Charity

November 1, 2020
The March/December relationship between a young medical student and a man "four times her age and half her weight" broadens into a layered examination of unintended consequences and social legacies. Canadian writer Fraser's latest is a short, inward-looking work of fictional chamber music featuring three generations of connected individuals lodged in an uncommunicative scenario. Narrator Denise is the second wife of physician Patrick, whose first wife, Judy, abandoned both him and their daughter, Greta, for a short-lived relationship with a Mexican tennis pro. Greta, 23, whose obesity is a cause for concern, is studying medicineand performing charitable work on the weekends. She horrifies all three parents by taking up with "a little old man with no future," namely air conditioning salesman Rudy Skupa, and then shocks everyone further by declaring she's leaving for Sierra Leone to work with Doctors Without Borders--and Rudy is going with her. Despite the invocation of other continents, Fraser's sad, comic landscape, littered with lingering wounds, is profoundly narrow. Mobile phones and drugs feature in it, but the sense of a social milieu frozen somewhere in the past is heightened by Fraser's arch language: "Even speaking, she devoiced as if to echo her unfamiliar reticence." The trip to Africa goes badly, and Greta returns, skinny from probable drug use and devoid of Rudy, who was murdered in a mugging . While Greta, now sent to rehab, appears to be the hinge of the novel's few events, she is rarely on the page. Instead, the focus is on Denise's regrets, rehashes, and revelations. She too went off the rails, went abroad, returned, and dropped out. A late notion aims to rescue Greta through charitable work overseas, but Charity begins at home, and ends there too. An obliquely teasing novella offering style and insight, within limitations.

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November 9, 2020
Fraser (The Voice Gallery) rushes through topics ranging from body image issues and May/December romances to opiate addiction and quarter-life crises in a spirited if undeveloped story set in present-day Vancouver. Narrator Denise Catalpa turns the focus mainly to her 23-year-old stepdaughter, Greta Fitzgerald, an aspiring doctor. Greta’s lover is Rudy Skupa, 88, a family friend and former babysitter to both women. Denise is concerned Greta will be left caring for Rudy as he becomes infirm, and makes incessant comments about Greta’s weight. Greta drops out of med school, and she and Rudy travel to Sierra Leone to work for Doctors Without Borders, where Rudy dies from “one malady or another.” When Greta comes home, she’s lost a remarkable amount of weight and, having sampled Rudy’s morphine, is addicted to opiates. Greta’s birth mother, Judy, described by Denise as one step below a “callous cougar,” shows up to help, and the two mothers forge a detente in order to help Greta. Fraser injects vague, unsettling reminiscences from Denise about Rudy’s presence in her childhood, but they don’t cohere with the Greta narrative. Too many questions linger in this brief, unsatisfying book.