rizakayan

There are two distinct story lines here and I wondered if they would have been more powerful if developed as two separate novels. In keeping with the title of the novel, we are introduced to seventeen year old Lizzy and her family and their stay at the Retreat for her mother’s “rehabilitation.” Weaving through is a more interesting story of two Native Indian brothers fighting for survival and validation in a white man’s world, and failing. Based around an event when the Ojibway occupied the Anicinabe Park in Kenora, we get to spend the summer of 1974 at the Retreat with the Byrd family: Lizzy, the doer and surrogate mother to her younger siblings, her fourteen year old brother Everett grappling with his blossoming sexuality that could tip him in either direction orientation-wise, Mrs. Byrd, the absentee mother, who is constantly looking to discover herself even if it means having trysts with the Retreat’s self-styled guru Dr Amos, Mr. Byrd who thinks the Retreat is a big joke but will do anything to keep his wife and family intact, and four-year old Fish, the youngest child, who likes to wander off and get lost and bring the family face-to-face with its deepest fissures. Surrounding the Byrds is a motley cast of visitors, permanent and transitory, to the Retreat, seeking wisdom from the enigmatic doctor on how to cope in the real world. There is even a crippled writer, Harris, who befriends the children, whose wife is making out with another guest while he likens himself to “a dull moth banging at an unlit lantern.” On the other side of the spectrum is Raymond, the eighteen year old Ojibway boy who likes white girls and constantly gets into trouble with prejudiced law enforcement officers as a result of this fatal attraction. Raymond snags his girls by being indifferent and remote, partly due to his fear of being arrested, but that cocktail is irresistible to his more privileged girlfriends from the other side of the tracks. His brother Nelson is more outgoing, but as he was once taken away from home and adopted by a white family, Nelson is more cynical about the plight of the Native Indian. Both are likely candidates to be drawn into the Ojibway occupation of the park that is to follow before the summer ends. Viewed from the perspectives of the children, we see that the adults are all screwed up and are poor role models for their progeny. As Lizzy observes, “most adults wanted what they couldn’t or didn’t have, and they would hurt people to get it.” Yet the sexuality is downplayed while the sensuality is notched up – there is a lot of touching and smelling going on, especially among the young ones. I found the style distinct: sparse prose, pronouns dropped, dialogue “told” or narrated, and sentences ending on prepositions (the English teacher’s nightmare!) What disappointed me was that there was a lot of waiting between events and I felt that I had spent my whole summer at this Retreat by the time I ended the novel. There are missed opportunities for drama between Raymond and the cops, when Fish goes “walkabout,” and when Lizzie wanders around in the woods or in town on her own, but they are all downplayed, resolved quickly or ignored. I wonder if that is something about writing a Canadian literary novel and preferring bland. And despite the major portion of the book being dedicated to the inhabitants at the Retreat and to Lizzy’s coming of age, the novel ends with a more tense sequence of events involving Raymond and Nelson. I guess, after all the waiting, some tension was called for, but in the presentation it felt like two different stories were trying to cohabit within the same book, almost like the Indian boy and his white girlfriend trying to find a life together and failing. In that sense, I wondered whether The Retreat was a misnomer and if Two Different Worlds may have been more apt?

2023-06-10 13:11