Book review: an intense read of an irritable and hurricane female character

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Rule

Sara Mintz | Invisible Post

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$22.95 | 170 pages

For a novel 30 pages short of 200, Norma is surprisingly rich. Resorting to metaphors, the novel is substantial, a thicket; Norma is reminiscent of osmium, the densest natural element. It’s intense.

Part of that is a design choice: A series of short sections, Victoria author Sarah Mintz’s debut novel contains no chapters. A kind of breathing space, the white void between one chapter and the next usually signals a pause in the action; nothingness is a momentary suspension. In Norma, it is Norma without stopping.

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The abundance of the novel is not just an absence. It is a presence: Norma’s outpouring.

As if she had spent too much time manic and alone, but full of varied thoughts, the flow of the narrative, its flood, never slows. Norma has a lot to say, so many notions to express; and as if the sand in the hourglass were running out, she is eager to express as much volume as possible. Her “swarms of impulses and silent pains” demand an audience.

The first two sections set the tone. In the first, Norma describes herself: she is 67 years old, with short gray hair, a body that is “a murky place of mutant growth,” she feels possessed by a thought in which she is always immersed, as if she had ever she would have been busy with hobbies, a job, a home and a marriage, but now “feeling rejected by youth and betrayed by middle age.”

The second section begins with an excerpt from the dialogue between Amelia Landover and Derek DeMarco. As Norma explains, they’re characters from Paradise Bluffs, “a short-lived American soap opera from the ’80s with a long-standing, primarily Eastern European fan base.” Initially she just needed to “stay busy,” but Norma’s now paid job involves downloading personal material from transcription service websites.

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The material also appeals to her, so that, in her words, she wastes “an hour, if not a day, if not a week” looking at a website that categorizes the thousands of outfits worn by a Paradise Bluffs character.

As Norma’s thoughts unload and unload, they reveal a woman perplexed with herself. She searches for purpose, fulfillment, and direction, but often ends up wandering the aisles of the local supermarket or, as she puts it, observing the “richness of worlds” on the Internet.

Furthermore, he often reminisces about their long-lasting, if dispassionate, marriage.

And the death of Hank, her husband: “And it’s not that I’m glad he’s dead, it’s that I don’t know why I don’t feel worse. Maybe I will. Maybe it’s the pain that drives me to sit in front of the computer day after day, transcribing off-air American soap operas.” Norma misses “the warmth of her, the stench of her next to me, like a bag of medical waste.”

‘How I Love You’ is not for Norma Nimmo.

While the novel depicts a variety of online material that absorbs Norma (from inmate phone calls to surveys) as she sits in “a caramel-colored kitchen in (her) dead husband’s house,” Mintz captures the halting pace and Norma’s missteps as she stumbles. into the future while replaying uncomfortable scenes from her past.

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As Norma progresses, Mintz weaves scenes of Norma’s pitiful self-evaluations: “The body like a dull slab,” Norma asserts, “a directionless fool.” “I’m not beautiful. And I’m not a breeder. Hank and I never had children.”

Norma’s transcription work includes police interviews. One case, involving family sexual abuse, appears to offer Norma a point of access to the flesh-and-blood community in her anonymous city.

And when she exclaims, “I found the girl from the archive, the girl from the Internet” (a name from one of her transcribed files), Norma is confident for a moment, as a reader, that she has found something that will be meaningful to her. At the same time, she disassociates her from a routine of fast food consumption and a social world contained on the Internet. She talks happily of the “emerging new universe,” “realities beneath realities,” and “things are slowly becoming clearer.”

However, Norma cannot claim heroism, and her efforts confuse her and get her into legal trouble. Her “mission” produces measurable failure, especially when her fantasies begin to crowd into her consciousness.

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Broken, rambling, incomplete and terminally wrong, Norma captivates on the page.

Any fan of Canadian fiction will link Mintz’s character to Hagar Shipley, the angry force in Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel. There is certainly a family resemblance. With their anguish and her sharp humor, the women of Malarky and Bina, the novels of Anakana Schofield, also come to mind.

This “heavy ruin in a sea of ​​waxed plastic” that “is not bitter, is not bitter.” No. Just Old” serves credibly as a statement from Sarah Mintz, the author of a stellar turn as a fussy, gale-force deluded character whose feelings animate the page.

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