Watch You Don't Fall

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

In her second novel, Bettina von Kampen returns to her Winnipeg roots to
tell the story of Theresa, a legal secretary living in a small house
with her husband, her three-year-old son, and her Portuguese immigrant
in-laws. Von Kampen’s first book, Blue Becomes You (2003), was a
finalist for the Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award. This young
Manitoban most assuredly has something to say about people living their
lives in quiet desperation. Unfortunately, her method of saying it is
plodding and, in most of these nearly 300 pages, unexciting.

Theresa’s desire to move her family out of their claustrophobic
situation and into a house of its own drives her into the hands of
Perry, the pot-dealing and scheming manager of the Wiltshire hotel, an
inner-city dive that’s home to Walter, an old man of questionable
sanity. Carmen, the waitress at the hotel (the only of von Kampen’s
characters with anything approaching intelligence; the others are given
little but soapy dialogue and improbable situations) is a survivor,
carving a life for herself out of the Wiltshire’s crumbling facade.
When Perry offers Theresa dinner, in an effort to cheat her out of her
savings, von Kampen describes her reaction: “Theresa’s face lit up.
She loved the sound of dinner. It had been a long time since she had
been to a restaurant. ‘That sounds great. I mean, I have the money and
everything and I love your idea, but I really should think it
over.’”

Von Kampen tries to make her characters’ dialogue reflect their
personalities. Unfortunately, she has very little to work with. Hanging
a narrative on the denizens of a crumbling single-room-occupancy hotel
requires stronger skills than the author is yet able to muster.