Before Joe and Laurie Beaudry absconded from their creditors the couple devised a plan. Drive from Winnipeg to Regina in a stolen motor home, then live on the edge of a Walmart parking lot until they can earn enough to get themselves to safety (a.k.a. Fort McMurray). Everything goes well until Laurie maxes out their last credit card on a linen dress and hair dye. Discovering this, Joe absconds once again. Except this time, he leaves Laurie behind. 

Sandra Birdsell isn’t too concerned with the fate of the central couple. Instead, she examines the Beaudry’s past through the lens of their self-inflicted “hard times.” Birdsell does not critique the aspirational spending that precipitated the couple’s financial ruin. She digs deeper, probing Joe’s formative years to illustrate how his past decisions have resulted in his present predicament.

In addition to Laurie and Joe, the story is narrated by Joe’s aged father, Alfred. Before Joe and Laurie’s finances soured, the nonagenarian Alfred lived with the couple in their Winnipeg home. When it becomes clear that Joe is going to lose his business – a motor home dealership called The Happy Traveller – he forces his father into a nursing home, promising to take the older man back as soon as things turn around. Confined to the nursing home, Alfred is ignorant of the fact that his son has run out on his mortgage, his creditors, and his wife. Joe tries to explain his absence by telling his father he and Laurie have gone on vacation, but when the two start calling him separately, making vague references to hotels, the old man knows something’s up.

Birdsell makes excellent use of rambling inner monologue to unearth her characters’ motives and histories. For instance, after Alfred exposes the cracks in his son’s story, all the competing voices in his mind are laid out in succession on the page. This meandering narrative style is captivating, and Birdsell weaves together an entire family history via the memories, impressions, and asides of her characters. Though her prose tends to be overly expository, she nevertheless imbues each of the Beaudrys with a convincing, unique voice.

By employing these alternating points of view, Birdsell expertly unpacks Joe’s history, turning what could easily have become a routine condemnation of credit-fuelled suburbia into a surprisingly nuanced study of a man who never manages to find a place to fit in. As the novel progresses, we learn that Joe has made a habit of abandoning people.

With his mother dead and his father hidden away in his room for days at a time, 12-year-old Joe discovered a surrogate family in the Christian church – specifically a youth group led by Pastor Ken and his wife Maryanne, who effectively saw Joe through his teenage years. He even planned to attend Bible college in the U.S. and was engaged to the deacon’s daughter. In a preview of things to come, Joe abandoned the church and broke off his engagement, although Birdsell is not explicit about his reasons for doing so.

Secular Joe remains equally ambivalent in his motivations. He cavalierly asks Laurie to marry him after finding a piece of obsidian on the beach, which he thinks is “an object lesson, a reminder that nothing happened in his life without there being a reason.” Laurie’s version of Joe’s proposal isn’t any more convincing: she claims she was going to break up with him the day he asked her to marry him, and then “listens to herself explain” to her friends that she had doubts about the relationship only because she thought it wasn’t going anywhere.

Readers get a true sense of Joe’s peripatetic existence from the people he tracks down once he has abandoned Laurie. There’s Steve, his best friend from childhood, now living in Fort McMurray. Joe asks to crash at Steve’s place until he can find work, but he never makes it there. Instead, he lands at the pastor’s house in Vancouver. Pastor Ken and Maryanne invite him in, but Joe runs off after a single evening. He systematically rejects every offer of help – even when he himself sought out such help. As the novel draws toward its close it seems everyone – Laurie, Steve, and even Alfred – has developed some sort of contingency plan to keep on with the business of living. Everyone, that is, except Joe, whose peripatetic and listless existence seems to be the dominnant feature in his life.

It’s a fitting conclusion. Birdsell meticulously constructs Joe’s story, situating his indecision and his futile search for perfection at the centre of her extended character study. The frantic momentum of the book’s opening pages segues into a single question: How does someone lose it all if there was nothing there to begin with?