by 

Lovers Fall Back to Earth
by Cecelia Frey
Innana Press (2018)
ISBN 978-1-77133-481-5

This book is about unpacking clichés; all that has been hoarded over the years. Frey pries beneath the surface, holding a formidable dexterity with the light and dark features of story. Her characters surface as those who make you laugh, and those who tick you off. 

Lovers Fall Back to Earth begins with a tragedy at the death of a beloved sister. We see how a small group of flower children—two remaining sisters and the men who married them—live beyond the tragedy. We get to know Esther and George, Helena and Benjamin, and Veronica, the marginalized mistress who demands centre stage. The book is studded with extensive dialogue that reveals surface tensions, as well as soul-searching prose that navigates deep questions. Sometimes I wanted more of one and less of the other, but Frey balances the variation. The characters achieve a sympathetic pose regardless of how they surface. Frey does not allow sympathy for long, nor does she allow us to sit with judgment. 

As George begins his affair with Veronica, he contemplates the headiness, at which time he becomes Everyman: 

He could not believe it, those first days, weeks, months. Lazarus raised from the dead. That was the simple truth of it. He did not intend to deceive Esther. But what could a man do who had been dead and then given a second chance at life? It was a miracle. Veronica was a miracle. He was grateful. To Veronica. To life. He had not expected this. (109-110) 

When Veronica informs George that she is pregnant, his privileged existence gets challenged, and he fires the vitriol of cliché against the women he has impregnated: 

It took George’s mind a moment to make the turn. It was as though she had spoken in a foreign language that his brain had to translate word by word, then form the disparate words into a comprehensible whole. But what she was saying was not possible. “This isn’t possible,” he said. “You’ve been taking the pill.”
“I know. I don’t know what happened. They say, the doctor said, that every once in a while it happens.”
“You must have missed a day.”
“No.”
“You’re lying. You’re not pregnant. You’re saying this to get me to stay.”
“In the first place, unlike you, I don’t tell lies. In the second place, I wouldn’t lower myself to that sort of subterfuge to get any man to stay. In the third place, I’ve been to a doctor. I’ve had the tests.”
“You’ve done this on purpose.” (113) 

Veronica’s voice is typically co-opted by George’s reflections of himself. But isn’t that always the way with a man and his mistress? She yells a lot and threatens. It is Frey’s careful use of narration that allows us to arrive at a layered judgment of Veronica. 

Helena and Benjamin are also victims of the early tragedy; each has suffered a debilitating loss of innocence and purpose. As Helena grapples with destructive behaviours, she opens up to Ben, who becomes her Muse once again. 

“I can’t make rational decisions about emotions the way you can. Anyway, it comes to me when I am asleep. I keep having a dream, where the accident happens over and over again. I don’t want to live if I keep having that dream. But I’m afraid to die because what if it’s true, what they told us in Sunday School, that there is life after death and if you’re bad you’ll be tortured in the fires of hell for eternity. For me that would be an endless eternity of having that dream.” . . . “Time is the enemy,” she said. “I don’t want time.” 

“Time is your friend.” Benjamin spoke slowly, emphatically, in low even tones. He’s used to this, she thought, used to talking people into handing over the gun or the pills. (130-131) 

Frey ushers all these characters into a healing place. She doesn’t flinch from narrational reflections that are ubiquitous, in Benjamin’s head: 

How a person deals with pain is a defining factor. Some people fixed themselves at the cauterization stage, some dealt with pain with drink and drugs. Most of the street people did that. But that caused other problems to do with health and relationships. And the pain could come back, like the eruption of an illness lying dormant for a while before re-emerging with vengeance. 

Then there were those who fought like wildcats against pain, who would not let themselves be destroyed, who would use any means or any person available as an object to save their own egos. Veronica was like that. (139) 

When Esther animates around her new life without George, she stretches toward her future: 

She reached out her arm and opened the door to a smiling man, not too tall, sturdy but trim, with greying hair and laughing eyes, who held flowers in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other. (245) 

Conclusions are wrapped up, but not so neatly. To do so, Frey would have had to comply with collateral damage in victimization. George is left to natural consequences. The women seem to win and those who do right by them can live to see another day of contentment, if not total happiness.

The post Review of Cecelia Frey’s “Lovers Fall Back to Earth” appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

The Long White Sickness
by Cecelia Frey
Inanna Publications and Education Inc. (2013)
ISBN 978-1-026708-90-4
$22.95

I attended the launch of this novel in July of this year. I observed the popular local author Cecelia Frey, a diminutive woman, pretty in a pink and floral dress as she worked the room with grace and ease, generous with her time as she greeted each friend or family member, eventually relinquishing this role to step up to the large crowd to introduce us to The Long White Sickness, her fifth novel. Frey has also written three collections of short stories, five books of poetry, and one play. She began reading from sections of the Prologue:

This is my official autobiography, a scorching tale of desire and betrayal. A deeper reading, however, suggests that it is more exactly a story about being in love, a fool’s story of too much heart and not enough head (3).
I have spent considerable time contemplating where to begin . . . . After much thought and measured deliberation, since, as I have said, things became more interesting at the end, I have decided to start with my suicide (9).

And, with this, she thanked everyone for coming to the reading, and stepped away, preparing to autograph copies of her latest novel.
This was a stunning, dramatic reading, and I have no doubt that most people in attendance plunged into the pages of this book at their earliest opportunity.

Frey’s posts on Facebook (May, 2013), “My wisdom for this year: Life, like a novel, is the development of all the inferences contained in the beginning.” And to further, “This [novel’s] about one woman’s lifetime pursuit of an uncooperative and perfidious muse, a black comedy.”

I believe Aristotle said that plot is character. The physical actions of Frey’s characters move the story, even, and perhaps especially, when the story yields itself to magic realism with comedic spin. Black humour, oh yes, it is “laugh out loud” funny. And it is also serious, sentimental, and always told in the author’s authentic voice.
Only a gifted writer like Cecelia Frey can persuade her readers that the voice of her narrator is a person of righteousness, intelligence, and goodwill; her tone garners the readers’ respect and persuades them to provide witness to the events. That same voice skilfully acts as a chameleon when it exploits the prose and/or poetry of other characters in the book; for example, daughter Lara’s partner Rowlf’s hip hop renderings; or Sergeant Rock’s detective manuscript.

Frey takes the reader on a carefully calculated suicide mission up a snowy mountain on the 1st of January with the intention of reaching the summit of the mountain, then “shoving off” (19). As her “Constance” scales the mountain, her stream of consciousness deliberates many of her memories and regrets from the past, thus allowing the reader glimpses of the people in her past and her wounded connections to them. Perhaps Gully, her first husband, was correct when he said, “The trouble with you, you live backward instead of forward” (4). And he would also be wrong, because a lone skier on a snowy mountain must have her wits about her, and she does, as is evidenced by her observation of the whiteness around her. “White is death in our cold climate. White can invade brain cells, occupy spaces of the mind. It can muffle you so that you scream and scream but can’t be heard. I hate white” (15). Frey’s exploration of white as metaphor on this page and in this first chapter culminates in a veritable homage to the word when Constance makes it around the bend, to the place of her departure.

And then I was around the bend. And then I was struck with awe. The earth was a living moving thing, taking on new shapes by the instant. A fantastic ballet of various forms of white – the snow swirled into heaps, heaps that then took off with a life of their own, creating an evolving landscape that was both distorted and magical. I had forgotten that aspect of white. I had forgotten that it could be magic (18).

Readers will discover their own interpretations of “white”, but the word and its implications cannot be ignored, as it appears in every chapter of the novel. Nor can the overall theme of the novel be ignored: perception is reality from someone else’s point of view. Cecelia Frey generously provides her characters with every necessary accoutrement to bring the novel to successful completion.

Since Constance is dead, the Afterword is narrated by one of the main characters, quite silent until now, who concludes, “The writing life is a failed life. Every serious writer knows that, knows he has failed to live outside the page. Every serious writer accepts the fact and gets down to work” (184).

This review first appeared in FreeFall Volume XXIV Number 1.

The post Book Review of “The Long White Sickness” by Cecelia Frey appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.