Luminous story will delight readers who relish word play

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This article was published 21/11/2009 (6181 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

An Unexpected Break in the Weather

By Deborah Schnitzer

Turnstone Press, 177 pages, $19

This luminous literary novel will delight those who treasure word play, want a Winnipeg fix and yearn for interesting and complex stories.

Just as Mordecai Richler did with St. Urbain Street in Montreal, University of Winnipeg English professor Deborah Schnitzer brings life and story to our own Corydon Avenue.

Readers will enjoy references to Bread and Circuses, Nucci’s, the Green Scene, Redeemed, and the "crossing guard costume man" at St. Ignatius School. This is written by someone who knows and loves the neighbourhood.

The multi-faceted story begins with lonely introvert Jeannette watching two elderly women cross the street: "It’s a walkrough day, iced, the side streets almost impassable and the wind as belligerent as Jeannette’s unwashed apartment window."

Yes, Winnipeg weather plays supporting actor in Schnitzer’s story. Her words capture what we might notice but don’t usually recognize: "Winter sun. Cedars tender in burlap dresses." In February, "temperatures unsteady, slush frozen in filthy alleys, ruts and cars stillborn in attached garages."

But the central characters are the elderly women who are a couple — Mildred and Gertrude, longtime owners of A Rose on Corydon, a fictional bridal shop (like 7th Avenue on Academy?). When Mildred falls on the street and breaks her hip, a series of events begin that spell the end of the Rose.

This broken hip forces Mildred and Gertrude, who are in their 70s, to face the reality that they need to close their business soon. But there is so much that remains to be sold, and it’s wrong to close a shop without a proper ending.

So, when their longtime friend and customer Perfume announces her fourth marriage, Millie and Gertrude offer to host her wedding in their store, with its stairway fish tank and fireplace.

It’s a clever going-out-of-business ploy and a not-to-be-forgotten event: all participants and guests, including the men, will purchase their wedding outfits from the wedding store. Chiffon all around!

The story weaves friendships among those who meet at the bridal shop. Jeannette is the loner who pitches in while Mildred is in hospital.

Thirteen-year-old Arlie attaches herself to the elderly women while getting over her treatment for leukemia. Wordie is a 50-something terminally ill artist who creates body-part shaped (think naughty) key-chains from buttons.

Perfume, the bride, is beautiful and intriguing, "outranking her friends with a beauty decided and eternal, grounded in a cult that runs toward Elizabeth Taylor violet, a doubled fan of eyelashes sultry, yawning."

Almonde, the groom, is one of the men who exuberantly join in the challenge to wear something from the shop. His fitting is successful: "for a man, he pulls this off better than most mothers of the bride, which is the section where the lavender sheath and matching jacket had been reposing for quite some time."

Experiences of loss permeate the novel. Relationships, aging bodies, lost lovers and children, death. There is an interplay of past and present, voice and silence, beginnings and endings.

Schnitzer’s writing has a poetic element. Not surprising, as she has published two books of poetry, Black Beyond Blue (1997) and Loving Gertrude Stein (2004) and an experimental novel, Gertrude Unmanageable (2006).

Flecked with humour and sadness, An Unexpected Break in the Weather is a wonderful new Winnipeg novel that is sure to bring Schnitzer worthy recognition.

Adelia Neufeld Wiens is a Winnipeg freelance writer.