Burning Rocker Claire Wilkshire is the author of Maxine, a brand new dazzling debut from Breakwater Books that Jessica Grant called, “the book we’ve all been longing for: a coming of age story in reverse.” I invited her to tell us about her book, and instead she spoke about mine: how selflessly kind and classy of her. Now you have to buy her book!
When Chad Pelley kindly invited me to write a guest blog, he suggested I might like to talk about my book, my writing process, pretty much anything I liked. Anything, I asked? Promise? He promised.
So, rather than treating you to a lavish account of what I do when I’m supposed to be writing, how I re-adjust the height of the armrests and fight the need to check my email every three seconds—much as you might have been fascinated by more of that, I decided to talk about the one book Chad Pelley can’t reasonably review in this space, his own brand-new second novel, Every Little Thing.
Every Little Thing is a squash player of a book: it pulls your heart up into your throat and out your mouth; it whacks that heart at the wall a bunch of times—up, down, all over the court—before putting it neatly back where it belongs and sending you on your way to think about what has just happened. No wonder the cover’s all red.
When the story opens, Cohen Davies is in jail for reasons not yet revealed. Then we’re taken into the past, to when Cohen first meets the young woman moving in next door, Allie Crosbie, and her father Matt. Cohen experiences a family tragedy, and new neighbour Allie, having been through one of her own recently, takes on the role of comforter. They’re both 25-year-old grad students in the sciences, Cohen a biologist with an interest in seabirds and Allie a chemist. Before long Cohen and Allie are celebrating five years together. From here, it’s hard to describe the plot without giving too much away. There’s another tragedy, one with multiple repercussions. Allie accepts a new job with Keith Stone, whom Cohen loathes. There’s an ex-POW friend of Allie’s, and a child Cohen befriends. The plot closes in on Pelley’s characters, racking them like pool balls in a triangle, and all we can do is hope for the best for Cohen, the most engaging of them all, the decent guy we’re prepared to root for.
For me, the most striking aspect of this novel is the precision of the description. It’s never just “He walked into the kitchen.” Pelley takes the jumble of impressions that comprise our sensory intake of the world and highlights them one at a time, makes them come alive. On the second page, describing how hard it is to fall asleep in jail, Pelley identifies the
waspy buzzing of distant bulbs. And then the whispering crawl of water though old pipes; the drips from faulty plumbing as constant as a ticking clock. In time, they’d all start snoring—a rhythmic orchestra of rattling lungs. People would grunt as they came to, gasping for air, and roll over; their part in the orchestra now gone, the song changed by one less instrument.
There’s a skilful manipulation of syntactic parallels here: the waspy buzzing, distant bulbs, whispering crawl, but then the (unmodified) water; the old pipes, the (unmodified) drips. Patterns are established and then broken, the way you hear the tap dripping—you could go to sleep if it were predictable, but it’s the not-quite-predictable-ness that drives you crazy, the knowledge that the next drip is coming but you’re not sure when. We understand why Cohen is tired because we hear every sound he does as he struggles toward sleep.
A few paragraphs later, it’s not the auditory but the visual and sensory images that come into play:
His vision dissected seven or eight times by the black cylindrical bars of his cell—the guard on the other side like a man in two halves. His body was getting stiffer than the bed he’d been sleeping in. His spine with no give to it now, an iron rod, running from his neck to his legs.
Throughout the novel, Pelley pulls us into a scene through imagery and detail. Here, he says: here’s what it looked like, what it sounded like, what it felt like. And, as a result, we believe him. We believe protagonist Cohen Davies, we believe writer Chad Pelley. When Cohen talks with Allie, the dialogue feels easy and natural; we sense the core of their relationship, the desire that underlies all their interactions.
Every Little Thing raises a number of questions, and the one that stands out for me is: how could this happen? Is Cohen Davies a disaster-magnet, is he the victim of terrible luck, is it the particular set of circumstances, or does Pelley want us to believe he has just made bad choices? To what extent do we control our destiny? Ultimately, although he could have done some things differently, Cohen is just too sympathetic and well-intentioned a character for me to judge him harshly, but other readers will reach their own conclusions. Every Little Thing traces a set of choices and the often-disastrous events that flow from them, either causally or through sheer misfortune. It sends you on your way a different person, with a glimmer of hope for the future.