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October 12, 2003
Author: Uncommon sense
BARBARA Gowdy has hyperacusis. Towards the end of lunch, as the waiters tidy up nearby tables, she says, “Those chairs are actually driving me crazy.” Suddenly I hear what she’s hearing: the shriek as chair legs are dragged over flags, the beat of neighbouring conversations, kitchen clatter. The noise, if you listen to it, is insistent. Gowdy has no choice.
“I have a hard time separating sounds,” she says. “It’s hard for me to focus when everyone’s talking. I hear everything.” As a child, she found meal-times with her siblings so unbearable that her mother dragged her high-chair into the dining room where Barbara ate countless solitary lunches and teas distracted by nothing but the sight of their next-door-neighbour doing the gardening.
“I’m really sensitive to sound, and I hate it; it makes me feel precious, like the princess and the pea. I’d rather wear a hearing aid and under-hear than be what I am, and over-hear”.
Gowdy’s writing is informed by this ability to pick up on things that other people miss. Her new novel, The Romantic is full of noise — Bach, Grace Slick, a laugh so ugly and startling that it derails a party, the “unavoidable whistling my leggings make as I walk”. It’s the story of Louise whose beauty-queen mother sticks a goodbye note on the fridge and bolts, quite abruptly, from their Canadian suburb.
Nine-year-old Louise, stranded with her ineffectual, genial father rebounds into a passion for an exotic new neighbour, “Saturday mornings Mrs Richter does her grocery shopping, and that’s my opportunity to look at her for at least an hour”. In the store, Louise communicates with Mrs Richter telepathically, willing her to choose the best apples, the sweetest ones. “Nine times out of 10 she does what I command. But she doesn’t turn round to see the girl in the pink shorts and adopt her.”
Later, Louise falls for Mrs Richter’s son Abelard, an easy-going boy interested in astronomy, nature and music. “Abelard and Hell-Louise”, they call themselves — you can see where this one is going. He’s more than charming, he really feels for people, and as a consequence of this heightened sensitivity will do anything to avoid confrontation. Alcohol becomes his get-out-of-jail-free card, until it becomes apparent that he isn’t really escaping, after all.
Gowdy calls Abel and Louise “nineteenth-century characters. They’re flawed. He doesn’t learn something, she does.” Fiction, she believes, is no longer concerned with the gradual sculpting of character, since it is filled with “intelligent, well-read, witty people” who are challenged by events, “and we read on to find out if their niceness remains intact”. Gowdy is of the opinion that neither Emma nor Anna Karenina would go down well with modern critics. “I think people would be really furious with Emma, and the editor would say, ‘Does Anna really have to throw herself under a train? Couldn’t she work through her jealousy?’”
Louise grows up in a suburban neighbourhood much like Gowdy’s own neighbourhood in Don Mills, Ontario. The world of dead-end secretarial jobs in the late sixties is rather brilliantly captured (shorthand exercises, tea trays, the ritual watering of African violets) but unlike Louise, Gowdy, now 52, was always pretty driven, always sure where she was headed — though a career as a novelist was never part of the plan.
First up, she wanted to act; then, in her early twenties, she set her heart on becoming a pianist and hunted down office jobs in stockbroking firms and publishing houses, where she could get away with reading music-theory books at her desk. But eventually, being a perfectionist, she realized she was never going to be good enough — “I knew what I should hear” — and closed the lid forever.
The gulf between music and fiction, she says, isn’t as wide as you might imagine. “I had a good ear, I think that’s important for a fiction writer. You have to remember how people talk. You have to almost hold the novel in your head and hear the language. The rhythm of the sentence, the sound of certain words is very important. I want it all to be quite light and transparent, not to draw too much attention to itself.” — Dawn/Observer News Service
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