Do demons and ghosts play a role in our lives? We say we’re “plagued by demons,” “haunted by ghosts.” These phrases, holdovers from medieval times, are clichés. Yet, what if, as Sally Clark asks in Waiting for the Revolution, the demons and ghosts are real?
Clark’s novel tells the story of two young women living in the sexually liberated Toronto of 1974. One, Jay, sees ghosts. The other, Lily, hosts a demon. Clark walks a fine line between the metaphorical and the supernatural, skewers the sexual mores of the times, and shows us a Toronto both familiar and long lost.
It is the summer of 1974. Jay is boarding at the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority house (KAT House), while taking courses at an art school. Lily is a sorority sister who has failed her university courses.
They’re unlikely confidantes: Lily is a pot-smoking sexual adventuress, while Jay is a clear-eyed, virginal classicist, aptly positioned to comment on the antics of the sorority sisters, art students and artist/teachers around her.
When these artist/teachers come on the scene, Clark’s writing is at its witty best. William Rossco, for instance, lives with his wife in the suburb of Mimico but spends three days a week downtown: “He knew that in the course of his sojourn in the city, he would fall down a lot, spill beer on himself, get beer thrown at him, dribble mustard on his shirt (Rossco liked hot dogs), sit on a glob of paint, get covered in charcoal, commit any number of nefarious acts and through it all, his humble black T-shirt wouldn’t get crinkled and it wouldn’t show the dirt.”
The scene, what Jay calls an “entire society attached to the art school,” resembles that of any group attracted to courses in the arts (not always aspiring artists, as Clark is quick to distinguish). Clark turns their drunken afternoons around the Brunswick House’s Oblong Table into set pieces, some of the novel’s funnier moments.
Other establishments attached to the art-school scene read true as well. The European restaurant and its dark, tryst-worthy counterpart The Blue Cellar Room; the gay bar, Cock and Bull; the suburban home of Lily’s family – each location is another piece of urban culture that outsider Jay must puzzle out.
The characters move in and out of relationships, some holding onto a 1950s ideal of marriage, others living communally and sleeping with whomever offers. Jay struggles to understand where she fits and, as in the best coming-of-age novels, sits better in her own skin by novel’s end.
Sally Clark is the award-winning author of eight plays, so it isn’t surprising the dialogue in Waiting for the Revolution is sharp, and often hilarious. Jay’s interactions with men, especially Rossco, whose nickname for her, “Girl,” sums up his appetites, are fast, funny and off-kilter, moving the story forward in surprising ways.
At times, however, Clark uses an intrusive authorial voice, making statements about “middle-class youth of the twentieth century” and such that yank the reader out of the narrative, giving the novel an uneven pace.
Yet, she makes up for these lapses with spot-on satirical portraits of Che Guevera-obsessed middle-class revolutionaries, sorority girls, Canadian film stars, hippie chicks and art critics. During one Oblong Table session, Rossco contemplates “the fate of Canadian art. One could spend years befriending and compromising one critic and without warning, a new, stupid, vicious one would rise up to take his place, And then, one wastes more time trying to train the new one. And each time, they get dumber and meaner and more intractable, like mad kings, after centuries of inbreeding, an apotheosis of genetic despair.”
Clark leaves room for the reader to consider the metaphorical implications of Lily’s demon and Jay’s ghosts, yet these subtle intriguing subplots could be intensified to good effect. Other moments are beautifully rendered. When Lily first skydives: “It was as though she were entering the world of a miniature train set, with its mock hills and valleys, little houses interspersed with tiny roads and toy cars.”
Read Waiting for the Revolution for its recognizable, unforgettable characters and its trenchant immersion in a long-lost, free-spirited Toronto.
Sally Cooper confesses to a history with art-school scenes. She is the author of two novels, most recently Tell Everything.
