Rosemary Nixon
If you are an author with enough talent to teach others, and the ability to conjure such images as "snow crying to the ground," why would you, as creative-writing teacher Rosemary Nixon has done, choose to tell a story of illness and death so wrenching some readers will turn away?
A tale of waiting and crying and hoping and dying, set against the fluorescent glare and the mechanistic hum of the neonatal intensive-care units of the Canadian Prairies? A story that starts with pain and ends with pain, punctuated with beepers going off all along the way because "babies are trying to die"?
Of course, many do write well about the anguish of ill and broken children, not to mention the desperation of the parents left holding the tiny pieces. Ian Brown's The Boy in the Moon: A Father's Search for His Disabled Son merged the chill of medical mystery with searing emotional distress into a whole that, despite technical language and excruciating heartache, stayed accessible to the reader. Why? Because like other deeply personal stories of grief successfully shared, Brown's was told with such intensity of purpose – to educate, to relieve, to honour – that the rawness, the sheer honesty swept us along despite the pain, just as a cut so thin and sharp goes undetected until we notice the blood.
In Kalila, all the same parts are there: a baby with collapsing veins and "thick, creamy secretions," who cannot swallow, endless torturous treatments and diagnoses. A young couple coping and then not. But there is a strange dance of distance that renders the pain here so heavy, an emphasis on both medicine and physics that weighs down the plot (this is a novel, after all), while depriving us of the intimacy we crave in literature.
Nixon's publisher tells us her novel was written over about 15 years on two continents, and there's lots of inventive structural stuff thrown in to suggest much thought and control. Most promising is the juxtaposition of voices as Brodie, the science-teaching husband, and Maggie, the wandering mother-with-no-baby, along with their doctor, alternate eponymous chapters. A diamond turned round and round in many hands to light the facets, find the flaws, locate the meaning.
Brodie, not surprisingly, is a quiet man, good at suppressing his feelings most days and poor at expressing those he manages to locate. Any hope of rare insight into the male psyche is dashed. He also teaches physics, and whether he is a poor teacher or we bad students, many of the references that might work as meaningful metaphor merely baffle.
Maggie is our real narrator, as the mother so torturously close yet far from her flesh, the tiny parcel of baby she is prevented from carrying home to happily ever after. And, as always throughout this book, whether you like the endless grief or not, the writing sustains. Nixon is so very accomplished: "Take this blue baby and lay her out in snow, dust her into a blue-shadowed little girl wearing a grey unbuttoned coat, blue leotards, a dusky grey-blue toque. The child breathes peppermint air, sinks against the crispy crust, swings her arms in arcs, scissors her legs. Sshhish, Sshish. Toque dark against the diamond glitter."
And Nixon can write bravely too, as when doctors do their hospital rounds. "Move to Baby Hargreaves, the size of two blocks of butter, sparrow legs dry, the tendons showing, to Baby Mueller, a fourteen-pound elephant, brain damaged as he ploughed his way through his diabetic mother's birth canal, to Baby Leung, born without an anus."
So, of course, a writer has every right to explore any subject. But still, there is something so incongruent here with powerful writing sometimes stunted, insight defeated, plodding despite the poetry, as if the story is reflected through a mirror and then into another before being set down on paper. Where is that greedy, lusty, desperate drive to express?
It is so puzzling that I do something veteran writer Mavis Gallant (in a rare interview in Paris a few years ago) lectured me never to do: looked past the prose into an author's real life. "It is rarely relevant and it doesn't matter," Gallant chastised.
But I couldn't help it. There is a discordance in Kalila I needed to understand: How could Nixon write about the agony of losing a child, but do so often with the coolness of someone stopped for a moment at the scene of a horrible accident, before driving on? So, I Googled. And there it was, an explanation from Nixon herself, in an interview with Branta, an online magazine/blog from Fredericton, N.B., publisher Goose Lane Editions, which also published her book.
"I did go through the experience of having a very ill child in neonatal care. … I am so glad I took all the years I did until this story finally began to take control of itself, perfect itself, almost as if it were out of my hands. … It felt a bit like a miracle, like I could feel the story sighing with relief as, at last, after years, it fragmented its way toward its end, slipping, finally, into its intended form that had, up until then, eluded me."
So, that is exactly what she has accomplished: a novel, exquisitely written, about a terrible time but from a great distance, one that may be more emotionally palatable for her, but not quite as satisfying for us.
Paula Todd is a Toronto broadcaster, journalist and the author of A Quiet Courage: Inspiring Stories from All of Us.