Plain Jane

Helen Hacksel is a Toronto-based freelance writer.

Writer and journalist Joan Barfoot is able to draw the reader into the
drab, claustrophobic world of a single repressed character and make it a
riveting experience. She did it in an earlier novel, Dancing in the Dark
(also a film), in which an obsessed housewife who killed her unfaithful
husband relives her long and mundane past. She has done it again in
Plain Jane.

Twenty-eight-year-old Jane is dutiful, conscientious, and as efficient
as a machine. She feels indispensable and thus secure in her job at the
library. She is also a “big sister” to a child, Lydia, but when an
intimate moment surprises them both, Jane backs off, observing that
“[d]uty is difficult enough, without bringing affection into it.”
With neither friends nor romance in sight, Jane still has her
hopes—surely such good behavior will be rewarded?

Jane finally gives things a small push by answering a newspaper
advertisement from a male prisoner who is looking for a pen pal. Soon
after corresponding, Jane begins to behave and feel like a different
person. Her mother, her workmates, and Lydia all begin to appear to her
in a different light, and she is able to respond to them in a more human
way. This transformation is hardly attributable to Brian’s letters,
which are clumsy and offer few other clues about him. Rather, it is this
virtually imaginary relationship that gives new meaning to Jane’s
life, allowing her to escape from her own prison and reshape her life. A
jolt of reality attends the news that Brian is about to be released, and
the word made flesh.

A gentle, ironic voice relates Jane’s story, commenting on her
shortcomings, her small meannesses of spirit; at the same time, it
admonishes the reader not to be too smug in judging her. There are seed
pearls of wisdom scattered throughout this compelling book.