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Sundre

by Christopher Willard

Christopher Willard’s second novel is a significant departure from his 2005 fiction debut. Whereas Garbage Head satirized celebrity culture, telecommunications, and the absurdities of postmodernity, Sundre deals in shotguns, combines, and pick-up trucks.

Composed of short sections alternating between the strikingly similar first-person perspectives of husband, Avery, and wife, Sandra, Sundre tells a story of courtship, child rearing, and the trials of prairie farm life in the 1960s and ’70s, culminating in tragedy and the revelation of a terrible secret. With its split point of view, its five central characters, and its brevity, the novel only touches on key events and elides others entirely, leaving the reader to extrapolate those aspects of the narrative that remain undisclosed.

Aside from the occasional colloquialism – “Sandra and I had howdied but we hadn’t shook”  – Willard opts for the language of lyricism rather than verisimilitude. Philosophical density coupled with frequent single-sentence paragraphs and section breaks give much of the narration an aphoristic quality. The narrator’s statements call to mind the voice-overs of Terrence Malick’s films, which trace the relation between suffering and beauty, good and evil.            

Willard’s prose draws the reader’s attention to the novel as craft rather than story. The result is that Sundre’s narrative is less compelling than its narration. Sandra, a reader of Longfellow, is aware of this tension between words and things: “Simple phrases,” she tells us, “are surpassed by the tingle of tin, the taut hum of barbed wire, a grass’s massed miscellaneous susurruses.”

Willard is also a visual artist, and the novel’s descriptive passages continually testify to the acuity of the author’s eye as well as his ear. Sundre creates a vivid, elegiac portrait of a family in a particular time and place, but the density and deliberateness of its prose distances reader from character.

 

Reviewer: Devon Code

Publisher: Véhicule Press

DETAILS

Price: $16.95

Page Count: 160 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 978-1-55065-253-6

Released: May

Issue Date: 2009-7

Categories: Fiction: Novels