Strong points settle on surface

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This article was published 03/07/2010 (5754 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Truth about Delilah Blue

By Tish Cohen

Harpercollins, 409 pages, $20

What’s the truth about Delilah Blue? Nothing special.

Toronto writer Tish Cohen had hits with her first two volumes of commercial women’s fiction, Town House and Inside Out Girl, and she also impressed many with her Zoe Lama series for children, and her teen novel Little Black Lies.

But The Truth about Delilah Blue, which explores ideas of responsibility, truth, forgiveness and vulnerability to tell a story about the fall and resurrection of a modern family, is formulaic and devoid of all but the most shallow emotion.

Others have tackled the subject to better effect, notably Joyce Carol Oates in We Were the Mulvaneys and Janet Fitch in White Oleander.

The novel opens in present-day Los Angeles.

Lila Mack, a 20-year-old loner, was once known as Delilah Blue Lovett, back when she lived with her mother and father in Toronto’s artsy, eccentric Cabbagetown neighbourhood.

But when she was eight, her mother abandoned the family, so she and her father moved to L.A., where she’s been an outsider ever since.

Now Lila is determined to become a famous artist, in part to catch her wayward mother’s attention.

"What Lila really wanted was for Elisabeth to see her daughter’s face in Vanity Fair magazine one day and say to herself, ‘My God, I’ve made a terrible mistake,’ " Cohen writes.

Since her father refuses to support a fine arts education ("an utter waste of paper as far as he was concerned, and an even greater waste of money"), Lila takes a job as a nude model at a prestigious artists’ academy to audit the classes while she poses.

But suddenly, Lila’s mother resurfaces, just as Lila’s father begins to show symptoms of early-onset Alzheimer’s.

And when her mother reveals an old secret, Lila has to decide if everything she thought she knew about her is true, or whether a more complicated truth lies inside her father’s fraying memory.

The story is told from third-person Lila’s and her father’s points of view, and Cohen is skilled at balancing the joint narratives.

However, despite an energetic beginning, the storyline turns disappointingly transparent.

This could have been overlooked with strong, well-developed characters, but unfortunately, Cohen’s characters are all one-dimensional and predictable.

Cohen also wastes an opportunity to create a sense of urgency in Lila’s quest for answers as she races against her father’s illness. Instead, she lets the story drag and meander.

Delilah Blue isn’t without its strong points. Cohen writes amusing prose and she has a knack for metaphor. Unfortunately, nothing much lies below the surface.

Winnipeg writer Kathryne Cardwell works at the University of Manitoba.