Mary Elizabeth Guinness, a woman in her late forties living with her husband and young daughter in Calgary, sees black holes. They’ve been with her throughout her life, though until recently they were infrequent apparitions. Lately, they have become her constant companions. Spinning bodies produce black holes, objects so dense nothing can emerge from them. It is impossible to tell the history of a black hole, from whence it came. Mary’s life is spinning beyond her control. Her domineering husband, Gregory, wants to buy a new, bigger home. Their marriage has grown cold and empty like the living room of the house Gregory is pressuring her into accepting. Mary’s grandfather died a few months before the story begins, diminishing her ties to Scotland, the ancestral home where she was born but lived only briefly. Gregory chides her for having difficulty returning to normal after she comes back from the funeral. He doesn’t see how his wife is losing her roots, her anchor. One morning, waiting for the bus on the way to her job as an insurance claims assessor, Mary meets Sierra at the bus stop. Mary, a former hippy wild child, sees a kindred spirit in the young woman who sports a nose ring and a close-shaven head. Wise beyond her years, it is her new friend who reads the signs and suggests perhaps Mary is pregnant. This unexpected news pushes Mary into a widening spiral. She takes frequent sick days at work. She compulsively clips newspaper articles about black holes to share with Sierra. She doesn’t tell Gregory about her condition, sensing he is playing at the role of concerned husband over her continuing grief at the loss of her grandfather, mouthing the necessary platitudes but not going any deeper to find out what is really happening with her. A car accident crystallizes her situation. She tells Gregory something that may or may not be true but represents the gulf in their relationship. She has all but decided to leave him when Gregory suffers his own personal crisis, briefly changing Mary’s focus. Mary departs Calgary with her daughter and Sierra for her childhood home in Manitoba, where her parents still live. In Tom Wolfe tradition, she needs to find out whether she can go home again, and what home really is. She opens a tearoom and meets a man who helps opens her eyes, a famous-but-anonymous author who wrote a bestseller about his experiences talking with God. As she learns how to fit back into her old community, how to reestablish relationships that have long been distant, Mary discovers many things about her roots of which she was unaware, things hidden by her parents. The phrase "Jenny Muck"–Scottish slang for a workingwoman–echoes in Mary’s conscious. It represents many things unseen–including a childhood encounter beneath a bridge where she first heard the expression that is one of the keys to her past. Connolly’s first novel is a voyage of discovery, a bold exploration of a richly drawn female psyche. The present-tense narrative adds immediacy and urgency to Mary’s plight as she struggles to rediscover and redefine herself. He deftly captures not only the emotional angst, but also the magic of developing relationships and the uniqueness of the Western Canadian setting. Web site and all contents © Copyright Bev Vincent 2023. All rights reserved. |
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