Featured Book Review: Making a Stone of the Heart by Cynthia Flood

By Judith Fitzgerald Feb 28, 2008, 10:05 GMT

With Making a Stone of the Heart, award-winning short-storyist Cynthia Flood (1987's Animals in Their Elements; 1992's My Father Took a Cake to France) delivers a lyrically challenging and stylistically dazzling first novel that nevertheless miscarries (albeit spectacularly) in that increasingly barren sub-genre of literary fiction aiming to sell its wares to the upwardly futile among the malltitudes.

Whatever happened to the art and craft of stick-to-your-ribs narrative fare for its own sake? Making the Stone of the Heart is little more than sop-operatic taedium vitae milked to the max in a cumbrously paced novel punctuated with lamentable passages reminiscent of all too much contemporary scribbling.

Readers encounter Neanderthal Owen Jones in Chapter One 1997-1900: Departures and Arrivals ("July 1997—Owen, Looking at the River") while the pointedly plain dame commanding the near-obsessive attention of both the thoroughly dislikable Owen and his counterpart — the strangely wounded Dr. Jonathan Smyth — is introduced via obituary:

"Dow, Dora (Cowan). Born 25 August 1900 in Vancouver, died 6 March 1996 in the Vancouver Hospital . . . Dear wife of the late Edward Dow . . . Dear mother of John (Joyce), Mary (William Cornish), and predeceased by Carole in 1934."

Dora Dow, "a little on the plump side," knows from self-loathing: "All Dora's life she was fat fatso plump fat heavy bulging Dora Dora Two-By-Four fat Dora Cow-Cow Women's Sizes fat Half-Sizes Chubette Above Average big-bottomed buxom chunky chubby fat fat fat. Now she was sticks and string. Only the torso curved still."

The torso entombs Dora's lithopedion, her fourth unborn child, a bastard illicitly fathered by the flinty Owen in 1935 during an unforgettable stolen moment around which the plot meanders. Now, it's the retained calcified foetus the contemptuous wife of the brutally embittered Ned has carried within her without complications till death and autopsy. She does not name it. Owen, knowing nothing of the true fate of his offspring, spends his life conjuring up an imaginary son he christens Jerry to compensate for the loss of both mother and child:

"The beginnings of this birthday sensation were as unmistakable as the beginnings of orgasm . . . The bar's noise went off somewhere, as if he'd turned a radio way down. The other drinkers in the bar got smaller and further away so space opened up in front of Owen, and there in tranquil procession the minutes passed until the vision began. Then Owen saw at his table not the harsh light shining down from above the bar, not the ugly stained terry cloth punctured with cigarette burn holes, but his son."

Many readers will wonder why the novel's central metaphor involves lithopedia, if only because such oddities smack of the prurient stuff upon which the yellow press feeds, not to mention the fact both 1996's Damaged Goods: Doctor Who (Russell T. Davies) and 2000's How the Dead Live (Will Self) likewise feature stone babies representing the current debased state of post-cultural humanity cut adrift in the cesspool of contemporary existence set against an unrelentingly dark landscape of accelerated degradation and degeneration.

The initially confusing and ultimately disengaging saga touches upon major events of the twentieth century while concurrently paying scrupulous attention to key periods and defining moments comprising British Columbia's turbulent history; yet, despite the veracity of detail and description, these inset pieces never quite conjoin with the foreground action propelling the barely plausible story's credibility-taxing synchronicities to their unquiet conclusions.

Naturally, given its brood of misbegottens born to lose, use, abuse, and suffer the hard-scrabble urban blues Flood's utterly bleak work investigates and adumbrates, her temporally tangled and spatially fragmented chronicle exposes, incrementally, heart-hardened relationships among a uniformly depressoid cast of minimalist maudlins whose lives retroactively unwind down and through to their ugly beginnings. Deaths tumble from Making a Stone of the Heart with mind-numbling frequency even as its clinically matter-of-factual narrative voice recalls Zola's recounting of les âmes perdues populating Les Rougon Macquart's neurasthenic cityscape.

It is difficult to imagine Making the Stone of the Heart appealing to general readers in the way, say, Daphne Marlatt's Taken or The Ash Garden by Dennis Bock might, particularly since Flood's unerring ear for dialogue and unquestionably brilliant eye for detail loses much of its lustre among the work's transparent contrivances of plot.

No doubt, Flood, having broken into the genre, will handily break out of the shackles of contemporary anti-fiction to write the novel her gifts demand. Making the Stone of the Heart is not that novel; but, there's no denying it's a magnificent introduction to a writer incubating a talent destined to achieve storytelling heights sorely in need of conquering anew.

Canadian poet and literary critic Judith Fitzgerald's critically acclaimed Adagios Quartet's BOOK III: Electra's Benison has just been named one of The Globe and Mail's TOP 100 BOOKS (2007).