Only now published
in the United States after its surprise selection as the winner of the 2010
Scotiabank Giller Prize, Johanna Skibsrud's uneven first novel explores the
uncertainty of memory, the weight of family secrets and the fierce bond of
loyalty between father and daughter.
Much of The Sentimentalists is set in the small Ontario town of Casablanca, where Napoleon Haskell, an alcoholic dying of cancer, is joined by his daughter, the novel's unnamed narrator, who's fleeing the breakup of her relationship. The Haskells share a house with Henry Carey, Napoleon's friend, paralyzed as a young man in an automobile accident. The long-ago flooding of the original town for a dam project serves as a metaphor for the way memories can be extinguished.
The novel ranges episodically over Napoleon's troubled past, from the ramshackle house in Fargo, North Dakota, where he lives for 10 years before the narrator and her sister transport him to Canada, to an unfinished boat-building project. At the core of the book is the account of his unit's involvement in a My Lai-type massacre in Vietnam in 1967 (based on Skibsrud's father's own service in that war). The novel shifts from first to third person to tell that story from Napoleon's point of view, and its epilogue consists of the transcript of his testimony at an inquiry into those events. The latter device recalls Tim O'Brien's novel In the Lake of the Woods, the story of a politician whose career is destroyed when his participation in a similar event is exposed, where it was employed more tellingly.
Skibsrud, whose previous books were two collections of poetry, draws on that talent to offer striking descriptions, like the one of "a sadness that would make you, when you saw it, want to pull the edges of your own life up around you, and stay there, carefully inside." But as satisfying as her prose can be, the absence of a more coherent narrative structure contributes to frustration at the novel's elusiveness. Skibsrud is on more solid ground portraying the friendship between Napoleon and Henry, and she excels in the depiction of a daughter's tenacious emotional attachment to a man who abandoned his family and whose behavior, even allowing for his deteriorating physical condition, tests her resolve to love him in his final days.
The Giller Prize has propelled Skibsrud into the spotlight of Canadian literature, and that success will expose her to a wider audience in the United States. Her talent is evident and yet it seems fair to say her best work lies ahead of her. --Harvey Freedenberg
Shelf Talker: Scotiabank Giller Prize winner Johanna Skibsrud's first novel explores the uncertainty of memory, the weight of family secrets and the fierce bond of loyalty between daughter and father.