So this is the hot new CanLit babe I’ve heard so much about. Maybe critics are so grateful to be reading something not set in rural Newfoundland during the Depression, they’re willing to overlook Petty Details’ more glaring flaws.
The story is lively enough, or ought to be. Siblings Blue and Emma are unwilling front-row spectators to their dad’s dementia and their mother’s alcoholism. Once their father Oliver takes off, no one even pretends to be part of a functioning family anymore. Blue drops out, Emma moves out, and their mother keeps drinking. But through confusion and misadventure, they eventually achieve some kind of wholeness.
That’s the idea, anyway, but it all goes cock-up somewhere. What I suppose is meant to be gritty realism feels posed and arty (strip clubs and homelessness! How delightfully sordid), and Gibb’s punches are all flinch and no impact. Instead of actually telling the story, she deposits most of it in lengthy asides. When Oliver abandons his family, Gibb says, his wife “wanted to scream, but instead, she did the middle-class thing she’d inherited from her parents and swallowed it down with a litre of toxins, keeping it inside her where it could fester and poison everyone around her in ways much more insidious and enduring than a single howl.” Thanks, Ms. Gibb: why should I have to figure it out myself when you can do it so tidily for me?
The characters don’t fare much better. Blue’s and Emma’s one-note neuroses are easy to get tired of, and Emma especially seems too emotionally retarded for her eventual self-discovery to be convincing. The bond between her and Blue, around which the book ought to cohere, also falls oddly flat: it’s as if Gibb just can’t think of anything better for them to do.
Of course, Petty Details has received high praise from many quarters, and its swirly metaphors and lovingly rendered saucy bits would have excited special admiration, I think, from one reader in particular. Oprah must not have read this one when she said there weren’t enough good books out there.
