by Dawn Promislow
FREEHAND BOOKS
2022/$24.95/240 pp.
Fans of Rachel Cusk’s much-acclaimed fiction might be intrigued by this debut novel from Toronto-based writer Dawn Promislow, author of one previous short-story collection. As with Cusk’s immersive, interior worlds, Wan places readers within the consciousness of a first-person narrator, a now elderly woman, Jacqueline Kline. Living in New York as a widow and grandmother in the narrative present, Kline is a successful artist who nevertheless looks back in an attempt to come to terms with “the terrible failure” of her earlier life as a privileged white middle-class South African during the apartheid era. The drama of apartheid resistance movements—and their ruthless suppression—thus provides the backdrop for this story of attempted “atonement.” With the retrospective action set largely in the year 1972, the tale unfolds as a series of short memory instalments, loosely associative vignettes, recounted to an unnamed American interlocutor. (The premise is vaguely therapeutic in its confessional set-up.)
Claustrophobic spaces pervaded by dim half-light dominate the narrator’s recollections. At the instigation of her husband, Jacqueline’s family secretly harbours a white resistance worker, a lawyer named Joseph. His arrival coincides with a period of creative blockage for Jacqueline. Her painting—notably a canvas suggestively composed of “many shades and gradations of white”—grinds to a halt as Joseph’s clandestine liberationist work proceeds. The narrator succumbs to a wasting illness as tension builds: how long can Joseph stay until his presence is discovered by the police? A strangled sort of attraction between Joseph and Jacqueline develops. And a tragic climax ensues, precipitating the narrator’s flight to America with her family.
As the metaphors of light and shade throughout suggest, the narrator’s self-reassessment from the vantage point of age seems sketchy, like some elusive play of shadows cast by moving clouds. Particularly troubling is the narrator’s vacillating response to the tragic outcome of the plot involving Joseph, for which she initially—and for good reason—accepts full responsibility but ultimately firmly attributes to a third party. Promislow’s first-person point of view proves limiting and tricky in this case: are readers really to accept Jacqueline’s final conclusion at face value? In an earlier scene, the narrator puzzles over her mother’s seeming inability to connect “the vivid realism” of South African author Nadine Gordimer’s stories with her own life: “How is it that my mother enjoyed Nadine Gordimer, who wrote about apartheid, when she was ignorant and oblivious of the structure of the country around her, the meaning of it?” If readers are intended to register a similar apparent blind spot or “oblivious” tendency in Jacqueline’s deflection of guilt at the end, or indeed view that deflection as precisely chief among Jacqueline’s “terrible failure[s],” then a stronger cue to this effect is needed.
Moreover, while a white expatriate perspective on South Africa’s authoritarian, racist society is an integral part of that history to explore, Jacqueline Kline is not what you’d call an especially gripping protagonist. She recalls having “floated through” her days without much of an interest in most things, including food, money, her husband’s work, the art world beyond her own. The voice is characterized by an emotional flatness and lassitude that may be an accurate indication of depressive PTSD, but nevertheless comes off at times as limp and self-involved. Jacqueline is indeed “wan,” and while that exhausted ennui may be intentional, it is a challenge for storytelling.
Uneven in its final achievement, Wan still merits consideration as the exploration of one fallible woman’s inner life, a woman struggling to navigate what Promislow has, in a recent interview, aptly called “the moral catastrophe that was” apartheid.
Christine Wiesenthal is a professor in the department of English and film studies at the University of Alberta.
