Abandonment fractures a girl’s fragile world

Toronto novelist Barbara Gowdy has built a career on reading the hearts and minds of oddball, exceptional characters and translating what she finds onto the page.

In her 1993 short story collection, “We So Seldom Look on Love,” she entered the lives of emotionally or physically abnormal people -- Siamese twins, a necrophile, an exhibitionist -- to animate existences that might otherwise seem unfathomable.

Her 1999 novel “The White Bone” considered the daily happenings of elephants, and Gowdy illuminated her pachyderm world with a keen depth and imagination. “The Romantic,” her newest work, explores experiences closer to home, showing readers the uncommon pain and unquenchable need animating even ordinary-looking lives.

On its surface, “The Romantic” is a tale of obsessive romantic love. The narrator, Louise Kirk, schemes and maneuvers to get the unwavering devotion she desperately craves from her childhood friend, Abel.

Using masterful narration that moves seamlessly back and forth in time, Gowdy gives us a look into the bond between Louise and Abel, a communion that began when they were children and grew over their adolescent years and into their 20s. The relationship they share is not one of plain sexual attraction or simple companionship, but is rooted in Louise’s deep, urgent need.

When the tale opens, Louise is a 9-year-old girl, yearning to impress her distracted, former beauty queen mother. As an only child, Louise keeps her room perfectly neat, dresses in younger versions of her mother’s clothes and walks on eggshells through the house, hungering for signs of maternal love. For all her circumspection, Louise is unable to forestall the inevitable: One day, her mother leaves home, explaining her departure with a note that reads, in part, “Louise knows how to work the washing machine.”

Louise, in fact, does not know how to work the washing machine nor how to navigate her young life set adrift by abandonment. At first, though, she is liberated by her mother’s absence. With her mother gone and Louise living in the more relaxed atmosphere overseen by her father and a housekeeper, the girl can leave items scattered on her dresser and actually use her playthings, rather than just look at them.

“When I play with my dolls, I don’t just dress them, comb their hair and put them back in the toy box,” Louise says of her new life. Now, she revels in her freedom “to carry them around and sit them in front of the television.”

On one level, the possibility of her mother returning sickens her; Louise is just as happy that she’s gone.

And yet, she’s cursed by her own desperate yearning for a mother, a drive that cannot be staunched, forcing Louise to search endlessly, and at times unconsciously, for an outlet.

The mother of the Richter family, just moved in down the street, becomes the locus for Louise’s desires. “I trail after her to the grocery store and touch the grapefruits she has fondled. I gaze at her flannel nightgown billowing on the clothesline and am uplifted, as if by music. Under the pretext of welcoming her to the subdivision or asking if she gives piano lessons ... I write letters advertising my availability and qualifications as a daughter.”

Louise can’t help seeking something to ease the crushing loss she’s endured, and indulges intense fantasies of adoption by Mrs. Richter. “Together we bake cakes and pies,” Louise imagines, “flour whitening our arms and identical frilly aprons. She teaches me to play the piano. I braid her hair.”

When Mrs. Richter’s attentions fail to rally, Louise begins to hang out with the Richters’ son, Abel, a moody, solitary youngster. Fascinated by nature and music, Abel is an adopted child who doesn’t quite fit into the suburban neighborhood. The children spend summers together in the nearby ravine, studying wildlife, staking out a territory of their own. They are two misfits who fit well together.

The weight of Louise’s obsession for Mrs. Richter shifts onto the slim shoulders of Abel, who’s no more capable of filling Louise’s bottomless craving than his mother had been. Over the course of the novel, the insatiable longing at Louise’s core will drive their rocky couplehood.

Gowdy’s clear-eyed narration gives readers insight into the difficult and extraordinary challenge of surviving maternal abandonment. She presents Louise’s needs as bald and raw, and in so doing, the unbearable pain of Louise’s dilemma resonates deeply in readers.

Though obsessive love and romantic desire serve as the story’s framework, the tale’s foundation is built solidly on the rupture suffered by this child and the way her intense yearning shapes her world. At the heart of “The Romantic” are questions about loss and love that are, in many ways, unanswerable and anything but romantic.

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The RomanticThe Romantic

A Novel

Barbara Gowdy

Metropolitan Books: 320 pp., $24