A Beauty

I kind of loved A Beauty by Connie Gault. Set in the 1930s dustbowl of rural Saskatchewan, and then revisiting the same small towns three decades later, Gault uses a homespun Prairie voice to make piercing observations about life and love and family and loss. There's a sneaky magic to this book: I found the storyline to be compelling – not because there was some big mystery or urgent climax – but because I had gotten to know the characters well enough to have really cared about how they all turn out. And that's saying something when the main character doesn't go around saying much at all.

We start in the small community of Trevna at a country dance, where all the gossips are catching up on the latest: the failed Finnish farmer (an outsider in an enclave of Swedish immigrants) has abandoned his 18-year-old daughter; walking off the farm and taking nothing with him but his rifle. The older women cluck and the young women giggle out of a mix of superiority and jealousy, for the daughter, Elena, has always been a mystery to them:

You couldn't say she was always pretty, but she was always great. Grand, that was the word. And she was prettier than Greta Garbo, maybe, to start with; Aggie thought she was...Aggie watched Elena standing alone by the door, kind of floating there as if she'd forgotten anyone could see her. In that old, faded, limp brown dress. The girl was dirt poor. She had only the one dress and when she washed it, God knew what she did to be decent in front of her father. She had no mother and she didn't pretend otherwise. Maybe that was the very thing that made her so grand – she didn't pretend about anything.

Soon enough, a strange man appears at the dance and attention turns to him:

The stranger waited near the door for a while, lounging against the wall with a friendly expression on a face that looked as if it naturally fell into friendly lines. He wasn't in a hurry. He waited there until people got used to the idea of him. He'd obviously come to country dances before. He was good-looking without being handsome, which in that community meant he looked clean and respectable and quite a lot like one of them.

While folks ate their lemon cake and shared Photoplay magazines – and a certain old goat kept sliding his hand down onto the bums of the young ladies he was dancing with – Elena was enchanting the stranger, Bill, just by being her. When he whispered that he'd like to take her home, Elena stopped dancing and headed for the doorway, beginning a journey from hick town to hicker town across Saskatchewan. Meanwhile, back at the dance, Elena's regular dance partner – a young man who might have reasonably hoped to make a wife out of the young beauty – had his own reaction:

Nils Larson got drunk for the first time in his life that night, but he was such a nice young man drink didn't affect him much. He only made some rash statements about following Elena and bringing her back where she belonged, and then forgot why he was alive and stared stupidly at nothing for a while and then passed out.

That last passage was what I found so enchanting about A Beauty– we never hear about Nils Larson again, but from a few brief sentences, I feel I knew him. In each of the towns that Elena (and later her father) visits, we meet the locals, and with more than a few sentences devoted to them, we grow to know these people: understand what a marriage means when you've been together forever like the smart alecky Merv and Pansy in Addison; or for a Chinese immigrant who was forced to leave his wife and son behind like Jerry in Virginia Valley; or to a man whose wife is incarcerated for murdering their severely disabled newborn like Albert in Charlesville:

She'd killed their baby daughter, born with so many deformities you'd think she couldn't have lived. Smothered her with a pillow. Just a bundle of pain, that's all she was, the women said. Someone had come up with that description, and it had evidently impressed them all. They'd each intoned it as if the phrase had popped into their heads that moment...And that was how easy it was for them to rid themselves of the child's little life and Betty Earle's dilemma, once it had been reduced to those just-right words, those words that implied pity without the effort of forgiveness. Albert had been left to absorb the pain that couldn't be assuaged by an apt expression. And to look after the five kids left at home.

When Elena steps out of the car in Gilroy, the point of view switches to first person and we see her through the eyes of young Ruthie McLaughlin. From this point on, we begin to think that Elena might not be so much “forward-thinking” as a bit nutty.

At one point, Bill and Elena are discussing the movie It Happened One Night and they can't agree on whether it's meant to show what makes a good husband or if it's about what makes a good father, and in A Beauty, Gault explores these ideas (of support and responsibility and commitment) further. Elena floats through the story like a Nordic fairy princess, shaking up even those lives that she doesn't interact with directly, and every time someone falls for the fairytale, the princes turn out to be frogs (or even toads caught in the throats of unlucky cats). I included so many passages here because I was hoping to capture the voice of the writing, which was consistently confiding and witty. I don't know if I loved all of Elena's journey, but as a device for Gault's penetrating explorations of character and setting, it's a worthy frame for fascinating ideas.

I'm pretty excited that this year I was able to find and read the entire Giller Prize longlist before the winner is announced (with weeks to spare). If I were in charge, I'd give the prize to Martin John, and here is my ranked order of the contenders:

The longlist for the 2015 Scotiabank Giller Prize in my order of ranking is:


Anakana Schofield - Martin John 
Marina Endicott - Close to Hugh
Patrick deWitt - Undermajordomo Minor
Heather O’Neill - Daydreams of Angels
Connie Gault - A Beauty 
André Alexis - Fifteen Dogs
Clifford Jackman - The Winter Family
Alix Hawley - All True Not a Lie in It
Rachel Cusk - Outline
Russell Smith - Confidence 
Samuel Archibald - Arvida 
Michael Christie - If I Fall, If I Die

*Won by Fifteen Dogs; not my favourite but fine.