Fielding pens a page-turner

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This article was published 06/01/2002 (8925 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Grand Avenue, By Joy Fielding (Doubleday Canada, 392 pages, $33)

Reviewed by Brenlee Carrington

IN her 11th book, popular Toronto novelist Joy Fielding follows the lives of four female friends through 23 years of family turmoil, career vicissitudes, romance and even murder.

The finished product is a fast read reminiscent of Danielle Steel or Judith Krantz. Just don’t expect a happy ending.

The Grand Dames of Grand Avenue meet in a neighbourhood park. All are married with toddler daughters and all live on the same street, Grand Avenue, in Cincinnati, Ohio. Barbara, Chris, Susan and Vicki are sharply drawn characters with complicated lives.

Barbara is a former Miss Cincinnati, still obsessed with her physical appearance and with staying young. Chris is physically abused by her husband and unsure of how to escape from him.

Susan is a magazine writer looking for herself and finding danger in the process. Vicki is the indefatigable lawyer whose friends’ problems give her far too much legal work.

Not coincidentally, Fielding has been married to a lawyer for 27 years. Unlike many writers who vehemently deny doing so, she freely admits basing her characters on different aspects of her own personality.

In order to attract the reader’s attention at the outset, Fielding opens with an unidentified narrator who’s one of the four main characters.

The narrator is in the present, watching a video of the time these four women met; she tells the reader that one of them is murdered. The narrator reveals neither her own identity nor that of the murder victim. Only at the end of the book are the mysteries solved.

Fielding’s prose is alternately flamboyant and florid. “I remember the laughter,” her narrator says. “Even now, so many years later, so many tears later — and despite everything that has happened, the unforeseen, sometimes horrifying detours our lives took — I can still hear it, the undisciplined, yet curiously melodious collection of giggles and guffaws that shuffled between octaves with varying degrees of intensity, each laugh a signature, as different as we were ourselves.”

A tad overwritten perhaps?

As the book’s plot unfolds, Fielding uses her research effectively. For example, victims of domestic abuse often wrongly blame themselves for provoking their abusers.

Chris, whose husband is beating her, is shown to be thinking: “Anger. Violence. Contrition. Kind words becoming false accusations until suddenly it was all her fault. Always her fault. Her fault she walked into his fist, her fault she tripped over his feet, her fault she was covered with bruises.”

The women in the book are sympathetically written, as in this observation about the thoughts of Barbara, the former pageant winner: “Was there more to her than just a pretty face? Her face had brought her everything — attention, accolades, adoration. Would there be anything left when that was gone?”

The book does answer that question, and many others. The result is a page-turner and a continuation of the author’s winning formula.

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Brenlee Carrington is a Winnipeg lawyer and journalist.