It has been 10 years since Bonnie Burnard took home the Giller Prize for her novel A Good House. She is finally back with Suddenly, another unassuming masterpiece that transports the life unfolding before our eyes onto the canvas of the page. With A Good House, Burnard laid out the blueprint for a good life: durable materials, versatility and quality of craftsmanship.
The underlying premise of her latest novel is not so different; Suddenly demonstrates how characters in novels, like people in real life, are composed of the sum of their stories. The plot tracks a middle-aged woman living through the final stages of breast cancer. “Living” is the key word: Burnard delivers a novel about death, teeming with life that is “pressed down, shaken together and running over.”
Suddenly, by Bonnie Burnard, HarperCollins, 317 pages, $34.99
But don't let the biblical reference mislead you. Sandra Rusano abandoned her mother's God long ago, and she's not about to call on him now that she's discovered a lump – a “little bastard bullet” – in her breast.
We meet her at her cottage on Lake Huron after she has packed her husband and their grandchildren off home. She wants to be alone with her private knowledge – and a glass of scotch. She knows what is coming. Her friend Jude conquered breast cancer some years back and has a scar to prove it: the thick skin we must all develop, one way or another, if we intend to get through life.
In addition, Sandra's husband Jack survived a massive heart attack. With such blatant examples of endurance, she does not quite fear the worst. That night she and her neighbours watch the space station Mir magically float across the sky. Just for a moment, Burnard suspends time: She leaves us there on the beach, with Sandra, gaping at the sky.
Jump ahead four years and the worst has happened. Sandra's prognosis was confirmed during the horror of 9/11. By the winter of 2004, Sandra's hospital bed has been moved home into the bedroom she shares with Jack. A constant stream of gifts has given rise to a pleasurable sadness, and Sandra manages, most of the time, to keep dread at bay. Between the nurses, Jack, Jude and Colleen, she receives round-robin care.
Burnard shoos away the notion that good people make dull fiction
Colleen is married to Sandra's brother, Richard, a surgeon with discreet influence over the management of her pain. Paul, the youngest of her four grown children, appears daily with his wife. But Sandra is waiting for the other three who have been told to come. They are arriving any time, from up North, down South, out West.
Sandra subtly reminds her husband that she will be fully alive right up until the moment that she is not. Indeed, her powers of observation remain intact. From the new heights of her hospital bed, she observes the various dramas playing out in her neighbours' well-lit rooms. She is mesmerized by the snowflakes dancing outside her window in a cone of light. She craves lemon pound cake, bright nail polish … and stories. Through her journals, dated by year, Sandra revisits happy or significant episodes in her life. She asks Jude and Colleen to share their untold stories. She is gathering up memories to take with her when she goes.
The novel moves in two directions – and at two speeds – at once. It races forward, faster and faster, to its sad and inevitable end; and it meanders longingly backward. Burnard reminds us that the mind can travel any time, any place, any where; memories cannot be restrained by bodies or beds.
