Cold Clear Morning

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

Lesley Choyce is a good writer. In my review of The Republic of Nothing
(1994), I wrote that “Choyce takes this simple story and, with a level
of writing skill with which he has until now just been flirting, fills
it with characters who are wry, warm, funny, and magic.”
Unfortunately, the author’s current novel contains none of the same
level of skill and character development as the earlier work.

Cold Clear Morning is a book of clichéd situations and characters. The
plot is transparent, even for melodrama. Young Taylor Colby, of
indeterminate age, returns to tiny Nickerson Harbour, Nova Scotia, after
a disastrous adventure as a musician in Southern California’s valleys
of sin and dissolution, during which his wife, Laura, died of a drug
overdose. Strewn though the story like pieces of Atlantic driftwood are
stock characters like trigger-happy Paul Macarene, Colby’s erstwhile
musician buddy, and others, including his stoic, boat-building father,
his cancer-riddled mother (who, after abandoning the family, has come
home to die), and, to spice things up, her new husband (the bigamy
subplot is explained haphazardly.)

Most annoying of all is the self-pitying tone of Taylor’s memories.
Here is his reaction to his first intimacy with Jillian, the unlikely
English professor he meets through her young son, Wade: “And then I
felt a door open inside me. I was holding a woman in my arms again for
the first time since Laura had died. I was grateful and I was very, very
afraid, but I saw myself walking through a doorway that led me back into
the household of humanity. I was becoming human again. Inside the first
room was a remembrance of things too painful for anyone to desire to
remember, but I would have to walk through there before I could enter
the other rooms of that house.” Harlequin stuff. Choyce can, and has,
done better.