Kenneth J Harvey
Kenneth J. Harvey's Reinventing the Rose was first published in a Russian translation last year and is selling briskly enough within the former Soviet Union that the first Canadian and original English-language edition is being promoted as "the international bestseller." In the case of any author other than Harvey, this would seem as extremely odd as the fact that Reinventing the Rose is not published by the genuinely international publisher of his widely and wildly acclaimed "masterpiece," Blackstrap Hawco (2008), which was nominated for the Giller, the IMPAC Dublin and the Commonwealth prizes. But Harvey's literary life has always been an odd, odd thing.
You don't have to have parents born in Russia or friends with close ties to the newest wave of Russian immigrants (as I do) to understand why Reinventing the Rose is such a popular success during the reign of the oligarchs. It can be readily understood as an allegory of how absurdly human rights are attacked, violated, overturned and aborted under any judicial system that protects property rights above all else.
When Anna Wells, a slightly reckless and very restless Newfoundland painter, has unprotected sex on the most fertile day in her cycle, neglects to take a morning-after pill and then discovers herself to be pregnant by her feckless, on-and-off lover, Dr. Kevin Prowse, a St. John's gynecologist, she decides to have the baby despite his misgivings. Embracing a new sense of herself as a single mother, and new possibilities for her art, Anna breaks away from Kevin and buys a house in the outport of Bareneed. (She's obviously not read Harvey's most popular book, The Town That Forgot How to Breathe, or she'd know that Bareneed is the last place on Earth she ought to be if she's looking for a happy outcome to anything.) Fearing that he might eventually be sued for child support, Kevin sues Anna for return of his "property" - he wants the provincial justice system to force Anna to have an abortion.
As Anna's story unfolds over the 56 days that bring her ever closer to the legal deadline for abortions in Canada, Harvey intercuts his narrative with an informal rewriting of textbook descriptions of day-by-day embryo development from Day 1's fertilizing of an egg "the size of a period in a book," in which "[s]venteen trillion possible combinations have been narrowed down to one," through to Day 56's erect and rounded cockroach-size embryo with half-open eyes, blue retinas, bendable elbows, kicking legs, 10 fingers and 10 toes and a mouth where "[t]e upper lip is perfectly formed."
While Anna becomes increasingly obsessive, compulsive, paranoid, hallucinatory or visionary, isolated and reclusive, her art becomes more complex and commercially viable. And, as media coverage of this curious civil suit expands, pro-choice and pro-life advocacy groups form a unique alliance outside and inside the courtroom.
Then, just as a reader is getting prepared for compelling courtroom drama, Reinventing the Rose "strains against the lines of its own force," as James Lasdun said in the Guardian of Harvey's novel Inside. Anna's activities become arbitrary, pointless, without impact, and the already thin subplot involving her real-estate agent and neighbours in Bareneed becomes as flimsy as phlogiston. The court proceedings turn into a farce that stacks the odds against Anna with such authorial truculence, cantankerousness and condescension that naive readers might well feel conned by the whole book. That would be a shame: Reinventing the Rose delivers timely counterpunches against the economic and cultural policies of every political regime that uses the language of stable government and family values to overturn women's rights.
I must admit to a long-standing prejudice against Kenneth J. Harvey's way of writing. Like the recently departed and always divisive expatriate American artist Cy Twombly, Harvey "experiences" his works directly by confronting models of improvisation with methods of planned chance. Writers who go about composing books like this easily fall prey to the immaturity of thinking themselves underappreciated geniuses when they are merely ingenious lampoonists. Blackstrap Hawco marked a sea change not in the way Harvey goes about writing, but in the spirit in which he writes: There's now a deeper recognition in his work that to be an adult is to remain ever hopeful.
Contributing reviewer T.F. Rigelhof regrets that he didn't discover Blackstrap Hawco before the editorial deadline arrived for his most recent book: Hooked on Canadian Books: The Good, the Better and the Best Canadian Novels Since 1984.