Book won’t save life, but it’ll make you think

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This article was published 23/10/2010 (5789 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

This Book Will Not Save Your Life

By Michelle Berry

Enfield & Wizenty, 272 pages, $30

This book definitely won’t save your life. But it will give you something to think about.

Ontario novelist and short-story writer Michelle Berry’s fourth novel is a thoughtful study of a dysfunctional family in mid-1980s Toronto.

Using themes of feminism, magic, mother-daughter rivalry and old-fashioned child-rearing advice from ’50s guru Dr. Benjamin Spock, Berry tells a story of a family undone by a conniving magician and their own petty jealousies.

The title is a twist on American A.M. Home’s 2006 novel, This Book Will Save Your Life, about a man trying to survive in post-apocalyptic Los Angeles.

But Berry’s novel (released by the literary imprint of Winnipeg’s Great Plains Publications) is actually a dig at Spock’s 1946 landmark child-raising guide, The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care.

Berry uses frequent excerpts from the classic 1957 edition to frame her story, proving that even someone as revered as Spock doesn’t have all the answers.

The novel opens in Toronto in 2001. The narrator, 28-year-old Sylvia Swamp, 700 pounds and bed-ridden, tells the story of her family’s downfall as she is being transported to a veterinary hospital for a CT scan (since the general hospital doesn’t have a machine large enough to fit her).

“It is necessary for me to face my life,” Sylvia thinks. “To figure out the beginning so I can understand the end.”

Sylvia begins by depicting her young, unhappily married mother, Ruth, pregnant with her first child as she finds the Spock classic in a second-hand bookstore.

In “The Book,” Ruth finds the answers to her prayers.

“Ruth’s obsession with the book was intense and complete. There was nothing (Spock) wrote that she didn’t eventually do in one way or another. Nothing she didn’t buy.”

At the same time that Ruth buys The Book, she also meets and falls for the second-rate but charismatic magician Marvelous Marvin.

As he infiltrates the family’s lives, Ruth’s obsession with the book only grows.

“At first Ruth merely used The Book to help her figure out breast feeding and toilet training, but soon she was using The Book to help her interpret her daughters.”

But one thing The Book can’t solve is the influence Marvelous Marvin wields over the family.

As the Swamp family falls apart from the magician’s spell, and The Book proves helpless to stop him, Sylvia realizes that she is the one who must save her family — at any means necessary.

Berry gently pokes fun at Spock’s more outdated advice (such as suggesting that women suffering from postpartum depression go to the beauty parlor or buy a new hat), while praising his classic advice to new mothers: “Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.”

Berry takes a particularly interesting narrative technique, by having Sylvia tell the story from four points of view: hers, her mother’s, her sister’s and her father’s, and admitting to filling in the blanks for the other characters.

“I can create things that seem right, that fit into the story the way I’m going to present it and, well, you’ll just have to take my word for it.”

The novel’s biggest flaw is that it lacks any likable or even sympathetic characters. At times, the story loses momentum because it’s difficult to stay interested in what happens to them next.

Berry tries to make up for this by adding frequent twists in the plot. But trust her. She knows more than you think she does.

 

Winnipeg writer Kathryne Cardwell works at the University of Manitoba.