OUTSIDE THE BIG OAK DOORS

A girl attempts to survive her chaotic Canadian family in Tocher’s literary novel.

Alice Montgomery, the only daughter in a household with four kids, is bookish and probably the best adjusted of the lot—not that that’s saying much. Her mom, Maddy, moved their family to Calgary after Alice’s dad, Jon, died of a heart attack. Her oldest brother, Jeffrey, is a star athlete who messes up that stardom (and a lot of other things) due to his unresolved issues regarding his deceased father. He goes so far as to start using his mother’s maiden name, Duval. The middle brother, Charlie, is Maddy’s favorite; she claims he has “the gift of faith.” Charlie ping-pongs between delinquency and religiosity throughout his childhood, though he’s consistently friendless and conniving. The youngest is Zack. The secret about Zack is that he was adopted. The other secret about Zack—unknown even to Maddy—is that Zack is the love child of Jon and his co-worker at the bank. The ever beleaguered Maddy is a former artist forced to work two separate secretarial jobs in order to provide for her kids. She is finally pulling herself out of the spiral she fell into following her husband’s death. Then there’s Aunt Bel, Maddy’s outspoken older sister, who took the family in when they first arrived in Calgary. Bel and Maddy’s relationship has always been tempestuous. “I suppose Mama wouldn’t be herself without Bel flying in and out of her life on a broomstick, breaking Mama’s spirit and giving her a chronic case of nervous hysteria,” narrates Alice. “Still, family is family. When the chips were down, blood flowed to blood.” Together, this fractious unit must confront problems old and new, from Maddy’s return to dating and painting to the circumstances of Jon’s death and Zack’s parentage. In times of crisis, there’s always family…though that may not always be a good thing.

Tocher’s prose, in the mouth of Alice, is spry and unsparing; here she describes Aunt Bel’s indelicate impression of Alice’s grandmother’s sleeping sickness: “ ‘She looked like this.’ Bel stiffened her body and twisted it into a hideous shape. The newspaper slid to the floor. She screwed her jaw to one side and raised her arms up into air with her hands clawed as if they were about to attack. By the time she came out of her pose, I had fled in terror.” The novel, short at under 120 pages, is told in episodic chapters that tend to revolve around a single character or incident. The order isn’t chronological, but a portrait slowly emerges of the family and its dynamic. Alice provides a stable, sympathetic center to the narrative. A shrewd observer of the people around her, her quest to understand her father’s behavior and absence becomes an unexpected driving force in the book. The book’s brevity works in its favor. Tocher manages to pack a lot into her pages.

A slim but fulfilling novel in stories about the madness of families.