March 18, 2024

The Gift Child, by Elaine McCluskey

With her seventh book, The Gift Child, short story superstar Elaine McCluskey has pulled off a novel that’s as great as one of her sentences, which is saying a lot. It’s a novel in the form of a memoir by Harriett Swim, a photojournalist who lost her career when the bottom fell out of the industry, and lost her marriage around the same time for reasons she’ll eventually make clear, which is also to say that she is struggling. Age 52, she’s returned to her hometown of Dartmouth, NS, where she’s got a job at the casino and can’t help getting sucked into the vortex of her father, Stan, iconic news anchorman, philanderer, narcissist, pathological liar, and jerk. But does the story of what’s wrong with Stan and all his various crimes have to do with who Harriett is? And what about her cousin Graham, a bit slow, last seen riding a bicycle with a giant tuna head in the basket and missing ever since? What if it’s easier to get to the bottom of the mystery of what happened to Graham, what happened to Stan, than to unpack the reality her own trauma and heartaches? (“Focusing, as people often do, on the peripheral, because the real problem was too unmanageable.”) What if family ties weren’t necessarily destiny? But then, if that were true, what would explain it all? What stories would we tell?

This is a novel ostensibly made of bits and pieces, and diversions, but it’s also fundamentally a poignant journey to the heart of things. Further, it’s an assemblage of the weird and wonderful—aliens; Dartmouth separatists; an exploration of the culture of “paddling,” which I never even knew was a sport; off-colour adventures of the down and out; the crime beat; Russian spies, and hockey heroes. I loved it all so much.