What We All Want

Patricia Whitney, former coordinator of the Women’s Studies Program at
the University of Prince Edward Island, is the Bank of Montreal Visiting
Scholar in Women’s Studies at the University of Ottawa.

It shouldn’t matter what an author looks like, but Michelle Berry’s
blond innocence gazes out from this novel’s book jacket in rather
dramatic contrast to its unsettlingly dark comic contents. The plot
turns on the need to get mother buried, and fast. Becka, the agoraphobic
parent, has at last gone to her maker, and this fact, as in most
families, draws the siblings together in not always happy association.
Hilary, the only daughter, has been caring for Becka in a filthy house
crammed with dolls, stones where one might expect to find a living-room
carpet, and dirty dishes cluttering every surface in the grimy kitchen.
Billy is the worthless alcoholic brother lumbered with a grossly obese
wife and a pregnant daughter with attitude to spare. The gay Thomas, who
has escaped his grotesque family to live an elegant West Coast life,
fights off panic and manages to fly home to the ugly Toronto suburb
whence he sprang to give his sister a hand with the arrangements. If
this is not enough, Hilary’s high-school sweetheart, Dick Mortimer,
turns out to be just the funeral director this wild bunch needs in order
to get mother interred in the back garden.

This is a shrewd novel, hilarious but with the darkness of secret sin
and obsession always lurking. Berry is a master of characterization,
making the reader care for this gang of misfit relations searching for
love, the “what we all want” of the title. Berry explores the
extremes we will embrace—and there are some extraordinary extremes in
this work—to secure that most desired of states: to love and be loved
by someone who knows our heart’s core.