Reviewed by Katherine Wootton

Maya Merrick’s book The Hole Show examines the way in which identity is created, juxtaposing her three main characters as children, formed by the world of their parents and circumstance, with the identities they choose at the end of their adolescence, in reaction to their earlier experience.

The Hole Show follows Hicklin, Billy, and Dahlia, interspersing chapters of their childhood in the early 1960s with their present, at the end of adolescence, in 1972. We are introduced at first to these three in the early 1960s, when the formative events of their childhood take place. The fourth main character, Luce, appears only in the ‘present’, and is the only character to speak for herself, telling her side of the story in the first person as she stumbles across the three others and proceeds to wreak havoc.

Merrick is inventive, pushing the experiences and identities of her characters to emphasize their outsider status. Dahlia is an albino, and Billy, we discover, is a pseudo-hermaphrodite. Hicklin, while not a genetic extreme, is known in his town as a pervert because of a bizarre childhood experience that becomes ingrained into everyone’s perception of him. Luce’s identity remains largely hidden, but the voice of her chapters, where she addresses herself to children she has left, marked by a kind of 1940s vernacular and sinister implications, make her equally, if not more, unusual.

Her characters are also all runaways; when they stumble across each other in Montreal, they recognize each other’s outsider status and between them create a kind of surrogate family that allows them to live with the identities they choose, rather than the ones they are trying to escape. Each character has, in finding a new home among strangers, been able to embrace that which makes them unique by retelling their story while hiding the element of exclusion. Yet in trying to reject what has rejected them, they repress rather than deal with truths critical to who they are. Hicklin runs away from his small town where he is ostracized, and where the girl he loves (Flan), strings him along, only seeing him secretly while maintaining her popularity and openly dating someone more socially acceptable. Dahlia, runs away from her repressive family and renames herself Dolly, after a startling experience with her older sister and being kicked out of her ballet class because she is trying to draw too much attention to herself. Billy, after years of confusion and feeling abandoned by his birth parents, flees from his aunt and uncle when he discovers they hid his medical history from him, and calls himself Beau. Luce, whose past we grasp only through unreliable hints, seems to have run away from responsibility (children), though she is quite young. Luce drives the plot by invading the carefully crafted world of Hicklin, Dolly and Beau, uncovering their secrets and destroying the equilibrium and peace they have found.

With such a diversity of voice and perspective, Merrick must create unique tones for each character at each age, reflecting their perspective and maintaining a link between the past and present as their identities evolve. This is most successfully done in the way she captures the surrealism of childhood experiences, and finds parallels in their later episodes of drunkenness, being high, and in their creation of art. Unfortunately, where dialogue is demanded in place of straight prose description, Merrick’s inventiveness fails her. Hicklin bears the brunt of a lot of clunky dialogue, saying things like "And I’ll miss…but you see don’t you? It’s not…I can’t." (Not my ellipses). The narrative voice sometimes slips into sillyness, as when Dahlia addresses her doll and Merrick bothers to write "Patience remains silent." Then "Patience keeps mum on the subject." It goes on. This is obviously meant to be slightly humorous, and emphasize the moment when Patience does speak, but it reads as twee.

Although Merrick is clearly very imaginative and succeeds very well in describing the more surreal events and scenes she creates for her characters, particularly the darker, fairy-tale elements of childhood, the novel is burdened with a few tendencies, springing from authorial laziness, undermine the fanciful world of her characters and hobble the progression of narrative and character arc.

Several times, Merrick uses secondary characters as deus ex machina to get around a difficult plot point. Billy/Beau conveniently discovers his unusual medical past from a friend whose mother worked at the hospital. For this plot point to work, this woman would have had to clearly remember his file in great detail and report it in toto to her daughter. To get her characters to Montreal, rather than having them struggle through the inevitable difficulties of running away, which would allow the conflict to greater illustrate and develop the characters, not one but two of them are simply handed an envelope full of cash. These handy secondary characters promptly disappear, or only reappear to perform a similar delivery. Luce is also the recipient of convenient donation, though it fits in more naturally with her narrative and character.

Luce also acts as a plot device, ‘uncovering’ vague secrets of Hicklin, Beau, and Dolly’s past by reading unexplained pieces of paper lying around their apartment. Despite the presumption that the three are determined to reinvent themselves, discovering, and exploiting, their dirty little secrets takes very little effort. The end of the book is the most exaggerated instance of this avoidance of conflict that would cause or indicate character development. Rather than following the characters after a dramatic and violent climactic confrontation, we are left with Luce and a newspaper, who cleanly fill in all the gaps in about two pages. This would be problematic in any novel, but is particularly detrimental here, since the creation and development of identity is so central thematically.

This means the characters do not evolve organically, they are not present for the moments where a shift would be natural and tangible. Before the major final scene, Hicklin, Dolly, and Beau each have a moment where they have a behavior or thought that may as well have a footnote saying "look, this is an indication of change and evolution". These ‘changes’, like the convenient envelopes of money, to come from nowhere, unrelated to the events and challenges they have thus far dealt with, and certainly not integral to the plot.

While Merrick pushes herself to be inventive, and creates some very evocative images and surreal moments, particularly in the childhood chapters, the novel would have been more compelling and believable if she’d paid more attention to the connection and moment to moment shifts in her characters as they moved through the plot. Giving them a little more agency, rather than writing around moments of conflict before the final confrontation, would have shown more progression more naturally and underscore the relation between reaction and choice in her characters’ identity. As it stands, the The Hole Show is, though inventive, not a successfully compelling story.