes of Shell’s life do or do not add up to a cohesive narrative representing a unified self. The linked-collection form is well-suited to this exploration of identity since the stories can be read in isolation or in any order, but read straight through they function as a coming-of-age novel, a full and satisfying bildungsroman. Like a shell necklace, beauty can be found in both the parts and the whole. In the stories, the individual Shells are strung together by recurring images and themes, particularly the memory-box Shell keeps under her bed, storing items ranging from a piece of glass on which she cut her foot as a young child to a near-naked photo of her taken by her first lover.

The main difference from Munro is, of course, the era. Shell is a girl of the eighties. Readers watch her move through roller-rinks, Judy Blume and Doc Martens. We see her activist tendencies find a cause in Uganda. We delight in her discovery of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and the existentialism of Camus. For anyone with memories of the 1980s, Thirteen Shells offers a delightfully nostalgic journey back in time.

In choosing to write all the stories from Shell’s point of view, Bozak sets herself a challenging constraint. Initially, Shell’s world is small, consisting almost entirely of her mother, her father and her neighbour-friend Vicki. The main interest in these early stories is the disintegration of the marriage of Shell’s parents. Bozak carefully avoids offering any adult insight into the complexities and complications of marriage. Readers see the marital collapse only through the eyes of a child. Even though Shell doesn’t – can’t – know exactly what has gone wrong or what is missing in her parents’ relationship, through her observations readers feel the suffocating resentment and hostility. Shell notices the ever-decreasing eye contact, the gradual disappearance of all conversation and the strained dinners.

It comes as a relief when nearly half way through the collection, a story begins “The summer before Mum and Dad get separated…” and readers learn of the seemingly inevitable end-of-the-marriage in an offhand aside. With the self-absorbed tendencies of any child, Shell notices the change only as it affects her: the move from healthy hippy food to frozen dinners, the transition from the luxury of having the house to herself to sharing it with a boarder, the novelty of the weekend trips to Toronto to visit her father and the juggling act of making each parent feel the preferred parent.

Just as the final collapse of the loveless marriage comes as a relief, so too does the eventual maturation of Shell’s voice. Though Bozak handles the child-narrator with remarkable skill, the more adult insights in the second half of the book add a welcomed complexity and depth to the narrative. As Bozak turns her attention to the way Shell over-eats to cope with the loneliness brought on by her parents’ new absence or the escapades involved in Shell’s burgeoning sexuality, the book has much in common with Mona Awad’s Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, with its intelligent consideration of gender and body and its finely wrought portrait of the challenges of being a girl.

Though Thirteen Shells departs from Bozak’s earlier fiction in terms of content, the quality of this new offering is consistent with the first two widely acclaimed novels. Bozak is a talented writer and brings insight and beauty to her account of a southwestern Ontario childhood.

Anansi | 305 pages | $19.95 | ISBN # 978-1-77089-988-9