A Sharp Sweetness

Elizabeth Hay’s Snow Road Station opens fifteen years ago with Lulu Blake, a sixty-two-year-old actor, leaving an unnamed theatre (though clearly it’s the National Arts Centre in Ottawa) and brooding on her performance as Winnie in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days. “She had muffed her lines,” we’re told. The irony is not lost on Lulu that the specific line she couldn’t remember —“O woe is me”— is a sentiment with which her character struggles. The situation of Winnie, brave and determinedly optimistic, buried first up to her waist and then up to her chin in a mound of sand, is a subtle but recurring theme in the novel. How does a woman of a certain age give meaning to her life? Can the narrowing of prospects also create opportunities for new insights, deeper vision? Has she only muffed the line or has she lost it?

We have met Lulu before: she was a secondary but significant...