Not sure where in my recent travels I acquired a copy of Audrey Thomas's Intertidal Life (1984), but there it was on my shelf, and soon enough in my hands -- its first words, sentences and paragraphs slowly getting under my skin. As slow as the going was, I decided this book is exactly what I need to keep my breathing even. A heat dome, we are told, is forming. Best not to exert ourselves, keep cool.
Audrey Thomas was an important Canadian writer when I started reading and writing in earnest in the mid-1980s. I had tried to read Thomas before, but was too young to relate to her middle-aged, middle class characters, many of whom were mothers, like the one I was subconsciously distancing myself from in my early-twenties. But Intertidal's Alice -- wow, I recognize her from days passed (the book is set in the late-1970s and recalls the early part of that decade), but also now, when the grief-rage continuum apparent in so many of today's younger and emerging writers is something of a sub-genre.
Alice and Peter are married (sort of) and have three daughters. Their Galiano Island summer house is now Alice's house while Peter, a teaching artist, spends weekdays in Vancouver. There are other couples, mostly younger, who are negotiating relationships of their own. Like John Updike's Couples (1968), but more marijuana than scotch and soda. And the prose! Gorgeous. Gorgeous prose.
"Sometimes she saw a kind of quiet aggression about Raven and Selena and their friends. It was in their voices, their philosophy. Anger had been outlawed. Jealousy. Suspicion. Fear. Anybody who got angry, jealous, suspicious, who even raised their voice, was somehow inferior." (95)
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