From Publishers Weekly
Canadian writer Stone's slim second novel (after Jacks: A Gothic Gospel) chronicles in muted, oblique prose the harsh realities of sex and death in a poor community in Quebec. Roses De'ath has conflicted relationships with her mentally unstable mother, Maddie; her father, Potter, whose scaly "birdleg'' relegates him to the social periphery; and her stepfather, August, a devious magician and Roses's lover. She works at the hotel in De'ath Sound once owned by her mother, who was institutionalized after the drowning death of her lover Bathhouse Jones. Roses dreams about death in various forms as she suffers the clumsy advances of men who look to her for "holes to fill." As vacant as Loralie, the scarred local prostitute, Roses knows "the feeling of being beaten and beaten but miserably, not touched." Roses's former schoolmate, Bat, understands how she craves a caress, and desiring her, he is sucked into a comfortless triangle. The unremitting bleakness of this tale of desperate survival, in which people cling without bonding and connect without caring, is seldom relieved. The women, in particular, succumb to violence and anomie, and there seems no escape as desperation knits the players together. But Stone makes an attempt at prose poetry in her short chapters, and when she is successful, her dreamlike tone and singular descriptions are seductive. Roses, obsessed with proving that hot water must boil faster than cold, finally knows there is no real truth, no story that can bind two people against the world. (Sept.)
Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Book Description
A family is haunted by suffering, loss and pain in this poetic novel about the violence of patriarchy and possibilities of resistance in the lower townships of Anglo-Québec.Roses De'ath lives and works at the grungy local hotel in De'ath Sound, a town named for her mother — a continually hovering presence who has recently checked herself out of a sanitarium and is suffering a gradual loss of memory. The other inhabitants of De'ath Sound include August, Roses' stepfather and sometime lover; Loralie, the local prostitute, whose existence in this place is a failure to exist in any other place; Bat, a young man drawn into the incestuous loop of Roses' family; and Roses' biological father, the old man Potter — outcast because of his scaly bird leg.Driven to the unnerving reaches of language, informed by the fluidity of time and caprices of memory, rather than a linear plot, this rich novel exists at the intersection of the body, language and self. Anne Stone has created a wrenching portrait of the murky vision and dulled sense that is the price paid for secrets and deceptions, and the exhausting effort of burying tremendous pain throughout generations.
