Fiction Review

Kalila

by Rosemary Nixon

Fredricton, NB: Gooselane Editions, 2011

255 pp. 19.95$

“Kalila” means beloved: it is also the name of Maggie and Brodie’s baby girl, who cannot come home from the hospital. Kalila is born with everything wrong with her and must live in an Alberta hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit until an army of doctors can figure out how to help her live. Maggie and Brodie are kept at a painful distance from their newborn baby, and this distance threatens to seep into their own relationships with each other, and with their lives outside the neonatal unit. As Maggie tries to understand her fractured identity, a half-motherhood she cannot make complete, Brodie develops his own way of navigating this new life, retreating inside himself to a narrative he can share with his imprisoned daughter.  Kalila explores the bounds of love through these three people, whose lives become bound through devastating separations.

Though Maggie and Brodie’s story – love’s struggle to overcome adversity – may seem as old as time, Nixon’s novel is unique. Her prose is simultaneously poetic, and aggressive in its honesty. The effect of this is a startling kind of emotional intelligence. Though the pain here is controlled, it’s the precision and truth in the experience of pain and sadness that is perhaps most beautiful because it is so frequently enhanced by its attachment to the kind of full happiness that only parents seem to be able to fully understand. For readers who have not experienced the sharp love of parenthood, Nixon’s novel is a humbling glimpse into this world.

Nixon masterfully controls the a fine balance between an incomprehensibly difficult reality – in almost clinical detail – and the sometimes whimsical, sometimes explosively wild bursts of hope that punctuate this new family’s life together. The languages of physics and religion factor in importantly throughout Kalila, among other highly touching and effective allusions, and with these devices Nixon weds these two ranges of experience together. Indeed in so doing Nixon reinvigorates science with magic, so that it does not belong only to the sterile world of Kalila’s intensive care unit chamber, but to the inner world of the characters’ struggles and victories. Science becomes a discipline dedicated to irrational hope, rather than to answers and quantification.

The novel’s plot is somehow secondary to its emotional exploration, and so some readers may want to take care when deciding to read Kalila. The experience of reading this novel is rich and vibrant: Nixon has truly created something beautiful here. That being said, readers must be prepared to grieve along with Maggie and Brodie, and not just for the sake of their child, but for a multitude of experiences that are part of humanity. Though the story is specific, Nixon’s skill is such that Maggie and Brodie’s suffering extends to realities that very few people escape, and so the story is certain to reach into a reader’s own life in some way. Though even this is made beautiful and enriching by Nixon’s inspired language, not to mention the love she clearly has for her own characters and their lives, part of Nixon’s skill is that she successfully taps into sadness in so many of its shapes and forms, and the reader cannot protect themselves from this without pulling away somewhat from Kalila (and Kalila). To resist the closeness that Nixon creates however would be a sincere shame: in fact, perhaps this intimacy with the reader is the true antidote to the distance the characters must otherwise suffer. Nixon’s novel deserves the gift of full reader immersion, because it is a story that will give back in spades.