EX-COTTAGERS IN LOVE
By J. M. Kearns
Key Porter, 384 pages, $19.95
For the ex-cottagers of Ex-Cottagers in Love, it's one damn thing after another. At various points, they're forced to contend with crises in faith and compromised careers, with a rebellious teenager and an ailing parent, with anxious wives and adulterous ones, with abortion and arson and folk songs. As if that weren't angst enough, Virginia Woolf pops her moody head in, too. J. M. Kearns has thrown everything he has at his debut novel; some of it sticks and some of it doesn't, but the plot ambles along benignly enough until it is jarred by the melodramatic conclusion.
Protagonist Dave Moore is a Canadian expat living in L.A., where he came to be a songwriter and where, several abandoned demo tapes later, he now works as a paralegal at a massive law firm. At least his personal life is looking up: After years of pining, Dave's finally dating Maggie Taylor, whom he describes - approvingly - as a cross between Sophia Loren and Virginia Woolf. Smitten, he takes her to Muskoka to meet his family and splash around in the lake of his childhood cottage.
Only, Dave's on the wrong side of the lake. This is a rental; the Moore cottage stands on the other end, sold by his parents, now abandoned by its owner. He can't shake his feelings of betrayal, and the holiday, inevitably, wraps up poorly, with rain and tears and flaring tempers.
Then everything falls apart. Upon their return, Dave's 13-year-old nephew, George, demonstrates an alarming tendency for self-destruction; Dave's father, Joseph, suffers a stroke; and Dave's complacency - not to mention his preoccupation with the past - threatens both his career and his relationship.
Ex-Cottagers in Love circles around these three broken characters with a good deal of success. Kearns deftly navigates grade-school hierarchies and office bureaucracies, and it's easy to see how they'd hold George and Dave in their grip. Better still is Kearns's portrait of the family patriarch: Joseph is genially pompous in health, and in illness, he garners tremendous pathos. Stepping into the hospital room, Dave finds "an old man swaying in a big straight-backed chair in front of the window ... his head lolled forward [to expose]the dishevelled strands of his white hair across his scalp."
Kearns knows how to craft an evocative passage. He also has an ear for rhythm, most effectively deployed in declarative sentences: "She drove away and I went into my cheap little house and found a two-by-four that was leaning against a wall and swung it as hard as I could against a doorjamb and the doorjamb cracked."
Taken out of context, the prose sings. Taken in context, however, it hinges on a series of clichés. Dave's violent outburst is prompted by Maggie's refusal to kiss him. Maggie refuses to kiss him because she's involved with a man twice her age; she later confesses she stayed with the man because she "trusted him not to harm [her]" It's surprising to see Kearns explore such well-worn terrain, given that his acclaimed handbook, Why Mr. Right Can't Find You, was devoted to exploding hackneyed dating conventions.
In fact, none of the novel's female characters fares particularly well. Dave's mother and sister are sketched in the broadest of strokes; their actions can't help but read as arbitrary, and it's difficult to muster much enthusiasm for them. Even Maggie, who has bursts of complexity, is dealt a late plot twist that rings false and strange.
This would be forgivable if Ex-Cottagers in Love's fifth act didn't plunge toward an absolutely baffling conclusion. Discussing his beloved To the Lighthouse - whose once-more-to-the-lake theme this novel channels - Dave proclaims that sentimentality "is when you cook the books in favour of the emotion you want." By contriving a set of bizarre turns and implausible coincidences, that is precisely what Kearns does here. He's after a tearjerker ending, and he erodes all his earlier good work to get it. It's enough to make you throw down the book, throw up your hands, and head off for the relative pleasures of a rain-soaked stint in Muskoka.
Danielle Groen is an assistant editor at Chatelaine magazine, where she writes the monthly books column.