Mister Sandman

by Barbara Gowdy

  The following review o/Mister Sandman first appeared in The Washington Post on March 30,1997. It is written by American journalist and author of Geek Love, Katherine Dunn.

  Some puritanical streak in many of us insists that art must be medicinal, glumly virtuous and difficult to swallow. Canadian Barbara Gowdy insolently explodes such constipated pretensions. Mister Sandman, her third novel, cocks a snoot at conventions, both moral and literary, and is so brilliantly crafted and flat-out fun to read that she makes jubilant sinners of us all.

  Gowdy’s humour dwells not in one-liners, but in acute variations of tone and attitude. Her luminous, deceptively conversational style shuffles time frames and points of view so smoothly that her intricate narrative flows in molten simplicity. The deliberately mundane takes on magical qualities.

  Gowdy’s topic in Mister Sandman is lies and the truth they are meant to conceal. The novel is a perfectly turned parable, but its characters are multidimensional human beings, convincingly drawn by a wry and knowing eye that sees all of their frail goofiness and loves them, not despite but because of their flaws. This refreshingly mature approach analyzes the function and form of deceit, recognizing that the first and last victim of the lie is the liar and that, as in more public realms, the cover-up does more harm than the original crime.

  Mister Sandman is the story of the lying Canary clan, Doris and Gordon Canary and their three daughters. Gordon is the unassuming editor of gritty potboilers in a small publishing house. His talents are appreciated best by the hopeless, drunken writers whose stacks of unpublishable manuscripts are the footstools and end tables in the modest Canary home. Gordon loves his family “a great deal, protectively and sheepishly,” and he lies awkwardly and painfully to protect them from their own peccadilloes as well as his. “The truth,” he always says, “is just a version.” This maxim, distorted in the pleasantly bovine mind of his eldest daughter, Sonja, becomes “The truth is just aversion,” a heraldic motto for the entire factually challenged family.

  Doris is a charming and versatile diva of prevarication. Wielding the skills of her failed acting career with a nimble imagination, the restless housewife creates a constantly evolving art form ranging from manipulative little fibs to grand-scenario whoppers. Lies are her tool for getting what she wants, from cash in a pinch to a shield from unpleasant consequences.

  Marcy, the smart middle sister, has her own terrors and passions to disguise. If the eldest daughter, Sonja, is too simple to lie, she has secrets to nurture, and her contented misunderstanding of herself and everyone else forms a web of unreality more impenetrable than the conscious fibbery of others.

  Yet this is an enchantingly loving family. They lie tenderly to each other and eagerly believe each other’s lies. Only the youngest, Joan, never lies, if only because she was dropped on her head at birth and is mute. Depending on whose version one believes, she is brain-damaged or a supernatural reincarnation or a great mind choosing not to besmirch herself with the vile dangers of language. Whatever the case, she is utterly unlike any of the Canarys. She is bizarrely gifted and completely mysterious, a tiny, fastidious near-albino beauty in a dark, robustly homely brood. She is terrified of strangers, hypersensitive to light and sound. She spends her childhood hiding, reading and listening in a closet.

  Joan is not the family shame, but their greatest treasure, the focus of their bewildered adoration. Each member of the family confides in her, pouring their secrets into her gorgeous silence. The father sprawls on the floor with his head in her closet confessing the tortures of his miserably decent soul. The mother, Doris, shares her merrily plotted evasions for the bill collectors and reads poetic tidbits from her lovers’ letters out loud. Dim, soft Sonja treats Joan to candy and whispers, while sharp Marcy claims she can read Joan’s mind and translate her desires. When Joan displays her astounding talents, the Canarys’ faith in her genius is joyously vindicated. When she starts work on her own creations, they struggle to help her, although they have no notion of what she is doing or of how it will ultimately affect them all.

  Around this familial nexus swirl the concealed individual lives. The lies become flags signalling what is most dear and most terrifying—and the biggest lies are to conceal sexual identity and extracurricular escapades. These are not evil people. The worst they do is deny what they fear in themselves, that inner life they fear will be rejected by their loved ones, or by society at large.

  In her descriptions of these hidden passions, Gowdy’s lyric use of ordinary language takes on a sensuality so sympathetic that the reader is led inevitably to suspect that these propensities may not be the darker side of the Canary clan at all, but their radiant best.

  —Reprinted by permission of the author

  Read on

  Web Detective

  Doris creates a sob story so convincing on the TV program Queen for a Day, she trumps the other two contestants for the grand prize. This show aired for many years, first on the radio before becoming a hugely popular TV program. Learn more about it at:

  www.classicthemes.c0m/50sTVThemes/themePages/queenForaDay.html

  The only other contest Doris wins is ten rolls of toilet paper with a photo of her choice printed on it. Out of spite for never getting on Name That Tune, she has Bill Cullen’s photo printed on the rolls. If you’re having trouble visualizing Cullen, visit a website dedicated to him (with plenty of photos): userdata.acd.net/ottinger/Cullen/

  The first time Joan plays a piano, she mimics the hymn Grandma Gayler just finished playing, “Tell Me the Stories of Jesus.” To hear the hymn played on piano, you can download the file at:

  www.hymnsite.com/lyrics/umh277.sht

  Find the lyrics from the song “Mister Sandman” at:

  www.ablyrics.com/lyrics_98634_Chordettes_Mr._Sandman.html

  David Rayne, the experimental composer Gowdy creates for Joan to study, could be based on the prolific and highly influential avant-garde composer John Cage. A lengthy and fascinating biography of Cage and his sound experiments can be found on this popular “Wiki” site: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_cage

  Quill & Quire’s profile on Barbara Gowdy, in which Mister Sandman and her other books are discussed, can be found at:

  www.quiIlandquire.com/authors/profile.cfm?article_id=2564

  Descant cultural magazine devoted its entire Spring 2006 issue to Barbara Gowdy. For information on this issue, visit:

  www.descant.on.ca/issues/d132.html

  To receive updates on author events and new books by Barbara Gowdy, sign up today at www.authortracker.ca.

  Read on

  An Excerpt from We So Seldom Look on Love, by Barbara Gowdy

  When you die, and your earthly self begins turning into your disintegrated self, you radiate an intense current of energy. There is always energy given off when a thing turns into its opposite, when love, for instance, turns into hate. There are always sparks at those extreme points. But life turning into death is the most extreme of extreme points. So just after you die, the sparks are really stupendous. Really magical and explosive.

  I’ve seen cadavers shining like stars. I’m the only person I’ve ever heard of who has. Almost everyone senses something, though, some vitality. That’s why you get resistance to the idea of cremation or organ donation. “I want to be in one piece,” people say. Even Matt, who claimed there was no soul and no afterlife, wrote a RS. in his suicide note that he be buried intact.

  As if it would have made any difference to his energy emission. No matter what you do—slice open the flesh, dissect everything, burn everything—you’re in the path of a power way beyond your little interferences.

  I grew up in a nice, normal, happy family outside a small town in New Jersey. My parents and my brother are still living there. My dad owned a flower store. Now my brother owns it. My brother is three years older than I am, a serious, remote man. But loyal. When I made the headlines he phoned to say that if I needed money for a lawyer, he would give it to me. I was really touched. Especi
ally as he was standing up to Carol, his wife. She got on the extension and screamed, “You’re sick! You should be put away!”

  She’d been wanting to tell me that since we were thirteen years old.

  I had an animal cemetery back then. Our house was beside a woods and we had three outdoor cats, great hunters who tended to leave their kills in one piece. Whenever I found a body, usually a mouse or a bird, I took it into my bedroom and hid it until midnight. I didn’t know anything about the ritual significance of the midnight hour. My burials took place then because that’s when I woke up. It no longer happens, but I was such a sensitive child that I think I must have been aroused by the energy given off as day clicked over into the dead of night and, simultaneously, as the dead of night clicked over into the next day.

  In any case, I’d be wide awake. I’d get up and go to the bathroom to wrap the body in toilet paper. I felt compelled to be so careful, so respectful. I whispered a chant. At each step of the burial I chanted. “I shroud the body, shroud the body, shroud little sparrow with broken wing.” Or “I lower the body, lower the body…”And so on.

  Climbing out the bathroom window was accompanied by: “I enter the night, enter the night…” At my cemetery I set the body down on a special flat rock and took my pyjamas off. I was behaving out of pure inclination. I dug up four or five graves and unwrapped the animals from their shrouds. The rotting smell was crucial. So was the cool air. Normally I’d be so keyed up at this point that I’d burst into a dance.

  I used to dance for dead men, too. Before I climbed on top of them, I’d dance all around the prep room. When I told Matt about this he said that I was shaking my personality out of my body so that the sensation of participating in the cadaver’s energy eruption would be intensified. “You’re trying to imitate the disintegration process,” he said.

  Maybe—on an unconscious level. But what I was aware of was the heat, the heat of my danced-out body, which I cooled by lying on top of the cadaver. As a child I’d gently wipe my skin with two of the animals I’d just unwrapped. When I was covered all over with their scent, I put them aside, unwrapped the new corpse and did the same with it. I called this the Anointment. I can’t describe how it felt. The high, high rapture. The electricity that shot through me.

  The rest, wrapping the bodies back up and burying them, was pretty much what you’d expect.

  It astonishes me now to think how naive I was. I thought I had discovered something that certain other people, if they weren’t afraid to give it a try, would find just as fantastic as I did. It was a dark and forbidden thing, yes, but so was sex. I really had no idea that I was jumping across a vast behavioural gulf. In fact, I couldn’t see that I was doing anything wrong. I still can’t, and I’m including what happened with Matt. Carol said I should have been put away, but I’m not bad-looking, so if offering my body to dead men is a crime, I’d like to know who the victim is. Carol has always been jealous of me. She’s fat and has a wandering eye. Her eye gives her a dreamy, distracted quality that I fell for (as I suppose my brother would eventually do) one day at a friend’s thirteenth birthday party. It was the beginning of the summer holidays, and I was yearning for a kindred spirit, someone to share my secret life with. I saw Carol standing alone, looking everywhere at once, and I chose her.

  I knew to take it easy, though. I knew not to push anything. We’d search for dead animals and birds, we’d chant and swaddle the bodies, dig graves, make popsicle-stick crosses. All by daylight. At midnight I’d go out and dig up the grave and conduct a proper burial.

  There must have been some chipmunk sickness that summer. Carol and I found an incredible number of chipmunks, and a lot of them had no blood on them, no sign of cat. One day we found a chipmunk that evacuated a string of foetuses when I picked it up. The foetuses were still alive, but there was no saving them, so I took them into the house and flushed them down the toilet.

  A mighty force was coming from the mother chipmunk. It was as if, along with her own energy, she was discharging all the energy of her dead brood. When Carol and I began to dance for her, we both went a little crazy. We stripped down to our underwear, screamed, spun in circles, threw dirt up into the air. Carol has always denied it, but she took off her bra and began whipping trees with it. I’m sure the sight of her doing this is what inspired me to take off my undershirt and underpants and to perform the Anointment.

  Carol stopped dancing. I looked at her, and the expression on her face stopped me dancing, too. I looked down at the chipmunk in my hand. It was bloody. There were streaks of blood all over my body. I was horrified. I thought I’d squeezed the chipmunk too hard.

  But what had happened was, I’d begun my period. I figured this out a few minutes after Carol ran off. I wrapped the chipmunk in its shroud and buried it. Then I got dressed and lay down on the grass. A little while later my mother appeared over me.

  “Carol’s mother phoned,” she said. “Carol is very upset. She says you made her perform some disgusting witchcraft dance. You made her take her clothes off, and you attacked her with a bloody chipmunk.”

  “That’s a lie,” I said. “I’m menstruating.”

  After my mother had fixed me up with a sanitary napkin, she told me she didn’t think I should play with Carol any more. “There’s a screw loose in there somewhere,” she said.

  I had no intention of playing with Carol any more, but I cried at what seemed like a cruel loss. I think I knew that it was all loneliness from that moment on. Even though I was only thirteen, I was cutting any lines that still drifted out toward normal eroticism. Bosom friends, crushes, pyjama-party intimacy, I was cutting all those lines off.

  Copyright

  Mister Sandman

  Copyright © 1995 by Barbara Gowdy.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  EPub Edition © NOVEMBER 2010 ISBN: 978-1-443-40258-3

  P.S. section © 2007 by Barbara Gowdy.

  Published by Harper Perennial, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

  HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

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  Toronto, Ontario, Canada

  m4w 1a8

  www.harpercollins.ca

  First published in Canada in hardcover by Somerville House Publishing: 1995. First HarperCollins trade paperback edition: 2001.

  This paperback edition: 2007.

  “Lies and Whispers,” a review of Mister Sandman, © Katherine Dunn, originally published in The Washington Post, March 30,1997. Reprinted in P.S. section with permission.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Gowdy, Barbara

  Mister Sandman / Barbara Gowdy.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-00-647498-2

  ISBN-10: 0-00-647498-5

  I. Title.

  PS8563.O883M5 2007 C813’.54

  C2007-900072-X

  RRD 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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