Kleinberg

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

Somewhere about the middle of Kleinberg, Kenyon’s first novel, there
is the feeling of being in the presence of the special sensibility of a
fine writer. Admittedly, it is somewhat of a struggle to reach this
middle, sorting as one must do through a welter of characters, time
frames, and voices. Kenyon’s previous triumphs have been as a
short-story writer (his work has won prizes at recent Prism
International competitions) and as an editor of Victoria’s Malahat
Review.

The story centres around a young woman’s search for her past in the
town of Kleinberg, somewhere in Manitoba. Her father had lived there
years ago—she discovered a clue to his early life in a note scrawled
in a book. Morgan takes a room in the local hotel and searches out
Gerta, the town’s oldest resident. With Gerta’s help, and with the
assistance of various “ghosts” who haunt her room each
night—ghosts who, Morgan says, are “creating me, letting me
repopulate their town with my guesses of how they were”—she is able
to put together bits and pieces of her father’s former life, and
recreate the other residents of this strange town. Kenyon is able to
bring the reader directly into Morgan’s mind, as well as the minds of
other characters, using changes in time and stream-of-consciousness
narrative technique. His elimination of all marks of dialogue makes it
difficult to understand, at times, who is speaking. Kenyon’s imagery
is wonderful. His “light and dark” image begins with a sandwich made
with one slice of white and one slice of brown bread, and extends to the
shadows of the ghosts in Morgan’s room. Birds are recurring images:
cockatiels and sparrows and plastic owls. What the reader is left with
are these images and these characters and the feeling that Kenyon’s
Kleinberg was well worth the effort of the visit.