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Kevin Patterson (Doubleday; $25)
BookPage Notable Title
A penetrating portrait of generational divisions and cultural dissonance, this novel illuminates how the tenuous bonds of friendship, love, and family fly apart--and the unexpectedly tender ways in which survivors carry on.
Hard times on the tundra
Review by Sarah E. White
The Inuit of Canada's sub-Artic Hudson Bay are tough people. Throw tragedy after tragedy at them and they endure, if not with a sunny disposition, at least with the feeling that life is a thing to be survived, a constant battle with nature for your very existence.
At least that's the way it seems to be for Victoria, the protagonist of Kevin Patterson's poignant debut novel (after a memoir and a short story collection), Consumption. After suffering a bout of tuberculosis that takes her away from her family for six years while she recuperates in a sanatorium, she returns to her home of Rankin Inlet, a place she no longer understands. Though the old hunters, including her father, have all come off the land and live in homes now, Victoria still hungers for more knowledge of and connection to the outside world as she knew it when she lived in the south.
She marries a Kablunauk (white person) and settles down to raise her family as best she can in a tiny, once-isolated community that is becoming a place where cultures clash. Her son longs to live off the land and hunt with his dogs, while one daughter falls in love with Axl Rose on satellite television and the other folds into herself in ways that are hauntingly familiar to Victoria.
A diamond mine mars the tundra and Victoria's family is beset by hardships that tear it apart. All the while there is no one for Victoria to turn to—whether her own people or the whites who have come to the village, including the doctor from New York who delivered all her children—for comfort.
This is a heart-rending tale of the ways things change from generation to generation in a family and a society. While change sometimes comes at a dizzying pace, there are some things that stay the same, like the enduring strength of people whose ancestors lived on the land and survived unfathomable hardships. Sometimes it seems there is not much difference at all between tough-as-a-glacier Victoria and her ancestors.
Sarah E. White writes from Arkansas.
© 2007, All rights reserved, BookPage
Publisher Comments
From Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize winner Kevin Patterson, an epic first novel of north and south, infused with stark beauty, startlingly realized characters and fierce truths.
Born on the tundra in the early 1950s, Victoria knows nothing but the nomadic hunting life of the Inuit until, at the age of ten, she is evacuated to a southern sanitarium for the treatment of tuberculosis. For six years she has no way to contact her parents. She grows healthy, learns Cree and English, becomes accustomed to books and radio, sunbathing and store-bought food. When she is finally sent home, she steps off the plane into a world that has changed radically. Even her father, Emo, a legendary hunter, has come in off the land to hunker in on Rankin Inlet at the edge of Hudson Bay. And Victoria herself has become a stranger to her family and her birth culture.
Vividly evoking the modern contradictions of the north--walrus meat and convenience foods, dog teams and diamond mines, midnight sun and 24-hour satellite TV--Patterson takes us into the heart of Victoria's internal exile, as she marries and raises a family. Many love her, but none can heal her. Not her son, who disdains the settled life she has bought for him and who struggles to be like his grandfather. Not her daughters, who embrace the pop culture of the south. Not her husband, Robertson, who slowly becomes estranged as he pursues the economic opportunities the north offers white men. Not her Inuit lover, who can offer her only glimpses of her lost childhood. And most especially not the local doctor, Balthazar, who has come to Rankin Inlet from New York City to escape scrutiny and seems fated to harm instead of heal.
When violence strikes Victoria's world, followed quickly by horrifying medical tragedy, Kevin Patterson shows how the tenuous bonds of friendship, love and family fly apart. And then at last, with great feeling, he evokes the unexpectedly tender ways in which the survivors struggle to their feet and carry on.
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