Review of His Whole Life by Elizabeth Hay

Elizabeth Hay’s “His Whole Life” set in the mid-1990’s it opens with Jim, a 10 year old boy on a car trip from New York with George, his American father and Canadian born mother Nancy to their cabin in Ontario.

During the trip the boy poses a question from the backseat, to his parents “What is the worst thing you ever done?” George is the first to answer, while it takes Nancy and her son till much later in the book to respond. It’s fitting then that facing choices and sometimes regret are major themes of the book.

“Jim could not help but be impressed by people who knew what to do. He was the son of an indecisive father and an over- decisive mother, the former sliding off the riverbank of his life and the later riddled with second thoughts about her moments of rashness.”

It is also the time of the Quebec referendum, so we get glimpses of Rene Leveque, Pierre Trudeau and Lucian Bouchard and the potential for separation from Canada. Some of the fracturing happening in the Canadian political scene parallels the cracks appearing in George’s family. Borrowing on an observation in a recent Globe and Mail book review of a book grounded in New York City, September 11, 2001, I wondered if it’s also a criticism that could be applied to Hays book. Her use of the Quebec referendum as a backdrop “locates the story in a specific time and place, and perhaps is an attempt to lend the story greater heft than it would otherwise have.”

It’s an observation that fit for me since it was the first few chapters where I was most engaged with this book. Sometimes, it felt like a task to keep plodding through to get to the end; for me it could have been brought to a conclusion much sooner. It was interesting to discover later that Hays novel found its roots in her earlier short story “Boys and Dogs” published 10 years before. Sometimes I felt that I was gliding or floating through scenes, appreciative of the beautifully descriptive settings but with characters who were emotionally flat. It was like watching a movie with the sound turned off, while trying to guess the feelings of the characters.

The three people who Jim spends most of his time with are his mother Nancy, step-father George and eccentric Lulu, Nancy’s lifelong Canadian actor and eccentric friend. I would have liked to have gotten to know them better.

From an interview quote, Hay helped validate my response “I have to work hard at narrative; images come easily, storytelling does not.”

One short scene did grab my attention; it was between a 50 something Lulu and 10 year old Jim. For me it bordered on predatory behavior on the part of Lulu toward the boy, at the very least it was inappropriate and for me infected the rest of the novel. I found it an odd interaction.

In some ways, though George comes across as older than his years. Even so, some of the sentences that come out of his mouth feel forced, concepts or references in my opinion a 10 year old would be unlikely to be able to grasp or articulate. And yet some readers might view George’s responses as typical of a precocious child who spends most of his alone or around adults. Plenty of food for thought in this latest novel of Elizabeth Hay.

Reviewed by Rita Gore