Rambling writing style misses key points

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This article was published 06/01/2002 (8931 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Dolce Agonia, By Nancy Huston (McArthur & Company, 258 pages, $23)

Reviewed by Sharon Chisvin

IN 1999, Canadian author Nancy Huston published The Mark of the Angel, a powerful and ingenious novel deservedly short-listed for the Giller Prize that year.

Prior to that, Huston, who has lived in Paris for years, had penned more than a dozen highly acclaimed fiction and non-fiction books in both English and French.

Since then she has written one more novel, the recently released Dolce Agonia, a work of fiction so uninteresting, ineffective and ill-conceived that it is truly difficult to believe that it was written by the same author as The Mark of the Angel.

In this novel, the narrative centres around a Thanksgiving dinner at the New England home of poet and poetry professor Sean Farrell. With God himself humbly serving as narrator, readers are introduced to Sean’s supposedly closest friends and associates, as well as to their individual triumphs, fears and obsessions.

Telling details

As the dinner guests arrive and the dinner conversation plods along, the most telling details of each character’s background are hastily sketched. Then, God takes the readers aside to slyly reveal the future of each one of the characters — specifically the exact way in which each one will die.

Unfortunately, every character, from the whiny host Sean to the gluttonous Beth is so one dimensional, poorly developed and boring, that readers are unlikely to care about them in the present, never mind in the future. Instead of murmuring “how sad” or “how unfair,” readers are likely to ask, “Who cares?”

While likely intended as a tale about the powerful and enduring nature of friendship as opposed to the tenuous and unpredictable nature of life, the novel fails to effectively depict either of these circumstances.

These friendships seem weak, insincere and catty, and the characters themselves and the lives they have lived come across as shallow, superficial and self-absorbed.

Yes, they all have had their share of disappointments. They have made mistakes, grieved loved ones and squandered opportunities. But these poignant facts of their lives are lost completely in the rambling, simplistic style of Huston’s writing.

Sharon Chisvin is a Winnipeg writer.