by Lisa Martin
NEWEST PRESS
2025/$24.95/400 pp.
Nearly every paragraph of A Story Can Be Told About Pain, Lisa Martin’s debut novel, reads like a prose poem. Martin constructs her words so carefully that each sentence sings with beauty. An award-winning poet and essayist, Martin proves equally adept at the novel. Her prose has the rich evocativeness of the novels of Michael Ondaatje.
The central metaphor of the novel, highlighted in the book’s exquisite design, is the pine beetle plague, slowly eating trees from the inside. Toward the book’s end, a narrator draws readers’ attention to the attractive lines the pine beetle makes in wood. Should we admire the beautiful scripts beetles leave on dead trees, despite the destruction? Standing on nearly 400 pages of proof, the book eventually answers: maybe yes. Maybe admiring beauty is the only way to keep going.
Though the novel has many complex characters and compelling plot lines, the main story revolves around Shiloh and her mother, Ruth. In the opening, the reader watches with Shiloh as her father plummets in a plane crash that ends his life and changes Shiloh’s and Ruth’s. Martin’s meditation on pain—how to be present with so much pain, how to move on from that pain—centres on these two characters but extends to all characters and perhaps her readers.
Martin’s characters live with various kinds of pain (even simply the pain of living a long life). The crash scene (with its aftermath) is central, articulating the ineffable grief and confusion of life-altering disaster and the impossibility of comprehending our reality changing in an instant. Martin brilliantly captures the devastating realization that we have little control over our own lives.
The stories Martin tells also address the question of how much weight to give such personal pain in a world of melting Arctic ice caps, warming waters of Bangladesh, ruined forests, and wildfires. One character beautifully decides that we must put the weight of the world down until we can bear the weight of our own pack. “I don’t want to be just another dead tree still standing.” Nobody can carry the whole weight all the time, and trying to do so will work to nobody’s advantage. Martin fills her book with profound bits of hard-won wisdom.
A Story Can Be Told About Pain is poetic and philosophical. Readers can approach it as a contemporary survival treatise. However, first it is a compelling novel—with riveting stories about Ruth and Shiloh and Raymond and Madeleine and Dave.
Lisa Martin proves that not only can a story be told about pain, but, in talented hands, pain (whether personal or global) can be transformed into beauty. She has a special talent.
Angie Abdou is the author of This One Wild Life (ECW).
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