by Monica Kidd
BREAKWATER BOOKS
2025/$24.95/232 pp.
Monica Kidd is a prodigious polymath: a practising physician, a filmmaker, an audio journalist and a writer who has published poetry, essays, non-fiction and two previous novels. Her new novel—The Crane—begins with an enticingly ominous dedication: “For those who live with the consequences.”
The novel’s first pages are jumbled chronologically and geographically in a montage that follows a young man—James—as he sits on a train, stays at a rooming house and rides a Greyhound, making his joyless progress between Maine and Newfoundland. He is weary, alone, travelling light and clearly not taking this trip for pleasure—a point underscored when he’s punched in a bar by a stranger for no apparent reason. For me, having more questions than answers amid the initial disorienting snatches of action felt immediate and intriguing. When James’s quest is given a name—Mary Reid—I had an “aha” moment: a woman incited this miserable odyssey.
But not so fast! The narrative then pitches the reader two decades back into the point of view of James’s father, George, as he paces a Wyoming hospital awaiting the birth of James and his twin, Dave, then further back to George’s service in the Second World War and his encounter with a French widow whose dead husband’s point of view we enter as he meets his monstrous end. What George sees and hears, we’re told, precipitated his PTSD, which inevitably pollutes the whole Wyoming household upon his return home. And no sooner are the infant sons grown than it’s Dave’s turn to fight in a devastating foreign war—Vietnam.
James is at college in the US, and Dave’s experiences in Vietnam come to him through letters. The fictional letters contain some of the most exquisite descriptive writing in the novel, yet I found myself hurrying through the different points of view to get back to James in St. John’s. The prose comes alive in passages of dialogue set in Newfoundland, demonstrating Kidd’s familiarity with the place and its patterns of speech (she lives part-time there).
James’s quest to avoid becoming cannon fodder and Kidd’s references to the Vietnam War era put me in contemplative mood. I found Kidd’s writing to be most vivid when elliptical, as when she brings James’s exile into sharp focus as he contemplates calling the home he cannot return to: “Pick up the phone and ask for a Wyoming operator to call Southern Butte 27R42: the four long rings followed by two short ones that meant the call was for them. He would remember that code until he died.”
Jane Kubke is a writer in Calgary.
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