News

Jenny Sampirisi's Is/Was unfolds as a sheaf of files and entries: the four interior worlds of a rural family, framed as data. File 1 intimately records the characters' ways of inhabiting their bodies and familiar spaces. It closes with the two sentences of entry No. 18, recalling the mother's injury with a shard of glass.

"The memory of glass in skin is also a hand. The word glass is a hand." It's a neat summing-up of what we've intuited so far: that the world and the self are inseparable. Skin is no barrier to hurts, and identity is a mix of inner and exterior realms.

The sense of hurt in File 1 is pervasive, but undefined. Eva, Roland and children Andrew and Isabel seem to be almost in a state of shock, drifting though home life, work and school. Exchanges are terse and mechanical. It's as if the life has been sucked out of them. We know that Eva is recovering from surgery. We know that another family in the community is dealing with the disappearance of a child.

Opening File 2, we're ready to have loss defined. Entry No. 1 begins, "green bottle blow flies, red-tailed flesh flies, hister beetles," followed by names of wildflowers. The tableau of images spurs our darker intuitions. Has the lost child come to violence? Sampirisi plants in our minds the familiar mix of borrowed grief and ghoulish interest, but, unlike the TV news she cuts to, she makes us consider its inward effects.

Andrew and his dad build a tree house, Andrew pounding nails "through dry pine into the living maple."

"The tree is allowing this. It's the sound though, the echo that isn't real but part of memory for the second after he hits the nail, that pulls him through the morning: arm to hand to hammer to nail to tree and all the air that is pushed out in the movement."

If you've hammered a nail just once into a living tree trunk, these words will return the essence of it to you. Sampirisi's prose keeps its distance from the metaphor here, letting us slowly catch on. Father and son, labouring in the chill of mortality, are driven by a need they don't even grasp, digging testily at each other's humanity as they bang together this raw vessel for life.

File 3, No. 15: Andrew plans to go skating with a girlfriend. His little sister is suddenly desperate with jealousy, hounding him in his bedroom. She flops on Andrew's bed and mimes a frenzied sexual humping, mocking his adolescent lust. They argue. It gets physical. We watch violent desire spark and flare between them. Subtract the knowledge that they are children and siblings, and they could be lovers caught in an erotic firefight. The candour of the scene is breathtaking.

Is/Was remains a difficult novel to piece together. Within passages, the work is remarkable for its layered insights and depth of observing. Still, the overall shape feels too loose and amorphous. Sampirisi makes some choices that scatter the story more than focus it. The parallel plot of Roland's affair with a neighbouring wife is more distracting than illuminating.

Where the book really shines, and lingers in memory, is in the parsing of the family's internal dynamic. You understand that guilt is a continuum; that failing to rise to the task of knowing your kids can leave them terribly vulnerable.

Jim Bartley is The Globe and Mail's first-fiction reviewer.