A Sharp Intake of Breath.

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

Toronto novelist and social activist John Miller earned substantial critical and popular acclaim with his first novel, The Featherbed (2002), involving women’s sexuality and subjugation. In his second book, A Sharp Intake of Breath, Miller’s themes are just as important, but they take their cues from a different source: physical appearances, and how they can influence the course of a person’s life.

Herman “Toshy” Wolfman is born in Toronto in 1916 to a lower-middle-class, left-leaning Jewish family—the youngest of three children, and the only boy. Toshy has a cleft palate and a harelip, deformities that shape his early years and have a decided influence on much of his later life. Sister Lil is a radical thinker and follower of Emma Goldman, the anarchist who spent part of the 30s in Toronto before heading to France. Sister Bessie is the more traditional sibling, doting on her baby brother and working long hours in the family’s second-hand-clothing store. “Political thought in the Wolfman household,” Toshy says, “was doled out in spare but regular allotments at the table, like dessert.”

Toshy tells his story in the first person, moving from a lonely childhood spent dealing with his deformities, through his teenage years in which he develops a proclivity for petty thievery (and is arrested and serves jail time), and into adulthood and old age, where he is dealt (as are his sisters) the cancer hand, which he plays out with no little courage and with considerable strength. Toshy is given remarkable breadth and depth; Miller gives him ideas and ironies, joys and sorrows—then gets out of the way and lets them play out for good and bad. A subplot involves the discovery of Goldman’s former house, Bon Esprit, in St. Tropez on the French Riviera. The elderly Toshy accompanies Ari, his academic nephew, to France and tracks it down. And there are certainly parallels between history of house and history of family: the doggedness of the Wolfman sisters, Toshy’s attitude toward old age and death as he assists his nephew’s search. Miller’s voice is nuanced and true. This is a successful second novel.