June 1, 2022
This is How We Love, by Lisa Moore
You wouldn’t say that Lisa Moore’s new novel This is How We Love is unputdownable, but I honestly think that’s a lot to ask of a novel . It took me almost a whole week to read it, because it’s kind of long, and I had a lot going on, so I kept picking it up and setting it down again, and the narrative style was doing something similar. The novel far less taut than you’d think for a plot with the stakes of a critical stab wound, an ICU, and a once-in-a-century snowstorm that brings St. John’s to a halt before it buries it under. But taut plots aren’t really what Lisa Moore is all about anyway. Or at least I don’t think so—nine years ago I read the first half of her novel Caught, which of all of them might be a contender for taut, while in labour in the bathtub, and afterwards I had strong aversion to ever reading the rest of it. From the rest of her novels, however, I know she’s all about the sentence, one word after another and how they all flow like waves, but they’re pushing us out to sea instead of drawing us to shore the way that actual waves do. Until we’re stranded on an inflatable raft like Trinity Brophy was before the authorities removed her from her mother’s care and delivered her to live with Mary Mahoney, the foster mother who raised her across the street from Jules’ house.
I wouldn’t say that Lisa Moore’s new novel This is How We Love is unputdownable, but I can say that over a week since I finished reading, I can’t get the story out of my head. About Jules, whose son Xavier is stabbed while she’s on vacation in Mexico and there’s only one seat on the first flight back so she takes it, arriving just as St. John’s is shut down entirely. So she’s there to deal with the peril of Xavier’s condition, and then all the snow, which falls and falls so the doors are blocked, except the back door, but it’s only because there’s been so much snow that the deck fell off the house.
The story moves between Jules’ point of view—her perspective on what’s happening to her son and reflections back in time too, to her mother and mother in law, to the early days of her marriage, her experiences as a mother, a stepmother. This is a book about care, about who we care for and who we don’t, and how some people belong to us, and other people don’t, and what happens to everyone when those people fall through the cracks—and those of Xavier himself, and Trinity Brophy, his childhood playmate who is somehow connected to what happened to him. Moore weaving so many different narrative threads together to begin to answer the question that’s mostly preoccupying Jules, which is WHY? Why did somebody hurt her son? Why would anybody want to do something like that?
Spanning decades and families, This is How We Love underlines the infinite ways in which lives are all connected. Part novel, part guidebook to the wondrous challenges of being a being.
