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Perfecting
With blood on his hands, Curtis Woolf flees his home in New Mexico for Canada, where he starts a religious commune, the Family. There he heals others and preaches pacifism while enduring the torment of this own damaged soul. Then his lover, Martha, finds his gun and goes south to discover the truth, whatever that might be. Curtis sets out to bring her back, lest the Family fall apart. In the half-light of a nursing home sits Hollis, dragon lord of a lost Mormon line, who has anointed Curtis, damned him, and now awaits his return. Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer's writing is full of dark humour and razor-sharp insight. Catching human fallibility head-on, she demands examination, confrontation, and a reckoning of pain with beauty.
336 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2009
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26 people want to read
About the author
Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer
15 books61 followersI am the author of the novels All The Broken Things, Perfecting, and The Nettle Spinner, as well as, the short fiction collection Way Up. My recent work is published in Joyland, Numéro Cinq, Significant Objects, Riddle Fence, Filter, The Walrus and Granta.
I teach at The University of Toronto and online through The New York Times Knowledge Network. I advise students in the University of Guelph MFA.
I teach at The University of Toronto and online through The New York Times Knowledge Network. I advise students in the University of Guelph MFA.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 29, 2009
Two novels and a short-story collection into her writing and publishing career, Toronto literary writer Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer has made two things patently obvious.
First, she's eerily good at writing both sex and violence. Second, her stories feature elaborate storylines that are almost impossible to summarize in a few sentences.
Kuitenbrouwer's first novel, The Nettle Spinner (2005), set up all kinds of interesting parallels between an utterly contemporary story of a rape in a tree-planting camp in northern Ontario and a Flemish folktale that rivals any of the Brothers Grimm stories for, well, grimness.
Her ambitious new novel, Perfecting, tells the story of Curtis and Martha, who met when the New Mexico-born Curtis stepped off a bus full of Vietnam War-fleeing conscientious objectors in 1970s Toronto.
With Martha's help, Curtis founds a religious community they dub Soltane in eastern Ontario.
Thirty years on, Martha finds Curtis's gun under a floorboard, and their life together begins to unravel. That's because Perfecting is also the story of Curtis and Edgar, the half-brother Curtis was ordered to kill by their abusive yet charismatic father Hollis.
Piecing together what she knows of Curtis and what she thinks she knows of Curtis, Martha leaves Soltane and travels south. Curtis follows, deeply anxious about his past and his future:
"Curtis thought suddenly how a person could not ever pay for what he'd done. You did it and it owned you; you did it and you were created by it. You could run, you could hide, but you could not expect to be free."
But as difficult as Kuitenbrouwer's plots are to diagram, her main project to date is crystal clear: exploring the radiating effects of violence. In The Nettle Spinner, the violence in question is rape. In Perfecting, it's murder.
What makes Perfecting such an interesting novel are the risks that Kuitenbrouwer took in writing it.
She had spent time as a tree planter and lumberjack before writing The Nettle Spinner, and the book benefited enormously from details of the industrial/natural life on offer in those professions.
But despite its strange and surprising content, the novel was fairly simple, structurally, told from the point of view of the rape victim and working off the contrast between the fable and the main story.
Perfecting, on the other hand, is told from the point of view of seven different characters: Curtis, Martha, Hollis, Hollis's mistress, and three of Curtis's half-brothers.
Each voice is distinct and each believable, which would be reason enough to pick up this novel, but Kuitenbrouwer also writes exceptionally well about subjects she presumably has no first-hand knowledge of, including religious communities, fratricide and war rugs.
None of which means that Perfecting is an easy read. Kuitenbrouwer does not believe in handling her readers with kid gloves and so, like Curtis's father, Perfecting, is compelling but brutal.
Unlike British Columbian Eden Robinson's equally dark work -- her latest novel, Blood Sports (2006), contained scenes of torture -- there is no good guy or redeeming romance to root for here.
No, Perfecting more closely resembles Winnipegger David Bergen's The Time in Between (2005), where ambiguity reigns and stories are told because they must be told.
But still, it must be said: Brava!
(From my review that appeared in the Winnipeg Free Press, April 26, 2009.)
First, she's eerily good at writing both sex and violence. Second, her stories feature elaborate storylines that are almost impossible to summarize in a few sentences.
Kuitenbrouwer's first novel, The Nettle Spinner (2005), set up all kinds of interesting parallels between an utterly contemporary story of a rape in a tree-planting camp in northern Ontario and a Flemish folktale that rivals any of the Brothers Grimm stories for, well, grimness.
Her ambitious new novel, Perfecting, tells the story of Curtis and Martha, who met when the New Mexico-born Curtis stepped off a bus full of Vietnam War-fleeing conscientious objectors in 1970s Toronto.
With Martha's help, Curtis founds a religious community they dub Soltane in eastern Ontario.
Thirty years on, Martha finds Curtis's gun under a floorboard, and their life together begins to unravel. That's because Perfecting is also the story of Curtis and Edgar, the half-brother Curtis was ordered to kill by their abusive yet charismatic father Hollis.
Piecing together what she knows of Curtis and what she thinks she knows of Curtis, Martha leaves Soltane and travels south. Curtis follows, deeply anxious about his past and his future:
"Curtis thought suddenly how a person could not ever pay for what he'd done. You did it and it owned you; you did it and you were created by it. You could run, you could hide, but you could not expect to be free."
But as difficult as Kuitenbrouwer's plots are to diagram, her main project to date is crystal clear: exploring the radiating effects of violence. In The Nettle Spinner, the violence in question is rape. In Perfecting, it's murder.
What makes Perfecting such an interesting novel are the risks that Kuitenbrouwer took in writing it.
She had spent time as a tree planter and lumberjack before writing The Nettle Spinner, and the book benefited enormously from details of the industrial/natural life on offer in those professions.
But despite its strange and surprising content, the novel was fairly simple, structurally, told from the point of view of the rape victim and working off the contrast between the fable and the main story.
Perfecting, on the other hand, is told from the point of view of seven different characters: Curtis, Martha, Hollis, Hollis's mistress, and three of Curtis's half-brothers.
Each voice is distinct and each believable, which would be reason enough to pick up this novel, but Kuitenbrouwer also writes exceptionally well about subjects she presumably has no first-hand knowledge of, including religious communities, fratricide and war rugs.
None of which means that Perfecting is an easy read. Kuitenbrouwer does not believe in handling her readers with kid gloves and so, like Curtis's father, Perfecting, is compelling but brutal.
Unlike British Columbian Eden Robinson's equally dark work -- her latest novel, Blood Sports (2006), contained scenes of torture -- there is no good guy or redeeming romance to root for here.
No, Perfecting more closely resembles Winnipegger David Bergen's The Time in Between (2005), where ambiguity reigns and stories are told because they must be told.
But still, it must be said: Brava!
(From my review that appeared in the Winnipeg Free Press, April 26, 2009.)
July 28, 2010
Characters and a sense of place that are really going to stick with me. I can't believe I know the author! Woot, Kathryn, amazing job! :)
August 1, 2011
I actually underlined some passages I don't want to forget - I never do that!
I saw the characters wandering around in my head, going about their lives, when I wasn't reading the book.
I saw the characters wandering around in my head, going about their lives, when I wasn't reading the book.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews