Fiction Review

Julia P.W. Cooper

Perfecting
by Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer
Fredericton, NB: Goose Lane Editions, 2009
336 pp. $22.95

Of the ubiquitous bees that meander, swarm, and prophetically speckle Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer’s second novel Perfecting, the narrator relates: “They were wild now; they would learn wildness and were already blessed in their perfection.” Wildness and perfection are two sides of Kuitenbrouwer’s narrative coin, and Perfecting revels in its continual confusion and flipping of seeming opposites. The result is a work that finds order amidst chaos, rain amongst drought, and a healing humour which brings levity to unlikely places.

Although the plot tells of murder, guns, war, and damnation, Kuitenbrouwer’s strikingly fresh use of language leads its reader to linger on the “terrible beauty”, to quote Yeats, that such ugliness brings forth. Indeed, it is the author’s art for storytelling that propels Perfecting forward, engulfed in the sensual and enflamed by the godly.

The novel is at once a quest narrative and the tale of a prodigal son’s return. Set along thePecos River in New Mexico and in a commune in rural Canada, these two worlds share a common man: Curtis Woolf. A modern day messiah, Curtis forms a ‘family’ of believers and pacifists to hide his own fears of his blood ties, and a violent past. Curtis crosses the border into Canada thirty years earlier, fleeing New Mexico with blood on his hands. When his lover, Martha, discovers the instrument of that destruction hidden in their commune, Soltane, the very foundation of her faith quivers and collapses. In search of answers and a unified selfhood after decades of communal ‘perfecting’, Martha makes her way toward Curtis’ enigmatic past and its key players. The terrible beauty born of Martha’s pilgrimage to her lover’s past is that it severs her from her own, and ‘burdens’ her with freedom.

Martha’s narrative counterpart is the aged and loyal Hattie, bound to Curtis’ cursed father, Hollis Woolf. Having lived for years wit her love unrequited, Hattie is left with only the reality of time past and bad habits: “I don’t mind”, she said once to him, “I don’t mind so much that you don’t love me so long as you keep touching me like you might one day.” Recalling her first unanswered “I love you” to Hollis, Hattie listens to the words fade away, and the narrator meditates: “What became of words once they were spoken, spiraling out into the universe, decaying like vegetable waste? What grew from that?” Kuitenbrouwer’s narrator points to the fecundity and resilience of language as she nods to Hattie’s similar traits. This narrator is not an altogether unbiased conduit; consequently, many of the novel’s striking chords and moments of wry humour reverberate from a place of narrative implication.

Very much a novel of origins, spiritual and familial, Perfecting dispels any belief in the absolute knowability of those beginnings, or their ends. Faith is not linear, nor is it cyclical, but rather a tumult of experience and gut feeling. Similarly, the origins and ends of language, representation, art, are obscure though their force is incontrovertible. Corporal Michael Dama, a vagary of Perfecting’s opening chapters, is an arms dealer of sorts who transports his ammunitions in carpets woven by the women and children of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Unrolled and hanging in a New Mexico trailer, the carpets depict grenades, army tanks, the toppling of New York’s twin towers, explosions, and guns. As the artifacts and art of war, these carpets raise the question and problems of artistic representation. One character explains (although not believing it himself), that the carpets are a form of therapy or perhaps a talisman for their creators. From a need to discern art’s intention comes a narrative impulse, an impulse that also manifests itself in Martha’s quest for answers, and in all of the characters’ appraisals of faith. There is a hunger for stories.

Just as elaborate and geographically widespread as Kuitenbrouwer’s characters and settings are, so too do they find one another, swarming together like her bees in beautiful and daring prose. Truth and answers are hard won, or not won at all, and redemption is fraught by history and love for prophets and devotees alike. Yet, our beginning and our ending is in many ways with Martha the wandering woman; like the primrose that somehow finds the moisture to blossom amidst the drought, Martha grows from the decaying sins of another’s past toward a fecund future of her own.