February 28, 2023
Strange Loops, by Liz Harmer
Exquisite and propulsive are the first two words that spring to mind when I think about Liz Harmer’s latest novel, Strange Loops, which I read this weekend and found virtually unputdownable. It’s the story of Francine, a high school teacher involved in an inappropriate relationship with a former student, who is now 18, the power dynamics at play inversely reminiscent of a relationship Francine had during her own teen years with a charismatic pastor at the church Francine’s twin brother Philip had started attending, a church that Francine had followed him to, though she was never the believer that he was, perhaps the reason he’s been angry at her for decades.
The novel moves between three timelines with Philip and Francine’s respective points of view: high school era, present day when both are married with children in their thirties, and a cataclysmic family vacation five years before that during which a storm blew in and everything the twins had been repressing for decades finally exploded to the surface. Are the “strange loops” the two are caught in destined to repeat forever? Does Philip know about Francine’s relationship with her former student? Will he tell her husband? And how does their mother’s own history factor into all this, a small but essential question whose answer is vital to this novel’s tremendous power?
Last summer a Canadian journalist published a misguided memoir that became more than a bit notorious after the fact, a strange and unthoughtful work of revenge, the kind of memoir one might more often encounter in torrid fiction than real life, a book that was mostly remarkable for the questions it posed instead of any of the conclusions it came to. And if that strange memoir had been an excellent novel, it could have been this one, an unsettling story of doubleness, the messiness and irresolvability of power dynamics, and what it means to be a woman who wants, who desires.
