Hal McNab made love to his wife for the last time the morning of the day she was killed.As an opening line, this from The Birthday Lunch totally hooked me, making me think that what would follow would be, at a minimum, touching, and hopefully – surpassing the minimum – intriguing. Unfortunately, I found it to be neither. This will get spoilery but I won't give away the best bits.
In a convoluted arrangement, Hal and Lily McNab have used an inheritance to buy a formerly grand home in Sussex, New Brunswick – now divided into three apartments – with Lily's spinster sister Laverne. Laverne and Hal do not get along, and on the night before Lily's 58th birthday, there is a spat over who will get to take her to lunch. Through manipulation and misadventures, Lily ends up being at the wrong place at the wrong time and she is, indeed, killed. What follows is the week that Laverne and Hal – and Hal's son and daughter, who come home from away – spend dealing with their grief and the heavy responsibility of making “arrangements”.
By using the word “killed” in that opening sentence, author Joan Clark hints that maybe things aren't as they seem, even having Lily's daughter muse on the word:
Killed. My mother was killed. Claudia knows that being killed is different from dying but she cannot work out in what way it is different.Clark then proceeds to sprinkle misdirections into the text, like having Claudia and Hal watch an Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and when Hal misses the ending, Claudia informs him ominously, “She got away with it”. Or, having the town's undertaker be a fan of murder mysteries, and as he's reading A Judgement in Stone, have him think, “Clever Ruth Rendell putting the murder up front”. Or even, as the son Matt lets his imagination run away from him, having him think, “Get a grip. This isn't a soap opera” (and this after making a point that watching both General Hospital and Dallas during this week was totally out of character for the family – and if this soap opera business doesn't have higher meaning, it's a distracting coincidence). There's an incompetent (perhaps complicit?) police force, a runaway suspect, an untruthful newspaper report, a sister who is slowly revealed to be a mentally unstable Blanche Dubois-wannabe, a number of men who may have had inappropriate relationships with the deceased (or was she just a very friendly person?) – if Lily was “killed”, does that mean “murdered”? Or can one be “killed” by accident yet still consider that different from “dying”?
The Birthday Lunch introduces so many minor characters, and provides too much family information about all of them, that by the time of the gathering for Lily's wake, I couldn't keep one widow straight from another (yet I do appreciate that in a small town everyone knows everyone else's business and this may have been an attempt to catch the reader up on all the town gossip). Claudia's boyfriend added nothing to my understanding of the story, and neither did Hal's estranged brother, with their last minute, irrelevant reminiscences. I found most of the dialogue to be unnatural and stilted (I do not know anyone who will not use contractions when they are speaking) and subplots (like the time Matt thought he fathered a baby with the town floozy) fizzle out to nothing. While the majority of the characters lack depth (a doctor shows up just to write out a prescription for more sleeping pills so the family can continue to pop pills but lay awake all night. Everyone. Every night.), I did grow to like the subtleties in the character of Laverne.
This spinster school teacher – half protective and half jealous of her younger sister Lily – has suffered a lifetime of unrequited loves, and by the time of the story, has embraced her solitude and the freedom it affords her to travel, garden, and decorate her small apartment. Although she believes it to be a secret, Laverne has recreated within her rooms a painting that she fell in love with on a trip to Holland – Pieter's de Hooch's Woman and Child in an Interior. To Laverne, her apartment allows her to “live within walls of beauty”, but Lily thinks of it as “dreary and strange”. To Claudia, who recognises what Laverne has done, it's all a little sad. And it's easy to feel sad for Laverne, until she reveals herself to be even odder than she at first seems. In choosing Lily's birthday present, Laverne resents that her sister didn't appreciate past gifts (like an unused flower-drying kit):
What irks Laverne is her sister's independent streak, her stubborn refusal to take up a hobby she has not chosen herself.I found that very funny, and later, Laverne remembers a time that she pressured Lily into buying some fruit and candy that she had been trying to sell to passersby. Although Lily had to pay with a promissory note (paid off weekly with her allowance), even at the time Laverne thought it was unfair that Lily was able to buy it all and eat it all herself. When she complained to her father, he explained that Laverne couldn't “have it both ways” – and this wanting to have everything “both ways” seems to be the key to Laverne: she's a frustrating, inconsistent, hypocritical prune who you can't help but pity. But did her jealousies and possessiveness drive Laverne to be responsible for the killing of her sister? Would you still pity her if she was somehow responsible?
I didn't really get the plot of The Birthday Lunch but I did very much enjoy the setting. On my way to Bridgewater every summer (the Nova Scotia town where Hal and Lily met), I pass that billboard outside of Sussex that boasts they have the best ice cream in the world. This year, I just might pull off the highway and put the claim to the test, understanding that there might be binocular-wearing neighbours watching for out-of-province license plates and crazy local drivers speeding up and down the main drag. After enjoying An Audience of Chairs, I was looking forward to The Birthday Lunch, but this one just didn't work for me.
