Luck

Sarah Robertson is editor of the Canadian Book Review Annual.

Nora, a painter, lives with Philip in a small town that has openly
persecuted them for her controversial art. One morning she wakens to the
sight of her 46-year-old husband “smiling a strange, drawn, pale
smile.” A dead man’s rictus, observes the sardonic narrator of Joan
Barfoot’s 10th novel, which critics have likened to Six Feet Under and
Desperate Housewives.

Luck’s first three parts trace the fallout from Philip’s shocking
death in the three days leading up to his funeral. The novel’s
conclusion takes place at the opening of Nora’s show a year or so
later; one piece, to the dismay of viewers, incorporates Philip’s
ashes, with bone shards and “[t]wo darkened, unincinerated teeth”
providing nauseating texture. The gallery scene marks a reunion of
sorts, though its participants are “not exactly a circle of happy
nostalgia.”

The unnamed town, “an outpost of Philistines,” is fertile ground
for rumours of an orgy-induced death involving Philip, Nora, and their
two housemates—Beth, Nora’s disturbed artist’s model, and Sophie,
the housekeeper, who was having an affair with Philip at the time of his
unexpected demise. As funeral arrangements are made, the bereaved Nora
“can imagine no end to the bleakness of this sudden division of two
into one”; Sophie is befriended by the local undertaker; a delusional
Beth contemplates an idyllic future with Nora; and secrets from
Sophie’s and Beth’s troubled pasts are gradually revealed. At the
funeral, Philip’s embittered ex-wife unleashes an astonishing
diatribe.

At the heart of this compulsively readable black comedy is a moving and
profound meditation on love and happenstance, grief and loss.
Perversely, Nora’s memory tantalizes her with sensual details of
Philip just as the inexorable process of widowhood forces her to come to
terms with his permanent absence.