Globe and Mail touched by Isobel and Emile

Excerpted from The Globe and Mail:

'Fiction must justify itself in every line,' Joseph Conrad said more than a century ago. Editors have quoted it to writers ever since. Rules, of course, can sometimes be broken with impunity, even with panache. Consider Alan Reed, a Montreal poet and student of semiotics. His stylistically audacious first novel jettisons the notion that every word and sentence must be necessary ...

The ache of abandonment in Isobel (the real puppet, as opposed to the wooden one) is touching to observe. Just as she reeled with budding love, it was snatched away by Emile’s silent absence. Her lament goes into letters to Emile, written almost nightly but never posted. The notes form Reed’s unfiltered missives from Isobel’s battered heart. I wanted to sneak in, steal the envelopes from under her bed and mail them off before her wounds grew too large to heal.

Reed bracingly flouts conventions -- for one, use of the comma. He goes for total banishment. The absence of the little impeders feels like fresh air wafting from the page. Adjectives appear sparingly and adverbs almost never: 'She rests her head on the edge of the bathtub. She lets her mouth open. Her hair is over her face. It is tangled around her shoulders and floats on the surface of the water. She is cold. She can feel her skin shrivelling. She can feel herself starting to sleep.'

Repetition, joined to spare, sharp images, is the hallmark of Reed’s style ... it’s effective; you feel as if you’re sharing the physical space of the characters’ world.

Read the whole review at globeandmail.com