Crow Lake by Mary Lawson

There have been a couple of things that have bothered me about books I've read over the last couple of years, and I'm delighted to say that this book neatly sidesteps both of them. The first is the Canada 100 list I'm slowly making my way through - I have complained repeatedly that it's far too weighted towards the five years before the list came out, and that the books on it are frequently not very good. (Outright bad, in a couple of cases.)  And then came along Crow Lake, which is on that list, and relatively recent, but was, to my immense satisfaction, very, very good.

The other gripe I've had is thematic - I've read at least two books recently that dealt with death and grief in ways that felt off-handed and slightly flippant. They definitely felt like neither had been written by people who'd dealt with grief or known what it is to live with it, the complexities of that situation. So imagine how happy I was when this book, which started off with the death of both parents of the narrator, dealt sensitively and completely with the ways in which it both defines and doesn't define your life afterwards. They ways in which it never goes away, but that doesn't mean it's all you are, either.

There's one other thing that this book does well, before I launch into a description of the plot. I sometimes have trouble with books where you have main characters who will just not fucking say what they need to say, will avoid conversation for the sake of the plot. I wasn't sure if it was that I am too impatient with people who aren't good at communicating, or if the authors weren't doing enough to make me understand why these characters weren't communicating.

I've decided, after reading this book, that it is the fault of those authors. Sorry. I say that because this book similarly has a main character who has a hard time talking about her feelings, who has bottled up what she thinks she knows about her family and used it as a weapon, mostly against herself. And yet, it felt right this time, because Mary Lawson let me close enough to the character to understand why, the particular cracks and chips in her coping techniques that had led her to this spot. She didn't irritate me, because I understood her, and many authors aren't skilled enough, or don't care enough, to do so, and so their characters who withhold information don't feel true.

Okay, time to put these things I really liked about Crow Lake into context. It is the story of four children. First, two brothers, just done and about to be done high school, and their much younger sisters, one still in diapers. They live in Northern Ontario, and were a stable, happy family until both parents are killed in a car accident. From there, the town tries to help, but no one is sure what to do. An aunt comes from rural Quebec and proposes to take them back and split them up between families, but the narrator, the older of the sisters, is so traumatized by the prospect of losing what is left of her family that the oldest brother decides to forgo teacher's college to keep the family together.

This is interspersed with the reminiscences of the character (Kate?) as she is in her late twenties, a newly minted assistant professor of biology at a university in Toronto, and we see how this child who turned inwards and was unable to deal with any more change has calcified into a woman who has taken her need for stability and her inability to admit she needs things, and woven them into a story about the tragedy of her family. We don't get to see what the full tragedy is for a long time, and it's wrapped up with another family in the Northern Ontario town that has much more sorrow in their lives, in the midst of daily cruelties.

In particular, there is now a distance between the narrator and her brother Matthew, the second oldest boy, clever and good at school in a way that Luke, the one who stepped away from education to keep everyone together, was not. He loved the rock pools and sparked her love of biology as a girl. She resents something he's done, and we don't know why, but it has put a distance between her and her family, and so, she believes, has her education. She's invited back up for her nephew's birthday party, and reluctantly brings the man she's been dating.

The book goes back and forth between these two time periods, and you know early that a couple of things happened with her brother, but not what they were. When they were finally revealed, and revealed to be as much about her perception and even more, her expectations of him, it was deeply satisfying, particularly when she was called on her assumptions by several people.

This is not a book with a large story, but it does a stellar job at the story of one family, and how early trauma has shaped these four children, and how those children both do and do not allow more change into their lives, do and do not adapt to altered circumstances, do or do not deal with fears of losing more people they love.