A Map of Glass

Naomi Brun is a freelance writer and a book reviewer for The Hamilton
Spectator.

Jerome is a young photographer on sabbatical in a remote island near
Prince Edward County, Ontario, where he discovers an old man lying dead
in the snow. This experience damages Jerome somehow, and he quickly
returns home to Toronto for a period of convalescence. His respite is
interrupted one day by Sylvia, who wants very much to speak with the man
who found her former lover, Andrew, in such a remote place.

Early in the novel, Jerome describes his fascination with a particular
piece of art by Robert Smithson. Titled “Map of Broken Glass,” the
structure in question consists entirely of broken shards of glass,
arranged to magnify the vitality of the sun without reflecting back
anything of its surrounding environment. Its luminescence, its
fragility, its vulnerability, and even its inherent danger to those who
would touch it all contribute to the work’s overall brilliance.

In naming the novel after this piece, Urquhart has chosen well. Her
central characters, Jerome and Sylvia, are, in their own way, damaged
beyond repair. The healing they need does not erase their brokenness,
but, over the course of the novel, the hurts rearrange to form some sort
of functional whole. And as the parallel story of Andrew’s forebears
unfurls before our eyes, we read of other generations whose lives were
shattered by disappointment and who were largely able to reconstruct
something fulfilling out of the shards that remained.

A Map of Glass stays with the reader long after the story is over.
Urquhart’s masterful writing poses interesting questions about
perseverance and survival on both a mental and a physical plane. This
novel does need to be read more than once to be sufficiently absorbed,
but doing so, for the literary reader, will prove to be sheer pleasure.
A wonderful addition to our country’s canon.