Jean Rivard - University of British Columbia

wishing for more gates to the midway
wishing for better longer carnivals
wishing for more arms around us
Croll doesn't draw any deconstructionist
arrows to "carnal," but this word is deliciously
embedded throughout the book.
The carnival, peopled by deformed fetuses,
rotten mermaid carcasses, fat ladies and so
on, becomes all that has been held freakish
about women's sexuality. In one vivid
sequence, Napoleon dresses the narrator up
in Victorian corsets and warps her body
into "perfection." Along with women's bodies,
the idea of voyeurism seems to be the
dominant theme in this book. At the end of
the collection, the narrator says she has to
"stop" and after a thorough roller coaster
ride of language and freakishness, we feel
relief and agreement. Why do we need
these stories of the freaks and why do we
read about them? Do we want to be thankful
for our blessings or do we want to be
titillated? There is a fine line between
telling a story because we need to know, to
protest, to expose cruelty, and telling a
story to thrill. Croll's narrator says one
point, "it's hard to write about this it's hard
to know/ how much to tell how much to
tell / and how much to keep to myself." Her
central metaphor of the tar baby—some
kinky sex tool for the woman and her two
lovers—suggests that tar sticks, that we are
tarred by our obession for the shocking, no
matter how "truthful" or necessary it is. Near
the end of Su Croll's collection, the woman
forces a man to go to a freak show and he
says, "WE DON'T NEED TO SEE THIS."
The women responds, "but that's what
floor showing is that's what the worlda
mirth is / .... get used to looking." Perhaps
we need to "get used to looking" at these
stories, for these are women's stories and
they haven't been told often enough. If the
novelty wears out, they may become private
tragedies, rather than public displays.
Croll's book is stylish, energetic and odd.
Findley's Eighth
Timothy Findley
The Piano Man's Daughter. HarperCollins.
$28.00.
Reviewed by John Hulcoop
Some symphonies acquire titles: Bruckner's
fourth is called the "Romantic";
Beethoven's sixth, the "Pastoral." Findley's
eighth novel, The Piano Man's Daughter,
might well be called his "Romantic-
Pastoral." Speaking of his marriage to
Alexandra, the narrator, Charles, says, "it
had seemed we could survive on love and
music—music and love," two of the most
common ingredients in recipes for
romance. Charlie is, typically, a guilty
romantic who disowns his mad mother as a
teenager, then sets out, at twenty-nine, to
"give her back her life" by telling her story.
Like most Romantics, he moves between
extremes of idealization and denigration.
The heads of female ancestors, servants and
friends he crowns with aureoles; the men
he casts as vengeful brothers, petty tyrants,
dysfunctional drinkers, unworldly androgynes,
nonentities, narrators and horny sexhounds
who disappear whenever they feel
fatherhood approaching. "There are so
many fathers in this story... .Aside from
parenthood, they have only one thing in
common: their habit of disappearing."
Paradoxically, the mystery of the protagonist's
origin is the birth-place of many
romances; and The Piano Man's Daughter
confirms Barthes' notion of narrative as
"the unfolding of a name": "Isn't storytelling
always a way of searching for one's
origin, speaking one's conflict with the
Law, entering into a dialectic of tenderness
and hatred?"
Like his first novel, The Last of the Crazy
People, Findley's eighth is retrospective,
structurally and generically. Nostalgic in its
summoning up remembrance of things
past, elegiac in its celebration of the dead,
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