The Woman Upstairs

Lydia Burton was an editor and writer living in Toronto, and was co-author of Editing Canadian English.

In this, a first novel, short-story writer Riskin describes Diana Guthrie’s return to the small Ontario town of Donellon to visit her dying mother. After a 20-year absence, going home again is not easy (there are memories and events that require some kind of resolution). Diana’s family and home town boast several odd but realistic characters, not the least of whom are brother Mitchell, a long-gone father, and a now-dead starchy grandmother. They all shaped Diana’s responses to life, which she feels are “little more than a series of reactions to other people” (p. 95).

Buried in the gloom of unrewarding and unfinished relationships are small mysteries compounded by years of silence. The familiar human story of unexpressed and therefore misunderstood or unknown feelings permeates Diana’s efforts to come to terms with her life — and with her mother, from whom she has long been estranged. Diana’s past and present in Edmonton, where she now lives, is interwoven with her past and present in Donellon and provides the interesting structural format of the novel. Diana is trying to find some genuine personal and independent stance that will permit her to deal with the unfinished business of both the concrete and the shadowy relationships she perceives she has (or has had) with others. Part of this process has come about in conversations with Madelyn, her feminist friend in Edmonton, to whom she has told the tales of her early life in Ontario. Diana’s stories elicit some sensible (but unexpected) responses from Madelyn that make Diana reflect on the basis of the fundamental hostility she carries toward her mother and toward her brother (who has grown from an odious child to an odious adult).

In the backward and forward motion of the story, Diana’s childhood and teenhood in Donellon — intermingled with telling Madelyn about them in Edmonton — begin to shape the story for the reader. This story is a conventional and yet a singular one. The author has managed to create effectively some very individual characters — particularly the mother, Edith, whose strengths and weaknesses (as Diana finally begins to see) are subject to many interpretations. Diana, the daughter of a unique if tragically imperfect family, must — like most of us —make peace with her own nature and the follies of those around her. There is some promise that she will emerge stronger and more self-sufficient from her experience in trying to understand “the woman upstairs.”