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What We All Long For

By Dionne Brand

Knopf Canada, 319 pages, $29.95

Dionne Brand's What We All Long For is her third and most accomplished novel. Set in contemporary Toronto, the novel is the overlapping story of four twentysomethings making a life in the city.

In Brand's last collection of poetry, Thirsty, she writes of a city that has never happened before. That city, Toronto, is sung by her as a place where the complexities and complications of human lives are experienced and expressed alongside a wide array of human frailties. Thirsty lyrically writes Toronto into a language not heard before. What We All Long For opens with a portrait of the city that makes it as central a character as any other in the novel. And it is not too much to say that Brand writes Toronto in this new novel as its never been written before.

Beginning with No Language is Neutral, then Land to Light On and Thirsty, Brand has developed a keen and incisive rendering of the everyday ordinariness of multicultural and multiracial Toronto. And in each of those poetry collections and her previous two novels ( Another Place, Not Here and At the Full and Change of the Moon), Toronto makes appearances within the individual and collective longings of many of the characters. But in What We All Long For, Toronto is magnified and specified as its own unique place. Brand's talent for putting that uniqueness into language and art comes through with profound intelligence, humour and realism. This novel is Toronto's book.

What We All Long For might be easily read as the story of four: Tuyen, born in Canada of Vietnamese refugee parents, and an artist who loves to do installations; Oku, a black male poet and intellectual desperately in love with Jackie and jazz; Carla, a mixed-raced woman who identifies as black and works as a bicycle courier; and Jackie, whose parents moved from Nova Scotia to Toronto when she was just a child, and who owns a second-hand clothing store on Queen Street West. While these four characters are the lens though which the overlapping narratives unfold, the story is much bigger than them. Other characters occupy the novel as well, giving Toronto a textured poetic reality. The lives of many others, including their families, unfold for us as these four try to figure out their own lives.

Each character is in family conflict of some sort. Carla has a younger brother who is constantly in trouble with the law, and clearly headed for bigger trouble. She is deeply affected by her mother's suicide and her father's indifference. Jackie appears disconnected from her formerly hipster mother and father. Her parents left Halifax as a young couple hoping to make it in Toronto. They arrived in a downscale area called Regent Park and stayed there, making few if any substantive changes to their lives. Oku is in constant conflict with a father whose immigrant striving has become tunnel-visioned and anti-intellectual, but whose brutality wounds and silences both son and mother.

Tuyen flees the suburban home of her Vietnamese parents to pursue life as an artist and, importantly, to escape the suffering her parents constantly experience over the loss of a child. This band of friends roams around Toronto and comes to own it in a new way. Most Torontonians will immediately recognize the uniqueness of the city Brand returns to us in this novel.

Cities seems to house heartaches of all sorts, and Brand chronicles them with tremendous artistry. One of Tuyen's installations is a cloth wall of collected longings, gathered by asking people what they long for. Tuyen's parents have a unfulfilled longing: In the 1970s, when they got on the boat to leave Vietnam, in the rush of the movement in the night-time, Tuan and Cam lost their eldest son, Quy. This particular story of loss drives the most central aspect of the novel. Quy's return to the family produces a stunning conclusion that is all too probable and real in urban life. Our interconnectedness is revealed in the conclusion of the novel, with consequences too vast to write here.

The characters of What We All Long For are deeply layered and complex, and they exhibit the many foibles of urban existence. Brand's great skill is to draw characters who remind us of people we all know. The craft of What We All Long For solidly establishes Brand as a literary contender. She writes desire like no one else, whether desire for commodities and consumption, for intimacy and love or for personal and collective liberation. She writes desire in a way that makes one say, "Aha! That is exactly what I have been feeling but could not say."

What We All Long For is a novel of the historical present that reflects back to us the intimacies of urban life. In the reflection, Brand makes us see ourselves differently and anew. She translates our desires and experience into a language, an art that allows us to voice that which we live, but could not utter or bring to voice until she did so for us.

Yes, I am crediting Brand's art with tremendous power, but if the truth be told, every great city has its literary moments, and contemporary Toronto has been longing for one. We can now say with certainty that we no longer have to long for a novel that speaks this city's uniqueness: Dionne Brand has given us exactly that.

Rinaldo Walcott teaches cultural studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto.

Chapter One

Readers can read the first chapter of What We All Long For today on our website, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/bookclub.

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