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Perfecting
by Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer
Fredericton, NB: Goose
Lane Editions, 2009, ISBN 978-086492-515-2, 334 pp., $22.95 paper.
Hollis Woolf is a renegade Mormon who drinks, ruminates, fathers children by two women, and rules his large brood with a tender brutality. He operates a gas-bar on by-passed Route 66 in New Mexico; to supplement the family income he arms his sons for robbery. Hollis keeps his boys in thrall to him with a potent combination of wheedling, lies, and violence. Curtis, his anointed heir, discovers that the privilege is a heavy burden. Obeying one too many of his father's orders, he commits the act that splits his family apart and sends him fleeing from the law.It's 1972 when Curtis crosses the border to Canada, a good time to forswear violence for pacifism. Curtis establishes a utopian community in a wooded farm lot northeast of Toronto where he tends to beehives instead of gas pumps and acquires a reputation as a healer. But thirty years on, when Martha, Curtis's lover, discovers a gun in his possession, her na•ve faith in him is shaken. She leaves "the Family"--as the residents of Curtis's commune refer to themselves-- and heads south in search of his biological family and some answers. Curtis follows. Meanwhile, thousands of miles away in war-torn Pakistan, Corporal Michael Dama retrieves ballistic weapons from former allies who are now enemies and collects war rugs, sending some to an American address. How these two plotlines interrelate is the subject of the Perfecting's final chapters.
This précis no more captures the flavour of Perfecting than a paraphrase captures a poem. Kuitenbrouwer's work has earned comparisons to Flannery O'Connor's, and it's easy to see why. The similarities extend beyond the bleak social conditions, dark humour and sharply observant sensibility to the religiously charged characters that some might label grotesque and others might call seekers after truth. I didn't always like or understand these characters, but I never found them boring. In their bruised and broken humanity, they argue strongly against the possibility or value of the kinds of perfection they seek.
Kuitenbrouwer treats her readers with respect, anticipating that we will follow her characters' mental leaps and lows and will work to piece together the shape of her story. She makes the effort worthwhile by treating us to sentences that sing and sometimes sting and to indelible tableaux, such as the vision of Hollis, fat and flaking with eczema, dancing in flames, or of the cloud of bees that rises from the commune just before Curtis's departure.
Much of the plot unwinds in flashback and interior monologue, so we spend a great deal of time in the heads of seven of the main characters. Yet to some degree their motivations remain opaque. The character of Martha, in particular, is a puzzle that never really gets solved. And early in the story, especially, I sometimes craved to know these people more deeply. Yet in a way, that craving misses the point, because Perfecting isn't a conventional realistic novel. The breadth of its canvas and the cadences of its prose recall, at different times, the Bible or an epic or a Greek tragedy, and its people are both larger than life and more emblematic than the characters of conventional realistic fiction. Curtis is the prodigal son; Martha is the perpetual naïf. They are like figures in a carpet--distinct, but more meaningful for what they contribute to the pattern than for themselves, for only the carpet as a whole tells the story. Having said all that, Hollis Woolf will remain in my mind as one of the most formidable personifications of evil I've met in literature--or, for that matter, in film. In fact, he reminded me of Marlon Brandon in some of his key roles--Stanley Kowalski, Don Corleone, and especially Kurtz. The power he wields over his family is all too believable, and the legacy of pain that he passes to others is not only the stuff of myth, but of reality.
The repercussions of violence and of misguided utopian aspirations--within families, communities, and nations--are the central concerns of this book. The novel challenges us to look at the damage we do to ourselves, to one another, and to the earth itself--all in the name of perfecting. What might we be, if we stopped hurting each other in the quest for power or for purity? What might we be if we accepted ourselves as flawed and already fallen?
Susan Olding lives and writes in Kingston, Ontario.
Buy this book at McNally-Robinson Booksellers.