BOOK REVIEW : Postwar Return to Her Childhood Home and Harsh Realities

HOMESICK by Guy Vanderhaeghe (Ticknor & Fields, $18.95, 320 pages) Isolated in the hamlet of Connaught on the plains of Saskatchewan, three generations are forced into involuntary intimacy when Vera, the widowed daughter, returns to her childhood home with her 12-year-old son. Vera is a hard case, surely one of the least lovable heroines in recent fiction. As a high school sophomore, taken out of class to manage the household after her mother’s early death, she had felt robbed of her youth; she was turned into her father’s drudge and her frail younger brother’s protector. Though she had loved and defended 5-year-old Earl, resentment soon drove her to run away and join the Canadian womens’ army. Already tough and self-reliant, she had thrived in that environment only to find herself at loose ends when World War II ended and she was demobilized.

When her brief marriage to a gentle, scholarly man ended with his untimely death, she was left with a baby and a resurgence of her old bitterness. One way and another, Vera managed to support the boy in Toronto, but by the time the novel opens, she has run out of options. A docile child, Daniel has abruptly become a contentious adolescent, and with characteristic impetuosity, Vera decides to go back to Connaught, where the rural environment offers few temptations to teen-agers. Her father, Alec Monkman, has prospered financially during the 17-year estrangement, and while Vera has no intention of forgiving the old man, she’s willing to consider a truce, with strict limits to be set by her.

As adamant as his daughter, 73-year-old Alec is eager for her return, though he pretends otherwise. The long years of loneliness, with only a loyal employee, Mr. Stutz, for company, have softened Alec’s jagged edges; wealth has mitigated his stinginess. Vera and the grandson he has never seen are his only relations. Earl is gone, though the reader will not discover exactly what “gone” means until the end of this uncompromising study of conflicting wills.

Although the emphasis in “Homesick” is upon place rather than character, old Alec Monkman is a memorable portrait of a plain man forged by poverty, annealed by personal tragedy and hidebound by the rigid limits of the small provincial town in which he has spent his life. Having given up Alec, Vanderhaeghe seems to have little creative energy to lavish upon Vera or Daniel. Vera is brusque and profane, unable to acknowledge her father’s clumsy overtures or accept his belated generosity. With virtually no job opportunities in Connaught, she finds herself once again serving as housekeeper for an old man and a boy; the stark irony of her position corrodes her personality still further. Rebelling against his mother’s obduracy and desperately needing the companionship and affection his grandfather offers, Daniel allies himself with the old man, and the two of them gradually build a bulwark to protect themselves from Vera’s unpredictable outbursts of temper.

Determined to end the connection that undermines her authority over Daniel, Vera moves out of the family house for a second time, once again abandoning her father to solitude. The hurt is exacerbated because it deprives him of the grandson he has come to love and who loves him. Helped by the generosity of Mr. Stutz, Vera restores a squalid cafe and becomes her father’s rival in the restaurant business. While she doesn’t immediately succeed in luring away his hotel customers, her venture flourishes after a mining company comes to town, and gradually the Monkman family arrives at a grudging and constrained accommodation.

Flashbacks describing Vera’s girlhood, her army career and her improbable marriage help us understand her, but she remains an enigma, a woman whose two short years of love and happiness seem an aberration in a life otherwise untouched by grace or pleasure. Despite adroitly written scenes from the marriage, willful, smoldering Vera Monkman and quiet, aesthetic Stanley Miller remain the most improbable of lovers, the attraction of opposites notwithstanding. The real heroine of this novel is the Canadian landscape, portrayed with a lyrical sensitivity that enlarges our comprehension of characters shaped by its extremes.

Next: Carolyn See reviews “Bird of Paradise” by Vicki Covington (Simon & Schuster).