Marital rot on the landscape

GARBO LAUGHS

BY ELIZABETH HAY (CONSTABLE, (pounds) 8.99)

WHEN Greta Garbo laughed - and it took a lot to make those thin red lips part - no sound came from her mouth. It had to be added later. That's just one of the many Hollywood stories woven into this quirky, affecting novel but it's the one with titular appeal for the author because it captures the essence of her central character, Harriet Browning. Only through artifice can pleasure be heard: in the case of Garbo that meant the dubbing suite, but for Harriet the artifice is film itself.

The place is Ottawa, Canada. The time, the late 1990s. Harriet, gawky and ugly-beautiful, is an insomniac and a frustrated writer. She's also wife to Lew Gold and mother to 10-year-old Kenny and 12- year-old Jane.

Mother and children are film obsessives, endlessly debating the merits of this actor over that, regularly sitting down to watch Some Like It Hot, Guys And Dolls or Casablanca with Harriet's friend Dinah. Kenny, "the boy with the movie brain", can recite whole chunks of dialogue and idolises Frank Sinatra. Harriet prefers Marlon Brando. She also prefers to watch alone, playing the good bits over and over and afterwards writing letters to legendary film critic Pauline Kael - letters she never sends but which act as a kind of diary.

"I've seen a thousand movies," Harriet writes in one letter, "but I'm still no good at love." In another: "I'm tired of pretending to like things more than I do. Like Ottawa more than I do. Like Lew more than I often do Tired of life being so much less vivid than it could be."

Less vivid than it could be if life was a movie, she means. And if love dressed in 1940s suits, looked like Cary Grant and could be controlled and rewound and replayed at will.

This isn't an original idea but while it provides Hay with a structure and a rationale there is more to the novel than just exploring the gap between celluloid fantasy and daily reality.

Behind the chumminess there are tensions. Dinah recognises Harriet as a woman waiting to fall in love with her husband. In truth, Harriet recognises it herself, and knows her marriage is in trouble. This is partly due to her obsession with film, but there are more corporeal reasons: Dinah and Lew are attracted to each other and Harriet is attracted to Jack Frame, whom she has known since her teens and whom she affects to dislike. Jack, meanwhile, is attracted to Dinah who does not dissuade him in his attentions. These jealousies go unspoken though the looks and glances which attend them are always noticed, always filed away. The circle of friends is poised to fracture.

It would be easy for Hay to drop her quirky Canadians into a stew of partner-swapping or infidelity but instead she does the opposite: she has them bow down to the pragmatism that puts cohesion of family and maintenance of friendship ahead of sexual gratification. In that sense she foments a political notion, that society is more important than the pursuit of individual pleasure.

As a portrait of a marriage, Garbo Laughs is a work of blinding honesty. But there's more, for beyond the front door is Canada, portrayed by Hay as an elemental thing where an ice storm can transform a city into a frozen moonscape and where seasons change with all the ease of an arm coming out of a socket. The action follows the year's humours and some of Hay's best writing goes into describing the effects of the seasons on the landscape and on the people who are tied to that landscape.

Formerly a journalist and documentary-maker in her native Canada, Hay is a wonderful advertisement for the less-is-more school. Her style is spare but her descriptions are rich and eccentric and she's unafraid of elliptical, poetic dialogue. Her prose shakes with it and, indoors or out, she is a masterful guide.

Elizabeth Hay, EIBF August 20

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