Open Arms
by Marina Endicott
Calgary: Freehand Books, ISBN 978-1-55111-932-8, 248 pp., $23.95 paper.

Edmontonian Marina Endicott's second novel Good to a Fault won the Commonwealth Prize for Best Book in the Canada-Caribbean Region and was shortlisted for Canada's most prestigious fiction award, the Scotiabank Giller Prize. On the strength of this success, her publisher, Freehand Books, has reissued her first novel, Open Arms, which was originally published in 2001 by Douglas & McIntyre.

This first novel has many of the admirable qualities of the second, including Endicott's ability to make good and likeable characters interesting.

Open Arms is narrated by Bess Connolly in three sections, each dealing with a stage in her young life. The first, "With the Band," shows Bess living with her mother in Saskatoon after having been raised by her grandparents in Nova Scotia. The Saskatoon household is rather odd, shared as it is by Isabel--Bess's mother--and Katherine, second wife of Isabel's ex-husband, the poet Patrick Connolly, and Irene, Katherine's daughter by Patrick.

Isabel has a night job delivering bundles of newspapers from the source to retail outlets around the city. But she dearly loves being a singer in bars; consequently, she hangs around a place called Hatch's and she's seeing a country singer named Boon.

The second section, "The Giant Doreen," takes place three years later, and Bess and Irene go out to Galiano Island in BC to pay a Christmas visit to their father and his current partner, Doreen. Bess makes this observation on her father's three women: "Patrick must have been going consecutively for height. If you lined up his wives in a row you could lay a board on their heads and have a slide. Isabel is shorter than me, Katherine is medium, and Doreen goes on forever in all directions." (94)

They find the rather unsociable Doreen pregnant and ready to give birth--her condition appears to have sent Patrick away yet again.

Where Part One seems to drag, Part Two quickly builds tension, as 20-year-old Bess and 10-year-old Irene become reluctant assistants when Doreen goes into labour. This section of the novel is easily the most engaging.

Part Three, "To the Top of the World," moves ahead another four years. Bess has been dealing with some of her own relationship problems as she pursues a career as a director in theatre for young people. This section finds her with her grandmother in Saskatoon, trying to track down Isabel. The quest takes them up north to the rustic abode of one of Isabel's men-friends; when they find she isn't there, they take off west, and the novel becomes reminiscent of Miriam Toews's The Flying Troutmans in the way the protagonists go in pursuit of someone without having a definite destination.

Some of the road sequences are quite lyrical; for example: "The land rises up gently toward the Rockies, giving you time to adjust to each new height. The foothills don't seem to get any higher for a long time, but at the crest of each hill the mountains snap nearer, clearer to the view. There was snow on them already, of course, but still some grey brown rock visible almost up to the peaks. The reaching, shouldering shapes held my attention from time to time, and I'd have to force my eyes back onto the road." (189)

Open Arms deals with women's relationships with each other, especially those within families. The male characters are mostly ineffectual, from the absent poet Patrick to the middle-aged cowboys who pop up in Isabel's meanderings. Narrator Bess devotes many of her musings to trying to come to terms with her love for Daniel Bain, a young man she met in Nova Scotia. The romance is conducted primarily off-stage--the reader doesn't get to judge if he's the heartthrob Bess says he is.

This novel is full of good-hearted people, and you feel that every crisis--Doreen's giving birth to twins under adverse circumstances, for example--will have a heart-warming resolution. The happy ending is Hollywoodian--but if it leaves you with a good feeling, what's wrong with that?

Dave Williamson is a Winnipeg novelist.

Buy this book at McNally-Robinson Booksellers.

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