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WATCHING YOU WITHOUT ME
Lynn Coady House of Anansi Press
unchecked masculine anger. The reason why Trevor’s manipulation is such a reprehensible sort is not because it explodes spontaneously like Rank’s, but because he is always in control of it; it is constant “beneath the surface, like buried cables, humming with information.” Coady laughs when I ask her about the authorial imagination that is able to summon such an unsettling character, pointing out that Trevor is “calculating all the time. His anger motivates him. It’s behind every gesture he makes toward Karen and Kellie.” The narrative is arranged in Karen’s mind according to shame. In her reflection, Karen explains that she spent “the days after [her] mother’s funeral flailing around for some kind of cosmic reassurance” that the future she plans for her sister is humane, kind and demanded a sufficient personal sacrifice of her own. She refers to her “pathetic gratitude” to Trevor as the moment for which she is most ashamed. Throughout the novel, Karen pulls back and describes the way her listeners have reacted to the story in previous tellings. “Whenever I get to this part,” and “people always stop when I get to this part,” she says, indicating that even after routine retellings, the story is still a story of shame. After “the scales fall from her eyes” and she has at least initially vanquished Trevor, Karen remains absolutely tethered to her shame. In a way, the novel saves Karen from her shame. Karen tells us that “Trevor’s identity took precedence” in her narrative, but Coady doesn’t let the story be about him. The story instead focuses on Karen’s emergence as a self-determined identity—neither tragic nor triumphant. Moments of closure, when they do materialize, are “a hideous kind of closure” and “uniformly feel awful.” Karen’s story is about disentangling emotional toil from the work of mourning and grief—the kind of story that is nothing if not gradual and confounding. ■ DONALD CALABRESE is a writer and illustrator living in Sydney, Cape Breton. He is working on a graphic novel about the life of Moses Coady. NUMBER 90 | FALL 2019
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