Amazon.ca
Love Object, Sally Cooper's first novel, begins like many others in small-town Ontario. In this constricted universe, life is often both depressing and unedifying. Seldom is humour involved. However, Cooper's book is a welcome exception. Apple Ford is a town with only four streets and distinct lack of night life, but as in a David Lynch movie, there is more to this small town than meets the eye. Sylvia, the crazy mother of Mercy, the young narrator, is the love object of the title. When Sylvia disappears, Mercy transfers her mother's seductive appeal into an obsession with her own body, while her brother takes on his absent parent's gender identity.
Although there are some dark moments, Cooper realizes that growing up in the country is just too absurd to take absolutely seriously and this results in some deliciously surreal moments and characters. Take Mercy's perpetually horny grandma, Vi, who fantasizes about her ex-boss at the local diner: "Dan's pubes were on my mind as he was giving me the 'you're fired' speech.... I pictured the hair taking territory, shooting tendrils up his abdomen, sliding down around the curve of his thighs. Even as he talked about how my surgery stories were losing him customers, my mind was running my fingers through that luxuriant pile." Although Love Object is still a recognizable coming-of-age story, it is closer to Tony Burgess's gothic evocations in Pontypool Changes Everything than to Alice Munro's classic tales. Sally Cooper's surprising, if off-balance, debut is not to be missed. --Robyn Gillam
Books in Canada
Love Object, by Sally Cooper, is the umpteenth female coming of age novel this year and ranks near the bottom of the pile because of its verbosity and lack of organization. The difficulties start with Cooper introducing six characters on the first half page. The protagonist is Mercy, who is about 17 in 1983. The story flops back and forth between 1978 when Mercy's mother Sylvia becomes mentally ill and is institutionalized. The changes in time are difficult to follow and it is often hard to know whether we are in 1978, 1983 or somewhere in between. The characters are Ontario hillbillies, quirky and unlikable. The father is almost simple in his devotion to his absent wife, while Mercy's young brother is a budding cross-dresser. The relatives, Uncle Larry and his family, are straight out of Deliverance. What starts as a young girl trying to come to terms with her mother's mental illness turns, in the final pages, into a gothic horror story. The organization is haphazard. The author tries to cram every possible detail into the story, whether necessary or not. This book desperately needed editing, organizing, and probably 100 pages cut. There are some good individual scenes as when twelve-year-old girls experiment sexually at a summer camp, though the problem is that the whole summer camp scene needed to be cut. The dialogue gets out of hand. For instance, can you imagine an unschooled grandmother saying this to her pubescent granddaughter? "When I was young, desire slipped on and off me like clouds on the sun..." And the narrator who is supposed to be literate observes, "Soon the two were rolling around in a wrestle."
W.P. Kinsella (Books in Canada)
