Quill & Quire
According to Emily Schultz, Heaven is located somewhere in North Toronto – among packing houses and printing plants in a mirrored, 70-storey behemoth. This isn’t the prototypical hereafter with the pearly gates and cherubs. This is Heaven Books, publisher of romance novels – and it’s where Gordon Small ends up after he dies. Schultz’s second novel is a darkly comic portrait of a man confronting his insecurities in life (a brilliant ex-wife, a lacklustre literary career) only after he is dead. Schultz creates an endearing protagonist in Gordon, who never pines after what could have been. Instead, he focuses on making things right, despite his inconvenient circumstances. Most of the novel takes place inside Heaven Books, where Gordon is posthumously hired as a proofreader. Schultz captures the staid, repetitious life of the office perfectly; she has a talent for honing in on the shoulder punches, the power bars, and the monogrammed mugs that make us cringe alongside Gordon. It’s here, in the descriptions of Heaven’s daily routine, that the novel is at its most scathingly funny. When Gordon meets Lillian Payne from HR, for example, he notes, “her face bore the pearl transparency of an embryonic sac.” Schultz juggles the monotony, humour, and futility of Gordon’s predicament with ease, and the combination often produces quiet, touching scenes between Gordon and his co-workers. Soon after Gordon accepts his death, he mischievously encourages others at Heaven to acknowledge their own deaths as well. When Georgianne Bitz realizes she’s been dead for eight years and her little girl is now a teenager, she starts washing her bras with dish detergent in the staff kitchen. “Well, where are you washing your clothes?” she asks. “I mean, if I haven’t been home in eight years, I’m obviously not washing them there, so.…” In an effort to console her, Gordon goes to the underground shopping concourse beneath Heaven, where the dead do their shopping, and buys her several new bras – white, of course, to avoid any inappropriate innuendo. As it turns out, Heaven, despite its moniker, has a lot in common with purgatory. And Schultz has created a delightful cast of lost souls to toil within its glittering structure.
Heaven Is Small is a keen examination of life and the afterlife, brimming with intelligence and wit. Gordon Small reminds us that, even if you can’t take it with you, there just might be something worth looking forward to on the other side.
Review
“ Schultz has created a delightful cast of lost souls . . . Heaven is Small is a keen examination of life and the afterlife, brimming with intelligence and wit.” --Quill and Quire
