The Chrome Suite

Linda Perry is a senior policy analyst at the Ontario Ministry of
Colleges and Universities.

This is a passionate exploration of loss, betrayal, death, and the
heartless whimsy of fate. Not that the tone is always passionate; it
also spells out sad trifles with a slow, relentless tick.

The book recounts a woman’s remembrances, from childhood through
young adulthood to middle age. Birdsell skilfully uses flashbacks,
beginning with a motor trip the middle-aged woman is taking with her
soon-to-become-ex-lover. She is preoccupied with his threat to leave
her, and their relationship is fraught with resentment and dread.
Interspersed throughout the car trip is a voyage of inner space, as the
heroine recalls episodes of her early experience.

Birdsell describes her heroine as having a “predilection for the
melancholy,” just as Jack the Ripper had one for sharp edges. Her
childhood recollections concern the mindless cruelty of children, the
sexual abuse of a neighbor’s daughter, incest, and the prolonged death
of her sister.

The heroine’s wedding provides a typical example of Birdsell’s
approach to her subject: “All eyes were fixed on the bride, a rodent
in a jar held up to the light to be scrutinized. Or perhaps they stared
out the window or up at the ceiling, bored and impatient for the fiasco
to end.” These may be the reader’s sentiments as well.

Nor was this to be a marriage made in heaven. Husband Hank is a
disappointment—more poverty, alienation, and abuse. And it comes as no
surprise that motherhood is depicted in such poignant images as
“yellow or greenish mucous trailing from a tiny nose” and punctuated
with compulsive child-beating. Birdsell seems determined to be strong
and uncompromising, expunging sentimentality and boiling every shred of
gristle off the bone of her prose.

While the plot and the characters present an unmitigated chronicle of
woe, the writing is masterful. There is an uncompromising ferocity and
harsh power to this author’s work.