Zoe Whittall

I know that Zoe Whittall has a new novel out, but I've just gotten around to finishing her 2007 title, Bottle Rocket Hearts (Comorant).

How about we start with the trailer?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMXCxJ8YCBM

So what's this book about? This summary from the Feminist Review sums it up nicely:

If I were to describe Bottle Rocket Hearts as a sort of creative autobiography replete with journal excerpts and a first person narrator, which also reads like a queer coming of age novel, you probably wouldn’t want to read it. But for anyone who has ever tried to align their politics with their personal life and discovered a plethora of limits and contradictions, this book will be a fun, fast-paced read. And it has punk rock bulging from the seams and postmodern emotional conundrums that will resonate with those who have tried to live in uncharted territory. Having read Zoe Whittal’s tightly crafted tale, I’ve had to reassess my position on the idea that diaries are cheesy and coming of age novels are boring. Bottle Rocket Hearts suggests otherwise.

The best review I found was by Sandra Alland in Xtra:

There are no simple solutions in the world of this book, instead [it becomes] a dedicated personal investigation by Eve. For this reason, Bottle Rocket Hearts never becomes preachy despite being chock-full of righteous politics. Whittall lets her characters breathe and fail like real humans, rather than forcing them to be cardboard cutouts for ideas.

Then there is this intriging comment from Vancouver's Straight.com: "a novel this is not."

Not a novel? Why not?

The review in Matrix hints at an answer:

An entire chapter is dedicated to the long description of a play staged by Seven in reaction to the incident, telling rather than allowing the characters’ feelings to manifest organically through their actions.

Alland found the novel "never" preachy, but some of it is, which undermines its other novelistic qualities: clear protagonist, moving through time to reach an objective, facing obstacles, battling an antagonist, overcoming complications, reaching new insight, resolution, promised land.

The story structure is conservative and effective. The book provides a good read, and a satisfying, thumping ending, which I won't give away, though I will come back to it at the bottom of this review.

What is the story? Here's Eye Weekly's summary:

Eve is a few days shy of her 19th birthday when we meet her, infatuated with an older woman but still living at home with parents who don’t know she’s gay. As she leaves their home in Dorval for an apartment in downtown Montreal, she enters a world of feminist activism, open relationships and drugs poached from dead people’s medicine cabinets, soundtracked by Team Dresch and Le Tigre.

Set around the time of the 1995 referendum, the book sizzles with heightened political awareness and urgency. Walls are tagged with “oui” and “non,” biker bombs explode in the night and the riot grrrl movement has jumped the shark. The political becomes personal as Eve is torn between her separatist girlfriend and Anglo friends and a hate crime hits close to home.

As Alland noted, there's a high degree of risk that this plotline will become "preachy" ... or as the Feminist Review reviewer suggested, "boring."

On the whole, however, Whittall avoids the pitfalls.

Eve is a fantastic character. Sensitive, charming, lovely, tough and tender, honest and self-confident, loyal and curious. Slightly mysterious, too. She doesn't reveal, for example, how she voted in the referendum.

One might call her oui-curious.

Eve carries this novel, and one can't help but root for her.

So, of course this novel is a novel. But what kind of novel is it?

The book it reminded me most of was George Fetherling's Travels by Night: A Memoir of the Sixties (1994). Because, while Whittall's novel is the story of Eve, it's also the story of Montreal in the mid-1990s ... and specifically the story of gay Montreal in that period.

It's a social novel with documentary power.

For example, on referendum night, Eve sits in a francophone gay bar surrounded by oui supporters who are becoming despondant as the results go against them. Someone eventually says, "We'll still be gay tomorrow."

A unique perspective about what happened that night.

The Globe and Mail's review is worth quoting:

Zoe Whittall might just possibly be the cockiest, brashest, funniest, toughest, most life-affirming, elegant, scruffy, no-holds-barred writer to emerge from Montreal since Mordecai Richler ... Bottle Rocket Hearts is a major statement about lessening unhappiness by overcoming the small dishonesties that creep into everyday life.

*

Now, about the ending (and be warned, I'm going to give it away)...

The last sentence is, "I feel soft and furious."

Eve is furious because she's just discovered that her girlfriend, Della, isn't who she said she was. Della had been keeping some major secrets from her (I'm not going to give those away), but these are revealled to Eve when Della lands in the psyche ward of the hospital. Eve's response is to turn away, leave the hospital, feeling "soft and furious."

Boom, bang. The end.

A few sentences earlier, Eve says: "Della is a story I will tell to reference my last stretch of adolescence. Those years I dated a fiction. She's locked up and I am anywhere I choose to be."

Well, whatever. I felt let down by this, and I puzzled over why.

I think Eve made the right choice by walking away from Della, but I think it's false to call Della "a fiction." It's a too-neat summation, and I think it's a false sentiment. Eve is highly ambiguous about her feelings about one of the most dramatic events in Canadian history, and yet she reduces the complexity of her former lover to a quick dismissal.

That bugged me, and it made me dislike Eve.

When Eve's mother says she's "tolerant," Eve rightly remarks that she doesn't want to be tolerated because she's gay; she wants to be "accepted."

But Della is offered no retrospective tolerance or acceptance.

In the end, Eve fails to offer a reflective response; she leaves behind a harsh, conservative judgement. Della is not a "mystery"; she is a "fiction." And the love that Eve talks about so much, isn't a path into the unknown, it's more of a social contract.

If we ever hear more from Eve, I suspect we'll learn that her adolescence didn't end with the dismissal of Della; it ended when she realized that she still had much left to learn.

http://thenewcanlit.blogspot.com/