May 28, 2024

The Rasmussen Papers, by Connie Gault

“How strange it is that our lives are not usefully taken apart, not instructive in their compartments, but everything in one life is twisted inextricably with everything else, and it’s impossible to decipher it all.”

What a fascinating, sly, and tricky novel is Connie Gault’s THE RASMUSSEN PAPERS, Alissa York’s blurb conjuring the image of a fox with a quicksilver tip to its tail, and that’s it exactly. An urban fox, of course, out of place, slipping along the sidewalk and disappearing down into a ravine leaving no trace, as though it had ever been there. Like Gault’s unnamed narrator, an essayist hoping to write a biography of the iconic but enigmatic Canadian poet, Marianne Rasmussen, who concocts a plan to rent a room in the home of Aubrey Ash, on the cusp of his one hundredth birthday and Rasmussen’s former lover. Once ensconced, the narrator hopes, she will find her way to Ash’s papers and finally undercover the mysteries and crack the code of Rasmussen’s most famous work—but all this turns out to be more complicated than she’d supposed.

Who IS the fox, after all? Is it our unnamed narrator, or Aubrey Ash himself? Ash’s attractive much-younger brother, whom the narrator is drawn to? Is it the cocky young literary critic whose many affectations include a cravat, who—inadvertently or otherwise—sets the narrator’s plan in motion? Is it the patriarchy, the oldest of old boy’s clubs? Or the city of Toronto and its seedy downtown east side, desperate people parked in doorways or screaming expletives on public transit, something scrambled in their brains, perhaps, or maybe they just see everything more clearly than the rest of us.

I loved this novel, which reminded me of Carol Shields in the very best way—imagine the preoccupations of her novels Swann and Unless. About the problems of biography, literary mythology, women writing, bystanding, and the impossible challenges of giving form to the world and to life itself.