In Brief: THE FUTURES, by Anna Pitoniak

One of the joys of snagging a debut novel in timely fashion is the chance to see a certain jumping off point in a writer's development. The Futures isn't a perfect novel, but it's an enjoyable read, and holds the promise of engrossing stories to come.

In The Futures, Anna Pitoniak has the guts to write a pair of protagonists, Julia and Evan, who are not very smart or farsighted. They're young, they're obviously attractive, they're clever enough, they're talented enough; they work as hard as they need to at what they think they need to be doing. They're good kids! But they're hopelessly naive, each of them highly privileged in their own way; Evan a little more aspirational, Julia a little more entitled, and neither sees much outside of their narrow world of Ivy League universities and downtown parties. What Pitoniak does that feels deft is deny Julia and Evan insight into the consequences of enjoying their privilege until they find themselves too deeply ensnared in the darker movements of the systems that help keep their class aloft.

Pitoniak isn't cruel. She allows her protagonists to seek some absolution, to make motions toward a humbler state of grace and forgiveness before the novel's end. But the writing is on the walls for Julia and Evan before the first hundred pages of the novel is up. Despite some occasionally hard-to-follow jump cuts in chronology, what keeps the reader engaged as the couple sink ever more deeply into a monied world of greed and questionable motivations is the suspense of wondering when the other shoe will drop. 

The novel could have probed the foundations of Evan and Julia's relationship a little more deeply; the underlying strengths of their relationship aren't always made clear. But overall Pitoniak has created a memorable pair of characters through whom the reader witnesses the unfolding of Wall Street's 2008 financial crisis: young adults, hapless without being blameless for the roles they take on in pursuit of  their own bright futures.

Book details:

The Futures

by Anna Pitoniak

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Publication date: January 17, 2017

ISBN: 9780316354172

Book review: SOMEONE YOU LOVE IS GONE by Gurjinder Basran

There’s a point just over halfway through Gurjinder Basran’s novel, “Someone You Love Is Gone”, when the totality of the emotional world her novel conveys is brought into brilliant highlight.

Basran writes a brief but evocative epic across generations of an Indian-Canadian family whose lives have mostly played out in a fictionalized BC south mainland, yet remain equally emotionally rooted in their family’s past in the north of India. The book is rooted in the present, as denoted by the headings of its “Now” chapters, but likewise the cavernous emotional spaces portrayed by Basran echo backward, receding through the emotional spaces of Then, Before. And it’s within this architecture of emotional time – soupy, muddled, remoulding perceptions – that we meet Simran, who is grieving the death of her mother. Simran is increasingly unmoored from time, from her relationships, from the mundane realities of work and home life, and into a nearly transcendent state of grief, driving her toward a crisis point.  Much of what Basran thus accomplishes is to create an emotional landscape that flickers as if with the changing light of shifting clouds: a changeable, motile atmosphere in which we can meet without great disbelief the novel’s most ephemeral character: the hallucination, or maybe the haunting, of Simran’s mother, Amrit.

The dislocating presence of grief: that’s the novel’s overarching theme, and it’s the force against which Simran struggles. Grief: it displaced her brother Diwa from his family for decades. It’s a silent presence that has worn down Simran’s marriage, riven a distance between mothers and daughters, and it’s a weight that has been passed down, ever heavier, through generations.

And so, at this midpoint in the novel, there’s a fulcrum point, where the hazy and thick emotional atmosphere of the novel, this river of grief thus far, is weighed against the counterpoint of the measures of grief which Simran is handed: A pamphlet from a funeral home that gives rise to the novel’s title; the recollection of a postpartum depression assessment tool that seems hopelessly futile. Arriving one chapter after another, they stand to establish the meagre support tools given Simran to comprehend grief, and to cope with it. It’s in this contrast that the real work of Basran’s novel makes itself clear: to attempt to draw a family story commensurate to the measure of grief. Simran, her often missing brother Diwa, their often emotionally distant sister Jyoti: each carries the imprint of their own grief as well as of the grievous circumstances of their parent’s lives.

As the novel begins its long, slow landing from the fulcrum point, and as Simran’s emotional life begins to be written into a sharper focus, so does Basran bring into a clearer narrative the tragedies of Simran’s parents’ lives: the secrets that they lived with, the choices that they made as well as the burdens thrust upon them. By the end of the novel, there’s a glimmer of Simran’s hopes for lightening her grief enough to bear it. How do you move on from the past? the book’s characters ask, repeatedly. Basran has plotted many different possible paths through, and so concludes with Simran, unresolved but firm in a determination that the time to reckon with the past has arrived.

Book details: 

Someone You Love Is Gone

by Gurjinder Basran

Publisher: Penguin Canada

Publication date: August 29, 2017

ISBN: 9780735233423

Thanks to the publisher for the privilege of an advance reader copy.

Book review: SEVEN FALLEN FEATHERS by Tanya Talaga

Tanya Talaga, a longtime reporter for the Toronto Star, has authored an impressive investigation into the deaths of indigenous high school students in Thunder Bay, Ontario. Her book focuses in on the latter days of seven children to whom the title, Seven Fallen Feathers, refers: children whose deaths are connected by circumstance, by history, sometimes by kinship, and always by the astounding efforts of individuals and communities across the North to bring the truth of these childrens' deaths to light.

Talaga never lets the reader forget that the children whose lives - and deaths - are the focus of this book were all sent to Thunder Bay from Cree, Ojibwe, Anishinaabe homes often hundreds or thousands of kilometres away. Funding for the delivery of First Nations K-12 education is the responsibility of Canada's federal government per the conditions of Canada's Indian Act. Yet for indigenous children from communities located in what is now the province of Ontario, the only way to attain an education beyond grade eight is to be sent to board in communities like Thunder Bay. Talaga chronicles in unrelenting detail the struggle that school officials, relatives, First Nations organizations, and the children's peer groups take on as these students encounter the disruption of a life far from home, far from what is familiar, and in a city rife with both systemic and street-level anti-Aboriginal racism.

Late last year, pop culture Canada swooned with the news that terminally ill singer Gord Downie would release an album dedicated to telling the story of Chanie Wenjack, a young Ojibwe boy who died after running away from Kenora's Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Residential School. Downie received great adulation for bringing Wenjack's tragic story to light, some fifty years after Wenjack’s death, and the album and accompanying picture book were bestsellers throughout Canada's 2016 Christmas season. Wenjack's story lingers in the backdrop of this book as one (infamous) piece of the history of racism, colonialist Canadian administration, residential schools, and the chronic displacement and dislocation of First Nations communities. However, Talaga goes far beyond mourning the sadness and tragedy of the loss of young lives in making plain the solutions sought by indigenous community members, the Canadian policy and funding changes that are sorely overdue, and the attempts to seek justice for in a Canadian policing and justice system that seems to throw up barriers at every turn.

Book details: 

Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City

by Tanya Talaga

Publisher: House of Anansi Press

Publication date: November 7, 2017

ISBN 9781487002268

Thanks to House of Anansi for the privilege of an advanced reader copy of this book.