by Andrew Hedglin
I’m a little worried, as Harriet Chance often does about her own life, that this review might not live up to its full potential. By turns wrenching and farcical, with a rich emotional landscape, This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance! by Jonathan Evison is a lovely, bittersweet novel of surprising humanity.
The story here is about Harriet Chance (née Nathan), a widow and former housewife from Washington state who has been haunted of late by the ghost of her recently departed husband, Bernard. When she is informed of an Alaskan cruise Bernard bought for her as an uncharacteristic surprise, she feels compelled to take it to honor his wishes. After her best friend Mildred backs out as her traveling companion, Harriet (eventually) spends the cruise with her recovering-addict daughter Caroline and massive, slovenly, thoughtful Kentucky tourist Kurt Pickens.
Although half of the book is a straightforward story set just last month in August of 2015, the frequent flashbacks in second-person perspective are narrated like an exaggerated version of the dulcet television tones of Ralph Edwards, host of the 1950s reality show This Is Your Life. In its heyday, the show profiled everybody from movie stars to WWII survivors to housewives not unlike Harriet herself. The tone of the show straddles the line between empathetic and exploitative, judgmental and reassuring. Riddled with not only 1950s social mores but also the accompanying circumlocution of delicate topics, it’s a curiosity to most modern readers, but it is be a framework that Harriet herself would recognize.
There is one notable difference between the show and the novel: whereas the show told a person’s story in linear fashion, the book ping-pongs throughout different eras of Harriet’s life, although the overriding narrative arc moves backward. We are constantly asked to reassess whether Harriet is the victim or the perpetrator of her greatest failings: the failure to become the independent woman she always wanted to be, and the failure to fully love her daughter Caroline.
The lurid glare of a television show, however, serves as a less-apt metaphor than the old stand-by of the Russian Matryoshka nesting dolls: we have to go deeper and smaller into her life to finally find the unbroken image within.
Although the big tentpole events might seemed to have charted Harriet’s course, it’s the quotidian acts of forgiveness and mercy, grace even, that’s necessary to end her story at peace with her husband, her children, her friend, and herself.
In my opinion, Harriet’s heroic attempts at absolution absolutely are as haunting as any apparition appearing on this Alaskan cruise. This book is about chances that do (and don’t) pass Harriet by. Don’t let this book pass you by this autumn.
[Jonathan Evison will be signing copies of this book at Lemuria on Wednesday, October 7, at 5:00 p.m. and will be reading at 5:30.]
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