‘Algoma’ by Dani Couture

Reviewed by Richard Cumyn

It took me longer than it should have to read Algoma, Dani Couture’s laudable first-novel. The sentences are well crafted, uncluttered, transparent. The chapters are relatively short, their depiction of small-town northern life, vivid and credible. I read the book on a big well-lit screen. So, no, it wasn’t that I prefer to read print (although I do). Something else, something at the story’s core, kept making me get up and walk away from it.

For one thing, Algoma comes about as close as a novel can without collapsing under the weight of its own contrivance. Its subject is the nature and corrosive effect of grief. Couture’s method is akin to holding her reader’s head under the surface of a viscous, numbing pool of sorrow until we can’t take it any longer. Hence my periodic wandering away from the novel: I had to catch my breath. I had to reconnect with breezy, mundane, inconsequential time.

The telling point here is that the story kept pulling me back.

Algoma Beaudoin, her husband Gaetan, and Ferd, their remaining child, live in the town of Le Pin, 240 kilometres northwest of Quebec City. Algoma is the youngest of seven sisters and the only singleton among three sets of twins. Each girl is named after a tanker in the fleet of the Algoma Central Corporation, ship-watching having been their father’s passion, one apparently unchecked by any consideration for the girls’ future social happiness. Their mother needn’t have worried. They’ve grown into a formidable group of well-adjusted women, still at their best when twinned. Except for Bay, the sisters are not fully developed as characters. They form a domestic backdrop accentuating Algoma’s singularity and reinforcing the notion that even at her lowest, loneliest ebb, she has a strong tribe of women behind her.

Twins and twinning inform the narrative. Ferd’s twin brother Leo was following an emaciated black bear across the river when they both broke through the ice; the black bear is the emblem of Algoma Central. Ferd, watching from a nearby bridge, saw his brother disappear; at the book’s climax Ferd is back on the same bridge, reaching for a dark mass he thinks is the floating carcass of a bear. Algoma’s parents, we are told, died apart but simultaneously. Fiction’s magic is that it conjures truth by way of artifice. First novelists regularly charge their books with bizarre detail, fearing perhaps that their story will be otherwise overlooked. They eventually figure out that strangeness arises most effectively in the language itself. In striving for a structure reflecting balance and completion, with sensational events and images neatly twinned, Couture may have sacrificed some of that anticipated rush of surprise we get from fiction at its most organic. Algoma remains a handsome construction, notwithstanding.

This year’s winner of a ReLit Award for her poetry collection Sweet (Pedlar Press), Dani Couture brings a poet’s eye and ear to prose that is muscular but emotionally clipped. The chapters read like abbreviated breaths taken outside in freezing winter air. Decisive declarative sentences propel the story ahead, though the narrative eye is continually casting backwards in time, searching for something—a body, a word, a happier moment—no longer there. Scenes are minimally dressed, their drama intense but brief, even fleeting. This method succeeds, if its purpose is to create an atmosphere of progress suspended. Time passes but nothing’s changing with the Beaudoins. Algoma, Gaetan and Ferd have retreated to distant corners of the house. They are stuck in bereavement and we feel their paralysis viscerally, especially in the first half of the book.

The writing soars when Couture the poet is at the keyboard. Two open-sided, outdoor hockey rinks are “sightless scleras of ice.” The local network of rivers, seen from above, is “a hawk’s claw clutching a treed mass of earth.” Church steeples, “each reaching higher than the last, [are] like children raising their hands in a classroom where there was only one right answer.” Notable also is the author’s empathetic rendering of her male characters. Ferd, still very much a little boy, is believable, heartrendingly so. He’s sure that Leo is still alive under water somewhere and that Ferd’s handwritten notes to his absent twin, the missives scrawled on scraps of paper and left in water fountains, bathtub drains and outdoor puddles, will reach him. Both parents find and save the sopping notes, although nobody talks about what Ferd is thinking and doing. Theirs is a clamorous silence.

It is relatively easy to accept a child’s absolute faith in the impossible. Ferd is as yet untainted by sex and the burdens of adulthood. What I found uncanny was Couture’s facility in portraying men, Gaetan in particular, his truncated gestures, his insobriety, his reticence, and his daily devotion to a weather diary, the entries from which form the heading for each new chapter. (Ferd comes by his hypergraphia honestly.) Male restlessness, aimlessness, explosive violence, self-sabotage, the rivalry of brothers—it’s all there in unflinching detail, right down to the mechanics of a fistfight or the brand name of the multi-purpose tool in a man’s back pocket.

Le Pin seems less francophone Québécois than Anglo, even taking into account that its denizens speak a French that has been translated into English. The mood of the place struck me as more English reserve than French passion. Even life in English-speaking Northern Ontario is more hot-blooded than in Le Pin, I thought. But then I realized I was forgetting that this is a Quebec town filtered through a thick, stultifying, icy block of sadness. These people, even those unrelated to the dead boy, trudge each day through the residue of a profound loss. Add to that the fact that Algoma is living her life secondhand, and the atmosphere of the place begins to make more sense. Husband Gaetan is a hand-me-down, a castoff she married after her sister Bay got tired of him. Algoma works at The Shop, a used clothing store where she converts much of her pay cheque into useful  “pre-loved” merchandise. She turns a couple of old fur coats, for example, into winter seat-covers for the car. In a community of limited wealth, barter has become an engine of the economy. Algoma reflects the town’s necessary resourcefulness in the way she keeps her family clothed and fed with what she finds, trades for or pulls from the ground. Gaetan, on the other hand, personifies futility. In his marriage, his role as a father, his bartending job, his prodigious drinking, he is a man hemmed in and blinded by the inexplicable. Both he and Algoma blame themselves for their son’s death. The difference between them lies in the way they process and atone for that guilt. The novel is aptly titled. It’s Algoma’s tale, one of feminine resilience, but written by a woman who understands men possibly better than they do themselves.