To the Cottage

[bibliogramma]

Rest Harrow, by Janice Kulyk Keefer

This is the first book I've read by Canadian author and scholar Janice Kulyk Keefer, and while it was a good read, I'm not so sure I'm going to go looking for anything else she's written (though if I'm handed another of her books by someone, I'm not going to toss it away unread either). In short, she's written a book that's interesting enough to amuse me, but it's not enough to leave me panting for more. Although perhaps it's not totally fair to judge an acclaimed writer on just one book.

Part of my response comes. I think, from my reaction to the main character, which was essentially one of deepening impatience. The plot summary quoted below fails to express just how painful it was at times waiting for Anna to get off her ass and stop dithering around.

A Canadian professor on sabbatical, gathering material for a biography on Virginia Woolf, Anna ensconces herself at Rest Harrow, a cottage in the English countryside not far from where Woolf spent her last years. Anna's desire is to cut herself off from other people, including her lover, Luke. But her life becomes entangled with an exceptional cast of local characters, and Anna's attempt at control--sealing off her private world--is shattered. She is confronted by her self, as past and present pain explode to the surface, and by an England that bears little resemblance to the country of her imagination. Yet in the depths of Anna's uncertainties is the promise of a new beginning.

Also - and this may be my overwhelming inclination to read a queer subtext into everything talking - to me, Anna reads completely as a woman who hasn't yet come out to herself, but has reached the point where she either has to come out or explode. And the author dangles that possibility in front of us for a while, and then sends Anna back to a comfortable, if not entirely conventional, heterosexuality.

There are a number of other female characters in the book, and honestly, I was more interested in their stories (and wanted to read much more about some of them) than I was in Anna.

But I must also admit that the Virginia Woolf references are fun.

In retrospect, I probably would have been able to deal with the dithering if Anna had ended up queer, or if the author had given me more of the stories of some of the other women characters in the book. But that's not the novel she wanted to write.