Mind Picker: His Whole Life

His Whole Life is an odd bit of Canadiana. As the story opens, Jim is ten-years-old and sitting in the back seat of his parents' old Chevette as they make their annual trek from NYC – where they live because of his American father George – to eastern Ontario – where his Canadian mother's family owns a secluded lakeside cabin. Attempting to slip in his most pressing question as just one more long drive conversation starter, Jim asks his parents, “What's the worst thing you've ever done?”, and this book then spends all of its remaining pages revealing the answer to that question for these three central characters. Along the way there are repeated themes of estranged siblings, broken friendships, prodigal sons, women who serve as end-of-life caretakers who then find themselves cut out of wills, men who are violent or resentful or sneaky-mean, dying dogs, and through it all, young Jim is the observer, the conciliator, the glue. In the end it would seem that author Elizabeth Hay's point is that for a people who stereotypically spend all of our time apologising, it would seem we Canadians have little capacity for actual forgiveness. Sorry, but I didn't love this book.

When Nan inherits her brother's property in the summer of 1995 – at the same time that she's feeling unhappy in her marriage – she decides to take Jim up to Canada for his entire summer vacation. Nan reconnects with her childhood friend Lulu, and with the second Quebec referendum on separation looming, the two women find themselves on opposite sides of the debate: Nan (the Canadian now living in America) is a passionate federalist who continuously trots out the retired-from-public-life Pierre Trudeau as the ultimate symbol of national unity and Lulu (born in the States, raised in Canada with a Québécois Grand-Mère, and recently living in Mexico ) is all for separation, holding up the now crippled Lucien Bouchard as the saint and martyr of Quebec's cause. Jim himself is a big fan of René Lévesque (dead by this time, but who Jim knows from his repeated readings of The Story of Canada), and it was so strange to me that these characters rarely brought up the two men who were actually on the opposing sides of the debate that summer: Prime Minister Jean Chrétien and Quebec Premier Jacques Parizeau. No matter, though, because the Quebec referendum seems to only be present in order to serve as a repeating knock-over-the-head metaphor about estranged families and failing marriages:

She wanted to feel more alive, that’s what she wanted. To live an independent and courageous life. And with that bracing thought something clicked in her brain and she understood Quebec. She understood a place torn between staying and leaving, and therefore always dissatisfied.

Canada beckoned to her, such a stable and reasonable country. Yet always on the verge of coming apart, because Quebec was so unhappy. As unhappy as I am in my marriage, she thought.

George hung on the edges, ill-defined, less important. He was “the rest of the family” the way English Canada was “the rest of Canada.” R.O.C. for short. That summer Quebec seemed serene in its power, secure, as if all packed up and ready to leave.

Even years after Quebec narrowly voted down the question of separation, Nan regarded George's post-surgical face and mused:

His mutilated face reminded her of a reconfigured map, a country carved up, her country without la belle province.

Um, your side won, so get over it? In the same way that Hay made all of these obvious political connections, she also would repeatedly come right out and name key character traits, as though not trusting herself to “show, not tell”:

Jim enjoyed watching people take sides. It increased the drama and he loved the drama. Yet it worried him too, since he wanted people to like each other and he wanted to be on the right side, the brave and exciting side.

That was a very obvious statement about Jim that I found annoying after watching him repeatedly demonstrate exactly those aspects of himself, as was the following when Jim returns to NYC and breathes deeply of its unique air:

It was like smelling an American dollar bill, thought Jim, and he loved it. These returns to New York at the end of August were a powerful part of his life.

Well, duh. These returns are shown many times, and besides, couldn't that be inferred? And sometimes, I didn't really know what Hay was getting at:

The son works forgiveness for the father. It felt like two rivers meeting inside her, one blue, one brown. The brown of “George, you hurt me,” and the blue of “I'm still breathing. I must have hurt you too.” If forgiveness could be considered a kind of movement in one's chest that made it easier to breathe.

His Whole Life ends the summer that Jim turns seventeen – set right after Pierre Trudeau's death and state funeral – and although there were many interesting vignettes along the way (I liked everything about the bizarre Isaac) and while, yes, Hay has a piercing eye for scene-setting, in the end, I don't know what this book was really about. I thought that Jim – with his group hugs and his knack for saying just the right thing – was too good to be true, and I grew weary of all the references to Homer and Shakespeare and Treasure Island (and if you're going to mention more than once that Jim was named after Robert Louis Stevenson's scamp of a narrator, why not explain the why of that?), and although I love me a book set in Canada, I didn't understand why Trudeau's life and death was the framing backdrop for what is otherwise a domestic drama. And don't even get me started on how annoying it was for Nan to rub the scar on her forehead every time she felt cornered, or the way she stroked the area over her heart whenever she was hurt.

I didn't get this book and I didn't really like it, but being more okay than downright bad, I won't dip below three stars on it.