by Sharon Butala
THISTLEDOWN PRESS
2023/$24.95/282 pp.
Sharon Butala’s new novel, Leaving Wisdom, is about Judith, a recently retired social worker who moves from Calgary to the Saskatchewan farm town she ran away from as a teenager. She relocates with the intention of saving money while recovering from a concussion. But, as if the knock on the head also nudged her subconscious, the choice of her long-abandoned hometown of Wisdom triggers family reunification, revisitation of traumas past and the revelation of secrets.
In Leaving Wisdom, rural life contrasts sharply with city life when Judith uproots herself so suddenly. The city becomes the place where her intense lawyer-daughter is handling the lawsuit about her brain injury; in the small town, people drop by without notice, the Jewish couple feels like outsiders, and Judith becomes suspicious (perhaps rightly) of her neighbours.
Judith’s at-first-unacknowledged goal in moving back to Wisdom is to uncover the source of her and her family’s intergenerational trauma, the unspoken reason she left home so long ago. A runaway at 15, Judith later became a social worker to help troubled and at-risk children. She wants to make sense of her own life choices, but it’s through revelations about the violence and horror of the past (and present) that Judith finds the freedom to look forward instead.
For away from Wisdom are her four daughters, each living in a different place and strikingly different in character—a well-to-do Calgary lawyer, a free-spirit schoolteacher, a missionary, and a Jewish convert living in Israel. Judith’s newfound understanding of her family’s past enables her to better empathize with and accept the trials of her diverse daughters.
Butala’s more than 30-year career in fiction, non-fiction and drama has been filled with awards and accolades. In the acknowledgements at the end of Leaving Wisdom, she says the novel concludes her series about the rural women of the southern Prairies. Though aging is not the main focus of this book (as it was with her 2021 essay collection This Strange Visible Air and 2019 short story collection Season of Fury and Wonder), the story couldn’t function without the great distance of time between Judith’s leaving and returning to Wisdom.
Leaving Wisdom is made of unflashy but sparklingly clear prose, so tight on the perspective and emotions of its protagonist that you’re left feeling like it’s in first person, though it is not. It explains the geography and history (of the Second World War) necessary for the story without talking down and without oversimplifying. Butala brings together historical and contemporary themes and illustrates how historical events filter down through individuals to impact the present.
Karen Press (as K.I. Press) has published four poetry books.
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