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A Good House

BONNIE BURNARD

© Copyright 2001 by HarperCollinsPublishersLtd All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without prior permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews. For information address HarperCollinsPublishersLtd, Suite 2900, Hazelton Lanes, 55 Avenue Road, Toronto, ON, Canada, M5R 3L2. This author guide has been written by Samarra Hyde.

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Contents · 2

BIBLIOGRAPHY AND AWARDS

ABOUT

Casino & Other Stories 0-00-648548-0; $17.95 HarperPerennialCanada paperback edition/ A Phyllis Bruce Book A Good House 0-00-648526-X; $19.95 HarperPerennialCanada paperback edition/ A Phyllis Bruce Book

AWARDS

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AUTHOR

Two major events influenced Bonnie Burnard’s writing career. The first was living on the prairies, mainly in Regina, with her children and husband. Saskatchewan during the seventies was a haven for writers. It was home to a supportive writing community, the literary journal Grain, Canada’s first provincial arts council, and a well-run public library. But with three children under the age of four, it was difficult for her to write at home. Burnard would travel to Fort San, a former sanatorium transformed into an artists’ colony, a place that gave her both the space to write and a support community to draw upon. Having three children under the age of four at the time, it was difficult for her to write at home. She would write a story at Fort San and then take the draft home with her for revisions. Sometimes she would produce only one story in a summer.

A Good House won the Giller Prize in 1999. The other major, although distant, influence was Marian Engel. During the late seventies, while auditing a creative writing class, Burnard attended a reading by Engel. She told described Marian Engel to Sandra Martin in Quill and Quire in 1999: She was middle-aged, she didn’t have on expensive, floaty clothes, she wasn’t wearing a suede suit, she was just what she would have been at home... She just walked in and sat down and read—and the seriousness with which she listened to the questions, and tried to answer them.... She respected them.... I have never been an arty type, never been a woman who dressed like that, and I saw that Marian Engel had been able to do it as she was. She had not altered her essential self and I thought I had to do all the romantic arts stuff, the garret, all that nonsense. I wanted a middle-class life, I loved my husband, I loved my house. In 1995, Bonnie Burnard was the recipient of the Marian Engel Award, given to honour a woman writer in mid-career. Women of Influence, her first collection of short stories, won the Commonwealth Best First Book Award. Casino and Other Stories, her second collection, was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and was awarded the Saskatchewan Book of the perennialcanada AUTHOR

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Introduction · 3

Year Award. A Good House won the prestigious Giller Prize in 1999 and has been published in at least thirteen other countries. Carol Shields, writing in the Ottawa Citizen, described A Good House as “the finest novel published in some years in our country. Its grace, its generosity, its humanity are present on each of its pages.” Phyllis Bruce, Burnard’s editor, commented that “her prose is highly polished… She worked on every sentence until it was perfect—her attention to detail is amazing but she is also understated in her presentation.” Bonnie Burnard is a writer, a creative writing teacher and reviewer whose work has been widely anthologized and dramatized on CBC Radio. She has been a guest lecturer at writing and literary conferences in South Africa, Sweden, Germany, and England. Born in southwestern Ontario, she lived for many years in Regina and now lives in London, Ontario.

ABOUT BONNIE BURNARD’S WORK Phyllis Bruce describes Bonnie Burnard’s writing style as “deceptively simple.” Underneath the surface simplicity of her understated writing lie “dark currents of feeling” and it’s this tension between the surface reality and the psychological depths of the characters’ lives that hooks the reader into the pages of her work. In A Good House and Casino & Other Stories we are pulled beneath the surface of convention into uncharted and often unpredictable emotional territory as Burnard uncovers the significance of the unspoken and the remarkable within the seemingly commonplace. The complexity that lies within everyday life is revealed in Casino & Other Stories. In the short story “Crush,” the coming of age of a young woman undercuts the typical middle-class reaction to female sexuality. A young woman who has developed a crush on the bread man that she babysits for, greets him topless at the door of her mother’s house on a hot summer afternoon. The bread man’s reaction is fear, the mother’s is worry and shame, while the young woman defiantly claims her feelings of desire. A Good House is centred on family, an aspect of all our lives that is often anything but ordinary. “Even now, with greater perennialcanada AUTHOR

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distance and longer absences between family members, people usually find that they do belong in one kind of family or another. It’s what we’re born into, it’s sometimes what we work very hard to break away from, and often it’s the most complicated thing to leave when we die,” says Burnard about the role of family. In A Good House, we follow the lives of an extended family over several decades; as their relationships tighten and stretch, the concept of family is continually redefined. The narrator in A Good House skips through time, periodically touching upon the lives of the characters from the fifties to the nineties, showing us what life has brought them. Like ours, the characters’ lives in A Good House take unexpected twists and turns. Murray marries the wrong woman, has an affair, and then unexpectedly finds love in middle age with another woman. Daphne never marries, and instead finds happiness as the mother of two daughters. Bonnie Burnard writes that “maybe happiness is a combination of two simple things: the instinct to celebrate like mad when your luck is holding and the tenacity, the decency to hold true (to family, to a lover, to friends) when luck goes bad.” Tenacity is the glue that holds the Chambers’ clan together. As Burnard said about family life in the short Giller movie on A Good House, you want to get off the train but you can’t because other people are depending on you. Although the Chambers are all essentially good people, they can tell one another white lies, withhold information, and give in to jealousy and lust. They are, in other words, an ordinary family bonded by blood and inheritance. Phyllis Bruce describes Bonnie Burnard’s exploration of the role of time in our lives as “a fascination with fate.” While we can look back on our lives and try to bring understanding to them, we don’t know what the future holds. The narrator in the story “Casino” details the characters’ lives in a few short paragraphs. Duncan, a teenager who imitates James Dean and slacks off in school, will become a lawyer, marry twice and have five kids. Donna, the woman he dated at the casino who pushed him to learn algebra, will have a hysterectomy at twenty-three and will marry no one. Jack is skinny, a hard worker, good company and friends with Duncan. He “believes in the future.” Tired of working harder than his Introduction · 4

classmates, Jack will drop out of school and work joe-jobs until he becomes a manager at an arena in a nearby town. While in university, “he will meet his residence roommate’s cousin right before Christmas in his first year and start to date her, seriously.” She will tell him all the things he has always wanted to hear. They will marry and have kids, she will have a torrid affair that Jack will know nothing about, and Jack will remain skinny and not remember who he hung out with during his summers at Casino. In an age of irony, it is both unusual and refreshing to read about characters who, despite their human foibles, face life’s tragedies with strength, tenacity, and humour. Bonnie Burnard writes, “Although I am as susceptible as anyone to cynicism, I now recognize skepticism as a much more useful response to my world. Perhaps these shifts have been prompted by middle age, by a life already more than halflived; perhaps they are simply a way to make room in my thoughts for hope, which I find I do not want to live without.” Through the lives of Bonnie Burnard’s characters, we are seduced by the familiar, only to be surprised by the unexpected. From small-town Ontario to a hotel in Vancouver, we are given a fresh perspective on the everyday worlds that we inhabit.

AN INTERVIEW WITH BONNIE BURNARD

three children under the age of four. At home, I could revise my work but I couldn’t begin a new story. Fort San was a peaceful and private place. I could go through the day and not talk to anyone if I didn’t want to. The meals were provided. I had nothing to worry about, everything was taken care of. Q. Your characters and their lives are so real. Are they based upon actual people? A. No. They are entirely fictional. But their traits, habits, and appearances are drawn from real people, and they are recognized by people. Margaret in A Good House licks her fingers to shape her eyebrow. I’ve seen a woman do this. And Daphne shows off her legs because she has nice legs. I have seen countless women do this. So again, these details are drawn from real people. Q. Was the transition from writing short stories to writing a novel difficult? A. No, I was ready. I knew that I wanted to stay with the characters a lot longer and I felt comfortable about doing this. In the title story “Casino” there are four main characters and the story covers their distant futures. When I wrote that I knew that I was ready. I was interested in a longer life span and so I was in need of a novel. Also, I wanted a whole lot of people. It would be too crowded for a short story.

Q. When did you first realize that you wanted to write? A. I never thought about being a writer. I just thought about writing. I started when I was thirty-three just after my son was born. Q. What role did Fort San play in the beginning of your writing life? A. It was essential at the time. I met writers who were published. It’s the same as any profession. I learned where to submit material.

Q. In A Good House, you span the lives of an extended family over several decades. When did you decide to structure the novel this way? A. I knew from the beginning. I was interested in how things have changed for families over the last fifty years. Families have made a lot of adjustments over the last fifty years. This change is an indication of strength. Families can be anything at all. In the fifties, the idea of family was much more defined. We were fooling ourselves culturally by defining the family so narrowly—defining it as two parents and 2.5 kids.

It also gave me the time to write. I went for a week every summer. Sometimes I would just write one story a summer. I had

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Before the fifties, families were far more expansive. Your uncle might be living in a room over the garage. And now families can be anything at all. Q. Where did the story of A Good House come from? Did you know the characters and how their lives would unfold before you started writing it, or did their lives unfold and personalities develop as you were writing? A. The first scene that I wrote was the circus scene where Daphne falls and is hurt. The second scene was the discussion between Margaret, when she is in her eighties, and Patrick. The discussion has an undercurrent of tension. Before I wrote the scene, I heard the voice of an older woman and her middleaged stepson and I knew that the father of the stepson was not as he had been. So I wrote this conversation. Then I realized that I had to fill in the previous forty years, to show what brought about this discussion.

Q. You mentioned the word fate. In both your short stories and in A Good House, the role of fate is explored. The characters start off rather hopeful and life brings along unexpected and often challenging surprises. A. Nobody gets to have a pristine life. Well, maybe for a time, like the first twenty years. I’m interested in how people manage with what life gives them. Usually, they are hurt or limited in some way. I’m interested in how people react to what life brings them. And I’m interested in strength. I’m not interested in weakness. Based on what I’ve witnessed, most people are strong. I’ve seen a lot more strength than weakness in most people.

For a time I thought that this discussion would end the novel. But I wanted a party at the end, for everyone to be together at a party. There had been funerals in the novel. Celebrations and family gatherings are also a part of life. So I wanted it to end with a celebration. Q. In Casino & Other Stories and A Good House there are many strong female characters, like the young woman in “Crush” who challenges the socially acceptable ideas of female sexuality. Is there anything in particular that drew you to this subject? A. Well, it’s fascinating. The last few decades have brought about tremendous change. Now, everything is up for grabs because the power base has shifted. Daphne in A Good House represents, without meaning to be hurtful or bull-headed, this idea. She wants to question what’s normal and she wants to make her own choices. But her motivation comes from personal needs and hopes. The politics of her choices and needs can be read from a distance. The characters’ fates are connected with a changing world for women. Margaret represents what used to be the role for women. She has a practical marriage and it is a good thing for her, too.

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A GOOD HOUSE

B A Good House is a deep read. You keep finding more and more satisfaction in the unshowy craft, the unique vision of this writer who can tell you hard truths, hopefully.” —Alice Munro, author of The Love of a Good Woman

hidden resentments to become the calm emotional anchor of the family. Witness to the loves, losses, trials and joys of the Chambers family, we watch them build and rebuild their ties to one another and their sense of both love and family. Burnard’s keen powers of observation and her sensitivity to emotional nuance have created people that we can all recognize, and a story that is as moving as it is profound.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION In A Good House, Bonnie Burnard imbues the apparently ordinary lives of her characters with an integrity and a depth of emotion that in the end make them unforgettable. Following the history of a southern Ontario family over a period of fifty years, the novel gives us the sweep of whole lives lived so that we come away with what feels like wisdom, a sense of the moments that truly give value and meaning to a life. —The 1999 Giller Prize Jury A Good House opens with Bill Chambers’ return from the Second World War to his family in Stonebrook, Ontario. An epic novel spanning five decades, three generations and five houses, it paints a compassionate portrait of the friends and family of the Chambers clan as time both widens and deepens the bonds between them. Bill Chambers returns from the war missing fingers on his right hand but with the will to keep his family life intact. With his job at the local hardware store and the future stretching out before him he wants and hopes for the best for his wife, Sylvia, and their three children, Patrick, Daphne, and Paul. But tragedy soon strikes the Chambers family. Yet through this and further trials, the Chambers family mysteriously and magically holds together as the idea of family is stretched and redefined. After Daphne has an accident, Murray spends more and more time with the family and is accepted like a third son. Margaret, who nurses Sylvia during her cancer, marries Bill and, with time, overcomes perennialcanada AUTHOR

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1)

In a Globe and Mail interview in 1999, Bonnie Burnard describes a good house as “a base, a place of comfort, a place that has gone through celebration and mourning… It’s where someone decides to be.” What do you think makes a good house?

2)

Before Sylvia dies she tells Patrick, Daphne, Paul, and Murray about the unique goodness within each of them. What role do words of praise and anger, which we are given as children, play in our lives?

3)

Murray tells Daphne that he will leave his wife, Charlotte, if Daphne will marry him. Daphne responds to Murray’s suggestion with the claim that that is not how the story is told or the song is sung. Murray answers that “songs and stories ... do not offer reliable guidance for life.” Is this true? Or is it also possible to learn about living through the fictional lives of characters?

4)

When it is discovered that Paul and Andy’s mentally handicapped daughter, Meg, is having sex with her friend Matthew, who has Down’s Syndrome, Meg’s drug dose is increased and the two young people are more vigilantly supervised. Both Matthew’s and Meg’s parents are aware that these feelings are natural, and yet Matthew and Meg are still dissuaded from having sex. How do the different characters react to these feelings and to Matthew and Meg’s actions?

Casino & Other Stories · 7

5)

Patrick’s anger is manifested in silence, “the threat you couldn’t quite hear.” How does each character deal with anger?

6)

In A Good House, white lies are told. Soon after Margaret marries Bill, she tries to identify with Patrick by telling him that she played ball with his mom. And for the sake of preserving his friendship, Murray lies to Patrick about his past relations with Daphne. Most of the characters see white lies as the means to smooth over rough and potentially damaging situations. Is the telling of white lies a necessary means to preserving relationships?

7)

8)

9)

While adultery, failed marriages, loss, and tragedy find their way into A Good House, the foundation of the novel is the strength of family. So many stories are written about the rupturing of lives by tragedy, it is unusual to read about a family that, for the most part, works. Why do you think that stories like this one are less frequently told? Each section of the book is separated by the year that it covers. Why do you think A Good House is structured this way? Katherine Govier in Time magazine commented that the hero of this novel is the family itself. What do you think of this observation?

AN INTERVIEW WITH BONNIE BURNARD A Good House

ABOUT

Q. As a reader, I felt that I was being guided very gently through the lives of all the different family members, catching up with them every couple of years or so, finding out about all the triumphs, all the difficulties, and all the tragedies. One critic said: “Burnard revels in the small moments and incidents that are passed like rolls around the dinner table from one woman to another in the construing of family history.” Can you comment? How did the idea for this construction come to you?

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A. The construction of A Good House arrived whole. There was never any consideration given to altering it. The narrative would visit the many members of the extended Chambers family intermittently, over half a century. Given enough time, I knew that things, almost everything, would change for these people and I wanted to watch as they withstood it. The word that refused to leave my head was unanticipated, an imperative to the human condition which is voiced late in the story by Patrick, when he is talking to his stepmother, Margaret, about all the things that have happened, when he asks her: Who knew? Q. None of the characters ever speaks in the first person. Why did you choose this method for telling the story of the Chambers family? A. The entire story is told in the third person because of what I call the position of the narrative ‘camera.’ I wanted the camera to move with the characters, and from one character to another. A first person telling would have allowed one character, and it would likely have been Margaret, to become more compelling than the others, and this seemed to me limiting, just as it would be unwise in any real family to assume that one person is more compelling than another. Q. At the heart of the clan are the Chambers women. They seem to be the keepers of the flame somehow, particularly Margaret… Can you comment? A. I don’t agree that the women in A Good House are the heart of the story. They are perhaps simply more articulate, or more in the habit of articulation, as women sometimes are. Margaret is indeed a kind of centre; she knows full well she was chosen to replace another woman, another wife and mother, and she knows from the start that this is no small undertaking. But this family, this story, would be bereft without its men. Q. The Chambers are a traditional family, but even so, divorce, infidelity, secrets, and lies enter the bigger picture. What were you trying to say about contemporary family life and its imperfections? A. The divorces, infidelities, secrets, and lies that occur in the Chambers family are simply the result of the human condition, which is, by anyone’s definition, imperfect. Unlike the family Casino & Other Stories · 8

values people, I suppose I believe that the function of family is not preventative or judgmental but restorative. There’s an old, old hymn with the line: “Come home. Come home. Ye who are weary, come home.” In the hymn there is a clear religious connotation to the word ‘home’ but what I hear in those words is that even for the foolish, the careless, the unlucky, there might be a place of rest. Perhaps I mean to say that the family is a microcosm for life: a bit of this, a bit of that, some harm, some succour. Certainly the response to the thought that we are not alone can range from “thank heaven” to “good grief.” Q. One of the characters, Daphne, chooses to become a single mother and never reveals the identity of the father of her two children. Why? A. Daphne’s decision to have children without marrying, and to be discreet about the identity of the father is a way of claiming happiness for herself, and usefulness. The two decisions are quite separate. She doesn’t marry because she is incapable of trust, which is perhaps an irrational but, in her particular case, inevitable result of an extreme incident in her childhood. She wants children for the usual reasons: to love something larger than, or beyond, herself. Although having illegitimate children when she does is deemed a social misstep, perhaps even a moral error, it is a very rational, loving decision. I brought her grown daughters to life in the last section of A Good House to give evidence of the moral rightness of Daphne’s life.

Q. One might say that the craft of writing itself is also like building a house, and that you—and all the other great women writers out there—have built the foundations for “a good house.” Where would you like to see women’s literature go from here? A. I don’t like to say the words “women’s literature.” There is only human literature, some of it written by men, some by women. In the last few decades two movements have changed the literary landscape: the near completion of the move from a semi-rural to an urban culture, and immigration. Younger writers are writing from their positions in this changed culture, which can make their work seem quite different, at least on first reading. But, of course, the best of them are writing about the human condition, about change and courage and doubt and risk, about the errors made by the human heart and the corrections. Q. What does it take to build “a good house”? A. People, or at least the luckiest among us, make their own good houses. A house is a structure, a shelter from the elements, but it seems to me that a shared house is the place where we learn that love is something we can make from chaos, with our words and gestures and movements, but particularly with our words. The stories we tell about our young selves, the memories that insist on their place in our present reality, are often made from the words spoken to us at some crucial time, by some crucial person: a father, a sister, a mother, a brother.

Q. Margaret seems to be the glue that holds the family together. She marries Bill soon after his wife Sylvia dies of cancer, and enters another woman’s home where the children are already teenagers. At one point, she tells a white lie … Can you explain why?

Q. So much in this novel rings true about small towns and real lives lived in those places. Did any parts of the novel, or any of its characters, come from real life?

A. When Margaret marries Bill, after Sylvia’s death, she moves into a house filled with late adolescent children. Margaret is a smart woman; she recognizes immediately that keeping on top of the laundry will be the least of her responsibilities. Because she is the least wounded, she witnesses most clearly, cannot help but watch and hear, how grief occupies the house, how it moves through Bill and his children, and their friend Murray. Because she is a pragmatist, she does what she believes would be best, for all of them, including herself. Telling Patrick a consoling story about his dead mother is natural to her, and easy.

A. I spent the first eighteen years of my life in a small Ontario town near Lake Huron, so the particular images and tone are meant to be true to life, at least to my life. But because fiction will not stand for rules and regulations, I changed things as necessary. In the end, this town is an imagined town, true in its parts to many different towns. The characters are not based on anyone I knew, although many of the people I knew could have said or done the things my characters say and do. As well as realizing credible, individual fictional characters that could move a story through to its end, I was trying to capture a larger style, a way of being that was particular to a time and place. The intention was not to praise it or romanticize it, simply to

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make it fictionally real, because it was real and still is, for many people. Q. A Good House is thoroughly unique, but it also fits into a literary tradition of women writers. Can you comment? Who are some of the writers you admire? A. I have been influenced a great deal by a variety of writers, particularly women writers. I don’t have a master list, and my interest changes with time, but I would have to include the late Margaret Laurence, Alice Munro, Carol Shields, Eudora Welty, Bobbie Ann Mason, even Dorothy Parker. Although I am inspired by the craft and grateful for the humanity or the wit or the gentleness or the sheer nerve in the writing, I have probably been most influenced by the sureness of the work. Each of these women has discovered and held fast to a very solid and extremely wise literary voice. Q. A Good House won the 1999 Giller Prize. Previous winners include Margaret Atwood, Mordecai Richler, and Alice Munro. Can you tell us the background of this award? A. The Giller Prize was established in 1994 by Jack Rabinovitch to honour the memory of his late wife Doris Giller, a book-loving journalist who lived and worked in both Montreal and Toronto. In that first year, David Staines, Mordecai Richler, and Alice Munro lent their prestige to the prize by sitting on the jury. It’s a wonderful evening. Jack Rabinovitch invites four hundred guests to an open bar and a five-course dinner at the Four Seasons Hotel in Toronto. There are usually five shortlisted writers and no one but the jury knows which book has won until the announcement is made.

ing a worthy book that won’t sell very well. Along with many provincial institutions, the Canada Council also provides small but adequate grants, which allow writers to keep writing. If our writers are quite good now, and I believe they are, it is because we live in a country that desires literary excellence. Q. Some of the Canadian press tried to categorize this novel as a “feel-good” novel, and you really rebelled against that. As a reader, I found something beautiful but also inexpressibly sad about this story. Children grow up and leave; a granddaughter is born brain-damaged; a son is killed in an accident; and Bill develops Alzheimer’s and goes through a personality change … There are so many losses, even in the life of this “happy” family. Can you discuss more? A. The losses in A Good House might seem to be excessive but, given the time span of the novel, in my experience and from what I have witnessed, they are not at all excessive. Because this is an extended family, there are more people at risk, more people for the reader to watch. At the end of the novel, Margaret in particular seems to comprehend that the absence of loss is not happiness, it is only good, and only temporarily good luck. Maybe happiness is a combination of two simple things: the instinct to celebrate like mad when your luck is holding and the tenacity, the decency to hold true (to family, to a lover, to friends) when luck goes bad. If this is true, then I have written about a happy family.

Q. There seem to be so many incredible writers coming out of Canada in recent years, yourself included. Is there a reason for the new emergence of this generation of great writers in Canada? Or is it just that they are recognized and appreciated more now than ever? A. There has been a kind of burst of good Canadian writing in the last two or three decades. Although I can’t guess exactly why this is so, some of the credit must go to a country-wide array of small publishers supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, publishers who often take the first chance on a writer, publishperennialcanada AUTHOR

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