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The Perpetual Ending

by Kristen den Hartog

As any creative writing teacher knows, serious stories about broken homes are very difficult to carry off, demanding a near-religious abstinence from anything smacking of movie-of-the-week melodramatics. Kristen den Hartog’s unsatisfying follow-up to the well-received Water Wings suggests that this warning needs to be impressed on established writers as well as students.

The novel commences with Jane, a children’s book author, returning to her parents’ home in rural Ontario after a long period of estrangement to visit her dying mother Lucy. This physical journey sends Jane off on a parallel mental voyage, in the form of flashbacks, into her family’s troubled past. It’s a too-familiar setup, even when cloaked in Hartog’s highly literary, stream-of-consciousness prose.

There are some strong scenes among the flashbacks featuring Jane’s identical twin and the lovably quirky Lucy. The fun never lasts long, however, because the girls’ troubled, controlling father is invariably waiting in the wings to hound them with lectures about evil strangers, razor blades in apples at Halloween, and any number of other bugbears.

Again and again, Hartog dishes up what is essentially the same scene of the kids’ fun being stomped on by the emotionally abusive dad. The reader, who grasps this situation early on, waits vainly for Hartog to dig deeper, to move on to new territory, or at least to send her characters for counselling. Instead, she continues to statically riff away on the same few fragments, and the story consequently sputters long before reaching its predictable climax.

The fairy tales written by the adult Jane grant the reader periodic relief. Richly metaphoric, these vignettes offer absurdist accounts of characters with horns growing out of their bodies or spiderwebs for hair-dos. These tales give us much needed clues about Jane’s mental state, but are ultimately unable to save the book from becoming another casualty of such difficult, if worthwhile, subject matter.

 

Reviewer: Nicholas Dinka

Publisher: Knopf Canada

DETAILS

Price: $34.95

Page Count: 274 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 0-676-97457-0

Released: Jan.

Issue Date: 2002-12

Categories: Fiction: Novels