Mind Picker: Girl Runner

Girl Runner is the story of Aganetha (Aggie) Smart, a gold medal Olympic runner, who at 104 years old, is essentially abducted from her nursing home by a young man and woman who say they would like to make a movie of her life, and enjoying the lark, Aggie goes along, awash in memories as she is brought to confront her own past. Where this book excels is in the writing about running and training and the Olympic experience, but where it falls flat is in execution.

I tend to enjoy books with jumbled up timelines -- they can create tension and mystery as we see the aftermath before the catalyst -- but too often here, the device felt deliberate and clumsy. For example, at the Olympics -- which, although placed halfway through the book, does serve as a climax -- I had no clue in what order the races were run. It wasn't until much later that I understood whether Glad had competed in the 100m before or after the 800m, and that order rather mattered to the plot and her relationship with Aggie (and the effect was lack of clarity, not tension). It honestly felt as though author Carrie Snyder wrote out the story in a linear fashion and then cut and pasted to jumble it all up.

But, much of the writing was lovely. I especially liked Aggie's childhood on the farm and her relationships within her large and complicated family. One particular standout scene has Aggie climbing to the roof of the barn where, after ensuring everyone could see she was there, the young girl began to spin and jump, one sister cowering with her apron over her head, too afraid to look, and her mother scrambling up an apple tree, as if she could somehow intervene from there. Thinks Aggie afterwards:

They think I've risked everything for a foolish show-off game. They don't understand what I'm doing. The problem will persist. There is life, as I see it, going on all around me, terrible in its uncertainty, frightening even. And there is me, as I see myself, preparing, practising, anticipating a series of performances whose timing and discipline I can't predict in advance but must be ready for at all times.

Inspired by Canada’s “Matchless Six" -- women who were sent to successfully compete in the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics -- the historical setting of Girl Runner could have been made better use of: everything about that Olympics was really well done, but with a main character who is 104, much that she lives through is just briefly alluded to: a brother fights in WWI; a sister catches "some flu" (which one supposes is the Spanish Influenza); the stockmarket crashes, so a training center is closed; a nephew looks like a little soldier (and a throwaway sentence about his stint in WWII is the only mention made of that war until it was over and the men returned, wanting their jobs back)…and nothing of historical importance happens for the next 70 years. Again, this felt really clumsy to me: if you don't want to write about world events, it's better not to mention them at all. As for the treatment of women at the Olympics -- that is an interesting topic. The 800m race was the longest distance permitted for women in 1928, and after it was over, the officials declared that it was unsuitable for the delicate female constitution and it was removed -- not to be reinstated as an event until 1960. I didn't realise that women weren't allowed to participate in the Olympic marathon until 1984; this was where the meat of the story should have come from. As Snyder says in the Author's Note:

(W)hy I chose to write about the subject in fictional form; when I consider these issues in any other way, steam comes out of my ears. And steam coming out of one's ears makes for an argument undercut by its own stridency.

But this stridency shows itself a wee bit, with gender inequality given a few heavy-handed scenes. When the girls find out that their midwife mother offers other services to pregnant girls, Aggie concludes:

We can do nothing more…The distant smell of acrid smoke knows it: a summons from the burnt-up crumb cakes in the oven, which beg watching by the girls who bake them, for it is never boys who bake cakes.

Yes, yes, boys don't bake cakes because they don't have uteruses, so that puts a heavier burden on the girls, but what really exasperated me about that conclusion was the fact that there were no boys left at home to watch the baking cakes -- and I know that sounds like I'm taking it literally, but it's just this imperfect metaphor trying to sound clever. Or in another scene, with Aggie talking with an old school chum:

We are both aged forty-four years, but do not imagine we are judged the same -- he is a man and I am a woman, and the year is 1952.

That was apropos of nothing, and therefore jolting to me, but the most annoying fact was that Snyder created some really great characters, put them in this interesting time that could have demonstrated any point she would have liked to make with them, but then oversalted the soup and left a bad taste in my mouth (and the Kaley subplot was totally unnecessary and unsurprising). If this book was terrible it wouldn't have bothered me so much, but because of the spoiled potential, this review might make Girl Runner sound worse than it is; read it and make up your own mind; it's worthwhile just to meet the incredible Miss Aganetha Smart.

There's no starting this race over again. And still I run. I run and run, without rest, as if even now there is time and purpose and I will gain, at last -- before my spool of silence unwinds -- what I've yet to know.