Little Bird of Heaven

I think that I should say bluntly This was the time in my life, I fell in love with Aaron Kruller. 

There would be a way of composing this that would allow the reader to understand She is in love with that boy. She will be so humiliated, she will make such a fool of herself, can't anyone stop her! -- a way of indirection and ellipses, not blunt statement; but I want to speak frankly, I want to say something that can't be retracted Yes I was in love with Zoe Kruller's son, the first time in my life I was in love. And there is no time like the first.

I don't know if this passage was purposefully meta-fictive, some kind of post-modern irony, but this entire novel was written in indirection and ellipses and with frustratingly few blunt statements. At its core, Little Bird of Heaven is a crime story, a murder mystery, it tells you so right at the beginning. It sets up two likely suspects, the murdered woman's estranged husband and her lover, throws in a whole cast of secondary characters -- could she have been killed by her floozy room mate? Another lover? A drug dealer? But in the end:  The floozy room mate, Jacky, makes a deathbed confession that she knew all along that Zoe had been killed by the owner of the club where she and Zoe worked. Isn't it the first rule of a murder mystery that the killer must make an appearance before the reveal? So maybe this story wasn't a classic murder mystery, perhaps it intended to be more literary than that, but if it was meant to be an exploration of the character of people affected by tragedy, by a shocking murder, then it simply fell flat for me.

I listened to an audiobook of Little Bird of Heaven and I found it so boooring and so looong (the rain that kept me from my walks might be partially to blame but this took a month to listen to). The two times that Jacky is talking to Krista are needlessly wordy -- the first meeting took over an hour to listen to, and it's 99% Jacky talking. I just wanted something to happen. And rarely does anything happen in this book; it just keeps repeating and circling back, with indirection and ellipses, and I feel robbed of the time. This is probably mostly due to the unsatisfactory resolution of the mystery; I just feel so cheated.

I remember being very affected by We Were the Mulvaneys, but this is the third JCO lemon for me in a row, and I don't think I'll be giving her another try any time soon.  

That's where my Goodreads review ends, but I had something more personal to add, so here I am. I found it interesting that the main character's name is Krista because I don't think I've seen (or heard) my own name in fiction before, but no matter how much I suffer from Magical Thinking, I really didn't think that much of it. Then I read the name Krista again this week in the last book I reviewed, Light Lifting. (In the story Adult Beginner I, Stace is goaded into diving from a hotel roof into the Detroit River. Her friend says: "Look. Even Krista's done it twice." Stace looks at her and thinks: Even Krista. Twice. And that was enough to make her take the plunge.) If I've learned anything about synchronicity from Jung and Sylvia Browne, it's when the universe keeps sending you the same bit of information, you need to sit up and pay attention. I do understand how hopelessly naïve and new-agey that sounds, but there are too many coincidences in my daily life for me to not try and find meaning in them.

And so what was I meant to pay attention to in Little Bird of Heaven? This passage made my spine tingle:

Snake-quick came Delray's backhand slap, striking his sulky faced son on the side of his head and nearly knocking him over. 

You don't talk of your mother like that, you little pisspot. You show respect or I will break your ass.

When I was maybe five, I had the brilliant idea that it would be funny to poison my little brother by putting nasal spray in his PB&J (har har). As he raised the sandwich to his mouth, however, I lost my nerve and said, "Kyler! No! It's poisoned!" He started crying and my Dad stormed into the kitchen, and when I confessed to what I had done, my Dad grabbed me by the upper arm and half-dragged, half-carried me to my room, flung me inside and said, "You can just stay in there you little pisspot." What an odd expression: I don't think I've heard anyone else say that, in real life or in fiction, so something must be linking my Dad with Delray Kruller. But what?

As I think about it, it's fascinating, actually, that my father has as much "Indian" blood as Delray (Mi'kmaq in my Dad vs Seneca in Delray), and while it's enough to identify the fictional character as a "halfbreed", regarded with suspicion in the town of Sparta, I don't ever think anyone would identify my Dad as such. I have first cousins with Status Cards, but even though Kyler once expressed interest in finding out more about our Native heritage, my Dad got mad, thinking he was just looking for a way to exploit any advantages the card might give him. A few angry words were enough to make Kyler drop it. Indeed, even if I was handled roughly a few times as a kid, it was my brothers who were more likely to get the "backhand slap".  But is my Dad really like Delray?

In Little Bird of Heaven, Delray Kruller is an auto mechanic who owns his own shop. He got the young and gorgeous Zoe pregnant, married her, and although he loved her, he couldn't stop being a drug addict and a drunk and all around abusive guy-- she leaves him and ends up murdered which leads to his own breakdown. My Dad was a mechanically inclined young guy but wanted a white collar life. He started a good job in a bank, met my young and gorgeous mother, got her pregnant, married her, and although he was certainly possessive of her, he couldn't stop being a pretty angry man. While I don't believe either of them spent their years in great happiness, my parents are still together. After 30 years rising through the ranks at a large corporation, my Dad was able to retire at 55, moving with my Mom down to Nova Scotia, into what was for the longest time the largest private home in the county. Having two alcoholic brothers (are they actually Delray?), my Dad has never been a drinker. Now that he's retired, Dad spends most of his time out in "Pop's Shop", the auto garage he built on his property (he even installed a hydraulic lift in there last year). My Mom thinks he's so happy now that maybe he should have just been a mechanic all along. 

We didn't have a lot of money when I was growing up -- my parents got married so young and had three babies in three and a half years -- and although we lived like poor people, I was always aware that my father had a white collar job and that somehow meant that we were more middle class than lower. Two strange occurrences that belie my idea that we always looked middle class:

• We lived in a small Ontario town for seven years. During that time, my older brother became a real hard case juvenile delinquent: cutting school, smoking dope in his bedroom, eventually stealing a car at 14 and trying to drive it out to Alberta. When he was caught and sent back to us, that was the last straw for my Dad, who marched Ken to a barber to buzz cut off his long blonde hair, tossing him around pretty good when they got back home. When a Social Worker was scheduled to visit our house, Ken begged me and Kyler to exaggerate the abuse so that he could be sent to a foster home (we were not actually part of the interview and Ken wasn't removed from our home). Within about 18 months, my Dad had the chance to be transferred to Alberta, and to give Ken a fresh start more than anything else, we made the move. My Dad was sent out west first, and I was on a trip to Ireland with my best friend when my Mom locked up the house for the last time, so it was just her and my brothers when the firefighter from across the street came to say goodbye. With a big smile my Mom rolled down the window of her car and said, "Well, I guess that's it. We'll be leaving now." And this big burly man said, "The whole neighourhood is happy that trash like you is moving away." He must have felt so good as her smile twitched and faded.

• Not long after my parents moved to Nova Scotia, my Dad, who had been working on something around the property and was dressed in blue coveralls, probably needing a shave, found himself in town and remembered that he needed to set up a new chequing account to move money around for some reason.  He went into his bank, walked up to the teller and told her he needed a new account. She frowned at him and called her manager over. After a brief chat between the two of them, the manager told my Dad that he could only open an account if he had some form of proper id. My Dad lost it -- Do you know who I am? Do you know how much of my goddamn money you're holding in this bank right now? As a matter of fact, I'm done with this bank, yada, yada. Since my Dad wore a suit and tie to work five days a week, it always looked fine to me, when I was growing up, if he dressed down to hang out in his garage on the weekends. I wonder how often he was mistaken for a homeless man?

All of this to say that I probably have some wacky misconceptions, self-delusions, about where I've come from. Ken, who is a Stationary Engineer and manages the mechanical trades at a  hospital in Toronto, commutes in a pickup truck. I've asked him why he doesn't drive a car, for the gas savings if nothing else, and he says he drives the truck because he's just a hillbilly at heart. A hillbilly? I'm not a hillbilly and we had the exact same childhood. But where do we come from? Two reasons why I will never know:

• I remember sitting on Dad's lap when I was little and asking him, "Is it true that I'm mostly Irish?" "Yes," he replied, and then with an incredulous chuckle and a shake of his head, he added, "Not that that's anything to be proud of".

• More than once when I was little, if I asked my Dad a question, he'd reply, "If it was any of your goddamn business, someone would have told you by now". I stopped asking questions. Dave finds it very curious that I can talk to people and never ask them any personal questions -- if there's one thing I know, it's that nothing is any of my goddamn business. Ken moved out of our house when he was 17 and I had no idea where he went. As a matter of fact, I wouldn't have known he had moved all the way to PEI if I hadn't overheard it. My brother was on the opposite end of the country and that wasn't any of my goddamn business? Apparently.

And so another spine tingling passage from Little Bird of Heaven:

Something to do with being who I am, the family I am from, don't ask anything more it's none of your God-damn business.

Every time Aaron has questions for his mother, Zoe tells her son "Why don't you ask Delray?" He didn't ever ask for the same reason I wouldn't have. But I still don't know exactly what the message is that the universe is sending me through this book.

My Dad is like Delray, but there's a lot about Eddie Diehl that's in my Dad, too. My Mom is like Zoe, but there's a lot of Lucille in her, too. As a juvenile delinquent who turns into a "citizen", Ken is like Aaron. As the person who tries to just ignore the very idea of family history, Ben the Chemical Engineer is very similar to Kyler the Civil Engineer. But as for the Kristas...the only similarity I see between the character and me is a desire to pretend that everything is all right. It was family mythology that I was my Dad's favourite, something that my Mom liked to note. Another quote:

Where there must be a choice, a girl will choose Daddy. Even if you are Mommy, you concede that this must be so: you remember when you were a girl, too.

But even I was afraid of my Dad; I was the only one who was ever a "little pisspot". But I had a role to play, and if it kept me safe, I played it. And now Ken is the only one of us he'll talk to on the phone.

There's probably more to this book that is trying to talk to me, but that's enough for now. I still don't think that Joyce Carol Oates wrote a good book here -- this is not insightful character development -- but she somehow captured scenes from my own childhood that made a very personal experience out of it for me. Am I supposed to be grateful that my Dad didn't become a drunk and drink himself to death (like his brothers both did)? Am I supposed to be glad that my Mom never left the family (like Zoe) or kicked out my father (like Lucille)? There's something here that I need to keep chewing on. (Thanks universe.)