The Need of Wanting Always

Beverly Rasporich is a professor in the Faculty of Communication and
Culture at the University of Calgary. She is the author of Dance of the
Sexes: Art and Gender in the Fiction of Alice Munro and Magic Off Main:
The Art of Esther Warkov.

This title is the third in the well-known Saskatchewan writer’s fictional trilogy that chronicles the life of a prairie woman, Alvena Schroeder. In a review of the second volume, It Never Pay to Laugh Too Much (1984) in NeWest R.eview (October 1985), J. Leslie Bell identifies a major failing of the fiction when he points out that the point of view of the child-narrator Alvena encourages digressions and a rambling, disjointed narrative: “Story freefalls all over the place, not seeming to know what to keep and what to delete” (p.21). This same criticism is true of this last volume, even though the point of view is now that of the aging, recollecting Alvena. At first, the narrative is provocative and tightly controlled. We are introduced to Alvena’s memories of her largely physical relationships with her several men (two of whom die in her bed): Harold, her husband; David, her half-brother, who blows his head off; Joshua, the dark man; and David the child, who is the product of another’s incestuous relationship and left for Alvena to mother. The tension begins to dissolve midway through the fiction, however, when Story abandons these relationships for the most part and moves Alvena, now very much alone, from the prairies to Victoria to spend her final years. As the author seeks to recreate the disordered, insulated mental life of an old woman, the events and remembrances of Alvena’s life become overgrown and unpruned, as much for the reader as they arc for the protagonist. Theme is often poetic energy and beauty in imaginary mental dialogues and remembered sensation:

and the wild strawberry heart of David lying secure (p.166)

Nonetheless, the reader wishes for an editor to trim and order Alvena’s thoughts into clearly meaningful aesthetic on psychological patterns.

While not entirely satisfactorily crafted, this fiction remains well worth reading. The first half, written in a naturalistic mode, is gripping; the poetry of remembrance is often remarkable; and the final chapter of Alvena’s life, written from the point of view of Alvena dying and dead, is intriguing. As Story considers the insensate dead as sensation (“a blood-scarlet, red-velvet Alvena pours, an all-energy electrical red, out of her old-leather body and dances straight through the marvelling eyes of the young thin Levi brother...,” p. 195), she takes an imaginary trip beyond death that very few modern fiction writers would dare. In her interpretation of Alvena’s ego-in-death as physical energy, Story does move her heroine somewhat incongruously out of a fiction of prairie naturalism into that of space-age supernaturalism; but at the same time, the conclusion is adventurous and a fitting ending for an ambitious trilogy.