Demons and Deities

Tragedy falls from the blue of a Nova Scotian beach day when 17-year-old Lisa MacKenzie rolls her 20-year-old brother Damian’s ATV into a shallow stream and, pinned underneath, drowns while he snoozes after a swim. The only sign that anything’s amiss is the distant sight of her kayak tied to his ATV’s trailer. Time stops for Damian as he and a stranger try to revive her, then watch helplessly as paramedics remove her body; and life virtually stops for her mother, Ingrid, as she faces every parent’s worst imagining. Thus opens Anne Simpson’s second novel, Falling, its events pooling around this incident, then rushing forward in a torrent that mimics time’s passage with an eerie verisimilitude.

Stymied by grief, mother and son face the inevitable “what ifs?”—all the ways they might have averted Lisa’s fate. The fact is, Lisa herself is largely the author of it, snitching the four-wheeler behind Damian’s back, without having driven it before. The fluke that, with a boat in tow, she drowns beside the ocean in a few inches of water exemplifies the novel’s careful layering of sobering irony and banal detail. A Griffin Award–winning poet, Simpson uses her knack for distilling peculiar truths into such images, investing the random and mundane with an ironic determinism to create a feeling of double vision, almost vertigo. A pattern asserts itself—to us and gradually to the characters—that reflects how we survive, by attaching ourselves to the visible while resisting the unseen. Ingrid in particular clings to the obvious, the rites and rituals of “normal” life as insulation against its mysterious possibilities.

But the human imagination intervenes, as time proves itself both illusory and relentless, a paradox that continually repeats itself. The farther time pulls Ingrid and Damian from that tragic afternoon, the more they are caught in its whirlpool, Lisa’s memory “fixed in the immovable smile of the dead” and the realm of unscripted uncertainty. Collapsing the timeline of their grief ’s nadir—during which Damian quits art school and Ingrid succumbs to an inertia fed by the earlier loss of both parents and her children’s father to divorce—Simpson fast-forwards ten months to their first step in moving forward. Lisa’s yellow kayak lashed to their car roof, mother and son arrive in Ingrid’s birthplace, Niagara Falls, Ontario, to scatter Lisa’s ashes in the river.

With its coursing water “thick as a muscle,” the Falls is a place Lisa dreamed of seeing but never did, because of Ingrid’s odd refusal to revisit it. Ingrid’s blind brother still lives there: Roger Hockridge, a former daredevil who, intent on facing “the whiteness of his own death,” went over the Falls not once but twice in his “Bomb Barrel,” a third, aborted attempt narrowly avoiding disaster. Father of a mentally disabled boy-man named Elvis, Roger is a 60ish, ponytailed has-been with a good heart, whose appearance almost parodies Damian’s. Named for the Greek daimon, an intermediary spirit between deity and man, Damian moves with “animal grace” and is blessed with god-like looks and “hair like the angel Gabriel.”

The family’s penchant for exalted monikers—his mother’s namesake is Ingrid Bergman—accentuates the disparity between the sublime and the mundane. Even more literally, the novel’s settings reflect the dualism of ideal and reality: the relatively pristine shoreline of Nova Scotia’s Northumberland Strait in contrast to tourist-trap Niagara Falls, where nature’s sublimity clashes with civilization’s tacky attempts to exploit it. But Simpson understates the ridiculous, avoiding satire; consequently, Falling reverberates with the strange but true coexistence of the iconic and the ordinary, the ersatz and the authentic, neither more valuable than the other in Simpson’s eyes.

Underlying this tenuous balance is an indelible net formed by the novel’s constant yet constantly shifting pairings of parent and child, sister and brother, youth and elder—the human patterns that exist within time and outside it in the cadences of memory. For Damian, though, the most immediate, vital pairing is sexual, when he practically stalks and then has an intense but short affair with a girl alluring enough to almost dislodge his grief. The ethereal yet physically enchanting Jasmine is a transient tattoo artist who hopes to move on to better things. Damian seeks to lose himself inside her, to the point of violation—an echo of his mother’s helpless urge to control not just her life but his. Clearly, the violation of love’s boundaries invites chaos.

His thwarted urge for control pushes Damian to the brink when he sees Jasmine kissing his uncle, and his cousin Elvis—whose mental incapacity undermines his free will—makes off with the urn containing Lisa’s ashes. Midway through the novel, these events effect a roaring confluence captured in prose that eschews punctuation yet remains brilliantly accessible. It telescopes time into a dizzying countdown as Damian manages to retrieve the ashes and place them in the yellow kayak for their final, solo journey downriver—a journey imitating that of the toy canoeist in the children’s classic Paddle to the Sea. Then Damian goes AWOL, bussing and hitchhiking back to Cribbon’s, where Lisa died, and abandoning his mother and Jasmine to their fears that he has accompanied the kayak over the Falls and into the abyss.

With its shifting, often vertiginous narrative viewpoints, the novel unfolds like a classical myth, maintaining until this point an odd distance between us and its characters. Their actions—like the writing itself, which mirrors the weight and flow of water—have a cumulative force, a momentum created by the swirling, pooling and sweeping effect of time itself, and the clash between individual choices and uncontrollable nature. Catharsis and redemption do not come until Damian is found, disoriented and hiding out in a vacant cottage, by Raymond, the good Samaritan who first appears when Lisa dies and does what he can to help. The story’s emotional power collects around this gentle widower and “protector” of goodness, who walks his dog on the beach and trains his telescope on Cassiopeia, named for the goddess decreed by Poseidon to sacrifice her only daughter to a sea monster.

Here the grand design reveals itself; in it we discern the creator’s deft hand. An open-hearted retired judge, Raymond is the real risk taker. We fall headlong into the pathos of his life, in several exquisitely rendered passages recounting his memories of caring for his terminally ill wife and their hopelessly disabled son. Although his love cannot save either, his choice to respond with kindness and stoicism to fate’s whims gives life its meaning and rivets us. Finally, his compassion and self-forgiveness enable in the other, reunited mother and son the self-forgiveness necessary for them to make peace with tragedy—an affirmation made powerful and utterly believable by Simpson’s remarkable grace. In the patterns and rhythms of nature itself comes redemption, albeit bittersweet.