Piles of books. Piles and piles of books. Cases and shelves of books, books, books, and a table in my office stacked with them. 

I bring this up not just to share the burden, although I’m happy if you’d like to. Instead, I want to mention a plan. There are very few book reviews in the established media these days, and podcasts and BookTok are random, so I’m going to start reviewing more books. Not all the time, but regularly. I’ve done it haphazardly for a while, and when I recently checked the metrics on my website, I found that some of the reviews have been viewed thousands of times. I assume people are having trouble finding reviews of books they’ve heard about. So, a small public service, and maybe a bit of a boost to other writers.

First up: Asking for a Friend by Kerry Clare.

Kerry Clare is a fluid writer, her prose a joy to read. As a writer myself, I sometimes read books that make me cringe the way a cabinetmaker must cringe when a friend shows off a bookcase they made in the garage. A shelf or two isn’t quite level, and all of them are hammered in with nails when they should be held in place by counter-sunk screws. I don’t know how to counter-sink a screw, but I like the term, and I enjoy the technical abilities of writers who routinely pull off good prose. Kerry Clare does throughout, and she’s particularly good at writing dialogue. Her characters come across as real people, not puppets, and they sound different from each other. That’s always important, but particularly so when the book is tightly focused on two friends.

Jess and Clara meet at a Toronto university in 1998, and the novel follows their friendship over the next 18 years. Clara is a couple of years older than Jess, and as the book opens, she’s far more sophisticated. Jess reads as younger and more repressed, but also more sensible. Both are believably vulnerable and try to hide it in different ways. The novel is not about mainstream political issues, which occur largely off-stage. It’s not explicitly about feminist struggles either, although freedom of choice plays a part. Instead, it’s about the daily lives of women, the expectations of women and the friendship between women. Also, importantly, motherhood. 

Clara is a restless person. Unable to settle for many years, she circles in and out of Jess’s life, often working overseas on archeological digs. As she emails Jess from internet cafes around the world, she doesn’t dwell on her work, and we don’t get the nitty-gritty of her daily life. This has the unfortunate effect of making her archeological work seem a little convenient to the plot: something to get her on the road. However, it lets us see that Clara needs to challenge herself and is struggling to prove her independence. She’s also following a man around, an older archeologist and academic, and she can’t seem to admit to herself that these two drives are in conflict. Along the way, Clara has a miscarriage that knocks her flat physically and emotionally. As she grows up, she comes across as sensuous, impulsive and a terrible planner, finding rationales for what she’s doing once she’s started doing it, and even after she’s moved on.

Jess remains quieter and more rooted. After university, she ends up in a number of believably awful temp jobs in Toronto, one involving cardboard, before getting undemanding work as a receptionist. This leaves her with free internet access and lots of time to email Clara, while working through her entirely believable self-doubt. Yet Jess soon gets where she wants to go, offered an entry-level position in a rare books collection at a Toronto library. She spends most of the rest of the book moving up through the ranks at the library. Jess grows into a tightly-wound, efficient, caring and inherently naïve person, even as she gets a big job, marries and has children.

She’s also pretty terrible with men. Both women are when they’re younger. Most women, ditto. Their early lovers are like poorly-trained dogs sniffing around a dog park, although Jess and Clara can love them passionately. They also love their eventual partners, although I find both men as convenient as Clara’s archeological work in moving the plot forward, and not much more. One earns a lot of money and adores Jess. The other is much older than Clara and mildly agrees to have a fourth child when he’s around 60 (hmmmm) since he adores Clara.

Yet the men aren’t important here. The novel is about the love Jess and Clara feel for each other. Their relationship isn’t sexual, although for one brief paragraph it skates close. Yet the two cherish a very deep friendship, and this is a rare thing in literature. Not many novels focus so closely on the relationship between female friends, how they help each other and the sad ways they can let each other down. While the two are usually in touch, at one point Clara disappears after taking offense at something Jess says, even though she hasn’t meant much by it. Clara is like that. When she reappears, Jess accepts her back seamlessly. Because that’s Jess. The men might not be convincingly drawn, but the women zigzag through life believably. 

The novel’s other focus is motherhood, as first Jess and then Clara have children. I have to say, reading that part got a little anthropological for me, since I love my son very much but was never as obsessively focused on him as Jess and Clara are on their kids. Maybe that’s because I was younger than they are when he was born. I strapped him into a Snuggli and got on with it. Maybe it’s more a generational thing, and motherhood didn’t seem quite so fraught to my friends and me as it does to women younger than us.

Here’s a memory. My husband and I had recently moved to Rio de Janeiro with our five-year-old son. My husband was posted there as a Globe & Mail correspondent and we quickly met another couple who had just arrived in town. The man was a journalist from Reuters and the woman was an ESL teacher, although they had a three-month-old baby and the woman was taking a few months off work. Our friends also had a two-year-old son, and when their son and ours came down with mild cases of German measles, we changed our weekend plan for all of us to drive together to an Amnesty International concert five hours away in São Paulo. 

Instead my new friend and I dumped both boys with their fathers and took off with her three-month-old daughter in the Globe’s new car (for which, hem, we didn’t have the right papers yet). When we got to São Paulo, my friend left her daughter with another Reuters couple who weren’t interested in the concert and whom, haw, she had met precisely once. We made our way to the stadium with 50,000 other people. Tracey Chapman was the best part; I still love her music. She sang Fast Car. Meanwhile Sting and Bruce Springsteen sang Sting’s stalker song: “Every breath you take, I’ll be watching you,” and I wondered if this was an expression of superstar rivalry. 

The next morning, my friend and I drove back to Rio, a cop stopping us on the highway for a shakedown, which I knew was a shakedown since I wasn’t speeding (although it would still have been a shakedown if I had been speeding). I pretended not to speak Portuguese in order to avoid presenting him with my lack of papers, not to mention a bribe. This went on for a while. When the baby started crying (perhaps after a motherly prod) the exasperated cop let us go.

I think Jess would have had an anxiety attack just reading this. I read the long later sections of the book with mild incredulity and great interest, knowing from younger friends that this is how it is now. I would imagine readers Kerry Clare’s age would find much to identify with in her characters’ experience of motherhood. I learned something, which is fine.

I also thought of an exhibition I went to last year at the Art Gallery of Ontario. It featured paintings by the wonderful Mary Cassatt and a Canadian painter I had never heard of, Helen McNicoll. She was a generation younger than Cassatt and diabetic, and died sadly young in the days before insulin. I loved their work. Cassatt is a marvel, and while McNicoll was maybe a little overly-aware of Cassatt’s work when she was starting out, you could see her growing toward her own style. It was deeply affecting. 

As I wandered the galleries, I asked myself why I liked the paintings so much. Sitting down on a bench, I decided it was because the women Cassatt and McNicholl portrayed were physical and sensuous without being sexualized. There was no male gaze. They could pick apples or walk in forests or play with children and they were women, not projections of male wishes and fears. They were sufficient unto themselves. 

Congratulations to Kerry Clare on the female gaze she brings to Asking for a Friend. It was lovely to look through her eyes.

Lesley Krueger’s latest novel is Far Creek Road, available here. And, yeah, I put it in the pile of books because why not?