Trevor Cole’s third novel, Practical Jean, should be a starred pick for every book club in Canada this fall. While reading this biting and black comedy of middle-class mores gone murderously wrong, I couldn’t help but imagine the kind of conversations – and no doubt nervous laugher and darting glances – that it would inspire among the sort of comfortable, middle-aged suburban women who typically populate book clubs these days. I propose as much because these very same people populate Cole’s book, which, at its best moments, combines diamond-cut social satire with thoughtful contemplations of friendship’s burdens, meaning and purpose.
The novel is set in a standard issue small town called Kotemee, where Jean Vale Horemarsh – a blandly likeable ceramics-maker who drives a topaz Hyundai, likes garden greenery and her husband, Milt, and tends to sugar her inherently small-talky conversation with words like “sweet” and “delectable” – is confronted with an existential crisis after caring for her mother unto the old woman’s ravaging death from cancer.
Practical Jean, by Trevor Cole, McClelland & Stewart, 294 pages, $29.99
This up-close encounter with the unmitigated human suffering of someone close to her leaves Jean wondering if there’s any point to life itself. It’s the kind of pondering that’s alien to her daily way of life (though it recalls dark childhood memories of drowned pets and stuffed animals), and even more so to her immediate circle of friends and family, types who would rather have another glass of wine or dessert square or holiday cruise than worry their heads over such questions, but it becomes a matter of permanent concern to Jean, and it inspires her to a quest that becomes the novel’s startling premise.
Having failed to save her mother from suffering, she decides to save her closest friends instead, and in place of inevitable suffering, she decides to grant them the gift of a truly happy experience that, by Jean’s own “exquisitely practical” hand, will be their last.
Accordingly, Jean plans, or more precisely plots a series of encounters with her friends, which gives Cole the opportunity to reveal, to very funny effect, the remarkable banalities of unreflective middle-class life: hosting a party featuring a fancy tropical drink you sampled at the liquor store, flirting with a younger man driving a grotesquely modified sports car, dressing up for an evening out “in the city,” a casual lesbian kiss “that was quite unexpected, actually,” a road trip with a girlfriend set to an endless Celine Dion soundtrack, etc.
Were Cole interested only in making fun of such efforts at living a happy life, the novel would come off as a rather predictable and lazy set of joke sequences from a writer who, on the evidence of his earlier novels, is clearly capable of much more. And indeed, as much is clear in Practical Jean; The novel’s often cruelly funny takes on middle-aged, middle-class life are shot through with unsettling sentiments and rising tensions because they’re always part of Jean’s murderous charity to her friends.
As the novel develops, Jean’s quest begins to attract interest, confusion and suspicion – notably from her ineffectual brothers, who work for the local police force, and, more consequentially, from other law-enforcement officials; from her husband, Milt, whose own secret activities contribute to their marriage’s breakdown; and from Fran, a more peripheral friend of Jean’s who tries to become closer by agreeing to help Jean track down Cheryl, a long-lost best friend. Jean regards helping Cheryl experience happiness and avoid suffering as her would-be crowning achievement, and it is with respect to this dimension of the novel that Cole both falters and achieves something very fine.
The faltering comes in his offering a series of flat chapters on Cheryl’s failing life – she’s a suicidal drunk presiding over a failing winery in upstate New York – as occasional breaks from his lively following out of Jean’s mordantly murderous quest. This interleaving creates an off-kilter rhythm for the overall story, and Cheryl’s own situation doesn’t seem to rate this much attention prior to Jean’s visiting her.
That visit, however, is where the novel’s profundities impressively emerge. As Jean struggles to resolve her plan to help Cheryl with the depressing realities she confronts about Cheryl’s life, and then with Cheryl’s unexpected desire to seek happiness in a way that puts Jean at risk of arrest, Cole offers a series of revealing, even moving meditations on the nature of friendship, on the quality of life, and on the difficulties, meaning and purpose of sacrificing your own desires for the greater good of someone else. Meanwhile, he simultaneously heightens the suspense of Jean’s becoming a murder suspect who, for love of her friend, has no choice but to go home and face the just consequences of her self-styled good deeds.
Suddenly, everything about Trevor Cole’s Practical Jean seems altogether grave, but don’t worry book club members, this wise and funny writer finishes off his latest novel with an epilogue whose closing words will leave you laughing (or shuddering and laughing) for days.
Randy Boyagoda is a professor of literature at Ryerson University and author of Governor of the Northern Province, a novel.
