Lottery winners navigate new reality

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/04/2020 (2000 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

‘Life can get knocked into a new orbit by a lottery win,” acclaimed British author David Mitchell once wrote.

In fact, Katrina Onstad’s riveting new novel is a case in point. It’s a compassionate tale about class, gender, secrets and loss in the aftermath of a conventional family’s lottery win.

Onstad is a Toronto author who wrote for the Globe and Mail for a decade and has published two works of fiction.

Her 2006 debut novel spins a tale about a self-destructive female entertainment journalist.

Longlisted for the Giller Prize, her 2012 sophomore novel Everybody Has Everything tells of a 40-something childless couple who suddenly become guardians to a toddler.

Onstad’s latest novel shares two common traits with her last one — the Toronto setting and the female protagonists’ sharp-edged youth — though this time, the style is more self-assured, the characters more sympathetic.

At the outset, we meet the family: Gwen, a stay-at-home mom, her husband Seth and their children, Maddie, a teenager and Eli, a 10-year-old. Though somewhat happy in the suburbs, they struggle financially — until their $10-million lottery win.

The family then buys a house in Toronto — something they couldn’t previously afford. Soon after the move, the kids are enrolled in private schools and Seth quits work to join a start-up company.

Things seem to go somewhat well until Gwen’s boyfriend from her long-ago past unexpectedly emails her. Consequently, the plot thickens and conflicts abound.

Set over the course of one year, Onstad’s lucid, succinct narrative is written in the alternating voices of Gwen and Maddie, hopscotching back and forth in time. Included are scenes about the family’s life in the ‘burbs prior to the win. The narrative also documents Gwen’s backstory: vignettes reveal her fraught upbringing, her escape at age 17 from a small town to Toronto and the fateful choices she made to survive there.

Much to her credit, Onstad excels at ratcheting up the tension from chapter to chapter. In fact, no sooner do we assume the plot will turn out one way than it veers off in another direction. This technique heightens readers’ interest and helps maintain their attention.

Also contributing to the tension is the multitude of conflicts in terms of the values and economic disparities among the characters. One example is Maddie’s boyfriend, whose social class and financial reality differ greatly from most of his classmates.

Throughout the novel, Onstad succeeds at plumbing the depths of her multi-layered, flawed characters in the portrayal of their relationships; the mother/daughter roles of Gwen and Maddie, for example, in addition to an in-depth view of Gwen and Seth’s marriage.

The vivid depiction of secondary characters, such as members of an immigrant family, add another dimension to the story as well.

In short, Onstad’s fast-paced, emotionally engaging novel will strike a familiar chord with readers. It’s a story that will resonate long after they finish reading the book.

Bev Sandell Greenberg is a Winnipeg writer and editor.