The Heart is its Own Reason
by Natalee Caple
Insomniac Press,
1998.
Reviewed by Michael Bryson
Natalee Caple's debut collection gathers for display
enough wackos, freaks other assorted odd-balls to stack something even
wilder than your standard Ontario Gothic carnival. Margaret
Atwood, Timothy Findley and Robertson
Davies have mined this territory before, though perhaps without the
post-modern self-consciousness it's hard not to bring to Caple's spooky
tales. The collection opens with a pedophile and closes with a caged
woman. Are these metaphors for our crazy age? The truth is these Gothic
archetypes have been around 200 years, since about the time some Europeans
began experimenting with ideas like liberty, equality, fraternity and
something that would later be called Modernism. Caple steps into a deep
stream with her debut and handles the currents well. Her sentences are
taut, muscular; her paragraphs aware of their acoustics. Fine writing in a
book nicely designed (not a first for Insomniac Press!).
The Plight of Happy People in an Ordinary World
by Natalee Caple
House of Anasi Press, 1999.
Reviewed by Michael Bryson
Everyone has seen a movie that felt like a play. Here is a novel that
feels like a play. Think Beckett: a stage, a tree. In the case of Natalee
Caple's followup to her stunning debut, the settings are similarly sparse: a bakery, a barren apartment,
a suburban kitchen and a few other nondescript locales. The focus here
is on action, dialogue and narrative soliloquy. The novel mines the inner
lives of two teenage girls who have been left in charge of the family
bakery as they wade into love and sex for the first time, complete with
the nervous shocks that accompany those experiences. Love is not sentimentalized.
Sex is not glorified or said to be oppressive. Rather, the characters'
encounters with their most powerful inner emotions are revealed as ambiguous,
painful and startlingly real. The plot is thin and a bit rocky at times.
Caple's spare writing style is slightly uneven, as the story drifts between
something approaching myth and a earth-bound rootiness. The range is wide,
the treatment a little wobbly. Nonetheless, The Plight of Happy People
is a remarkable first novel from a young woman whose talent is only just
beginning to deliver.
Michael Bryson is the editor of The
Danforth Review.
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