Foucault and Picasso in Newfoundland: Lisa Moore's This Is How We Love
Reviewed by Michael Greenstein
Jules, the artistic protagonist of Lisa Moore’s latest novel, This Is How We Love, is married to Joe, who teaches philosophy and reads Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. Foucault zeroes in on a prison’s panopticon or central observatory where guards exercise their power or authority over inmates. Although Moore’s novel doesn’t contain a panopticon per se, her Newfoundland landscape features a lighthouse, which cuts through the island’s fog and superimposes an atmospheric discipline over her characters’ crimes and punishments in St. John’s. More important than this mindscape, however, is the novelist’s painterly prose that combines hyperrealism and cubism through fragmented vision, curved shapes of imagery, and distortions of narrative, setting, and character in the plot’s jagged geometry. Furthermore, Moore is on record as having been influenced by Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, a novel whose cubist techniques reflect her characters’ trauma.
“The trauma represented in Picasso’s Guernica reflects the traumatic events in Lisa Moore’s This Is How We Love.”
Jules’s omniscient narration serves as a kind of panopticon overseeing events on the island; her artistic representation of people resembles Picasso’s cubist shapes. Although Moore is responsible for the book’s abstract cover design where colours kaleidoscope into swirls of waves and smoke, the novel itself fills in abstraction with figures in the ground of Newfoundland. Jules, Joe, and their son Xavier are among the many characters depicted in this novel’s tightly knit community against a vast North Atlantic backdrop. The trauma represented in Picasso’s Guernica reflects the traumatic events in This Is How We Love.
The opening chapter’s frenzy of telephone calls disorients the reader, as well as Jules and Joe who are vacationing in Mexico, far removed from tragic events back home. Jules’s sister Nell phones at the same time as Joe’s sister Nancy calls him – both announcing that Xavier is in hospital undergoing surgery after being beaten and stabbed at a party. Jules has been awakened from her dream about running in the ocean (“the tug of wave” and the “curl of a wave”) only to learn about the tragic nightmare in Newfoundland. This tug and curl of waves introduce the shapes of things to come, for the video of the attack on Xavier is “elegantly tilted and off-kilter,” like Moore’s style. In the hospital room Jules dreams about her art teacher Sabine: “smaller and smaller, as in the eyepiece of a backwards telescope.” Through reversed and distorted lenses darkly between dream and trauma, the novel employs cubist techniques.
The next chapter, “two stars,” shifts focus from the phones to Xavier who “saw the streetlight blink in and out, over a shoulder, over the top of the heads, shafts of light, sharp and then splintering. He could see the side of a cheek, fists, the cuff of a jacket.” Moore renders parts of anatomy as cubist shapes with splintered light accentuating the trauma of the attack. Blindsided, he sees double: “Everything visible through the keyhole of his shutting-down vision. There was a ghostly doubling of the snowdrift. All the stars in the inky sky had doubled. Each star was two stars.” Cubism’s double vision distorts foreground and background, white snow and black sky, white page and inky print. His friend Trinity tries to save him – “Xavier, Xay, Xay,” for his name is an x-ray not only of his damaged body, but also of the underbelly of Newfoundland society.
The next chapter, “the tell,” reverts to Jules who provides more background information. Jules and Joe choose the name Xavier for their son because it means “light,” an essential focal point for the novel as a whole: “We say Xavier or Xay, anglicizing it, hammering out the little hesitation between the X and the rest of the name.” Since much of the novel takes place in his hospital room, we are exposed to revealing x-rays: “In the room where Xavier’s surgeon led me there were several large screens and they showed the interior of my son’s body. The bones eerily luminous, and here and there burrs of light clinging to the white shafts of pelvis bone. The little sparks were irregularities in the x-ray technology.” Jules is as adept as the surgeon in reading the picture. If a panopticon supervises prisoners, then the x-ray penetrates patients to reveal irregular anatomic shapes. His assailant Murph possesses antagonistic x-ray vision: “Murph had seemed okay when they first moved in. But he had an x-ray vision, a narrow genius that could recognize a point of tender, hesitant pride.” Under the influence of drugs, Murph hammers his hesitation into both Trinity and Xavier, victims of his criminal behaviour that calls for discipline and punishment. X is the resonance and crossover between victim and perpetrator: “A knife that stabbed my innocent son twice in the gut because the knife had the wrong name.”
Jules chronicles her background in art history in the “attention” chapter which begins with a class on Canadian Landscape. She becomes a student of Sabine who teaches her to extend or unfurl Newfoundland’s space: “a street went on forever toward the vanishing point. It was a desecration that produced depth.” She considers “the long haul” much as Moore chisels her chapters to fit within the overall length of her multi-faceted novel. Sabine paints portraits, relying on chiaroscuro, but her more important work consists of gesture drawings, paintings about dancers in motion, their shapes approaching cubism: “Her marks were full of the dancers’ muscle strain, clench and stretch, pirouettes, big calves, men lifting women in the air.” Sabine’s class is a “circle of easels” in which Jules juxtaposes colours to see which recedes and which leaps into the foreground – how surface and depth shift.
Jules studies the Impressionists, Expressionists, the melted clocks and sliced eyeballs of the Surrealists. Cubism is somewhere in the curriculum as the students make terracotta casts of their breasts and buttocks. A local landmark binds the studio’s lights, casting cubist shadows: “The swinging beam from a lighthouse swept through in the evening.” This lighthouse atmosphere is a kind of panopticon highlighting painters and their shapes. Jules is under the influence of Sabine’s charcoal drawings of women flinging themselves across the dance floor, “one that showed the toss of a head, the sharp bones of the clavicle, the hockey players smashing into each other, a lead singer gyrating against his guitar.” Hyperrealism to be sure, but also Moore strumming Picasso’s guitar in Newfoundland.
She juxtaposes these perspectives with Foucault, for his discipline is embedded in Moore’s painterly prose. His Discipline and Punish is jokingly referred to as a “parenting self-help book,” just as “This Is How We Love” is a novel about how to love in Newfoundland. Sabine teaches Jules about how to pay attention, while Moore instructs her readers to attend to her novel “Because this is a story about my son and how he was stabbed at a party and beaten by a handful of monsters and how nobody chooses yearning, it chooses you.” That final chiasmus crosses through Xay or Xavier. Just as Picasso’s guitar enters Moore’s canvas, so too does his Guernica appear in the novel’s trauma.
Xavier is blindsided by the attack in the snow, but this is not the only blindsiding in Moore’s novel. Jules, Xavier, and Trinity are blindsided by a swan, which is painted in colours and shapes, a blur between realism and abstraction: “The swan had reared up against the hot breeze, the webbed orange feet, barely visible in the murk beneath it, churning the placid water into a boiling mass of bubble which propelled it at a sinister speed to the shore.” Although the novel concentrates more on Snowmageddon surrounding Xavier’s stabbing and Jules’s attempts to reach him in the hospital, Moore is equally capable of turning up the heat in this episode as she shapes trauma once again. Murph’s winter, swan’s summer: “It came at Xavier and me with its breast thrust forward, wings half raised and spread, a sun-drenched white-hot fire, unbearable, until it hit shore when the S of its neck went bolt straight, the beak wrenched wide, hissing.” Bolt and wrench are insinuated into breast and beak, each shape collaging into cubist gestures of chaos. “A hurling missile of spite, the swan shot itself across the apron of gravel.”
The picnic scene is described in detail, but we don’t know the cause of the swan’s actions until later. Xavier’s soccer ball forms one circle. “But it was eight-year-old Trinity the swan wanted; Trinity’s little back in her striped halter top, arched away from the open-throated hisses, the dangerous beak.” In this brutal ballet, her head is twisted backwards, while Jules grips her, “discombobulating her escape.” The swan’s “ball of feathers” disorients Xavier’s soccer ball in a frenzy of trauma. In the car on the way home Jules’s eyes meet Xavier’s in the rearview mirror. “Sometimes I think that way about potent incidents – that significance ricochets” – in cubist trauma. The day “had been an epic journey, the swan a sidebar” blindsiding the family.
Yet the episode returns much later in the novel from Trinity’s perspective, as the trauma ricochets from character to character, each shaping a different view. “The swan hadn’t moved of its own volition but was pushed by a little breeze and the movement broke the perfect reflection, a reflection that showed the ridges of folded feather, the curved neck, even the orange beak.” This reflection contrasts with the earlier reflection in the car’s mirror and soon breaks up into geometric forms: “The reflection shattered, jagged stripes of white on the black surface, juddering away from the swan in concentric rings.” As an adult, Trinity continues to have nightmares about this event, and the narrative abruptly turns to Murph punching her in the face. “What a dart. He might have snapped her neck.” These descriptions parallel Murph’s attack on Xavier. The room spins, there are five of him moving in a circle around her, a black hole outside, her eye like a misshapen pirate patch, a flap of skin in a triangle hanging beneath her eye. A neighbour helps her escape in her car with its strip of clear glass, ice on the back window cracked in jagged pieces.
The swan isn’t the only bird that blindsides Xavier. At age thirteen he drives a dirt bike beginning with a few circles around his house. Pathetic fallacy in the form of a deluge prepares for his accident: “Cracks of lightning over Bell Island, splintering the charcoal clouds, jagged lines of it tippy-toeing across the ocean.” Like Sabine’s charcoal drawings, this deluge pierces perception: “A few times big planks of violet light, making everything an x-ray, the white roses garish, a silvery on-off, on-off.” Once again, Moore x-rays setting, character, and atmosphere to examine trauma. We skip several chapters to arrive at “the bird”: “Xavier’s head snapped backwards and the tinted visor was blackened and smeared.” Blindsided again, he is hit by a sparrow: “Lying breast up and busted open, its neck was crooked hard in the wrong direction.” In this misshapenness bird and bike are absorbed as one: “The bird broke through the bone of his forehead and took up residence.” In this neo-cubist instant, the bird becomes pixels into his skull and heart.
We see Snowmageddon through Jules’s eyes. The light in her kitchen is all wrong: “The murky shadows were slanting in the wrong direction.” The sun blasts through the murky light in a single column full of dust motes; her front door is like the lid of a coffin. If fog is a constant blocking vision on the island, snow takes over: “The shape of everything was altered and blazing white, sparkling. The world was unrecognizable.” Moore’s shape-shifting unrecognizes the Rock through defamiliarization. A huge, curved funnel hangs from the back of a snowplow. Once she makes it to the hospital, she meets Geraldine, a woman from Gander whose daughter has undergone surgery and is recovering in the bed next to Xavier. She has glasses with big, thick lenses and clear plastic frames that have yellowed. Moore always paints at least one colour onto her characters, as she disperses illumination of Geraldine’s spectacles: “The reflection of ceiling lights from the hall on her glasses had made it impossible to see her eyes, but I could see grit where the lenses fit into plastic grooves of the frames. I could see fingerprints.” Geraldine’s identity is bound up in her glasses.
(Similarly, Jules inspects her mother-in-law Florence’s glasses: “The lenses were covered in white dust that sparkled in the brilliant sun, grit from the airbag.” Florence had died in an accident on the highway, and her glasses serve as spots of time and space, visual fragments focalizing narrative shards. “Years later, in Mexico City, I would think of these glasses again, the lenses like silver coins on the eyes of the dead.… I would look down into the Aztec graves… and I would think of all of this, of Florence’s car accident, my mother’s leg … and that sheet of plastic between one world and the next.” Through Plexiglass darkly, Moore scours a continent from Mexico to Newfoundland.)
Jules proceeds to clean Geraldine’s lenses, and when the latter falls asleep, Jules has a revelation of a fairy at the foot of the bed. The fairy is her sister Nell at age nine when Jules had tied nylon sheers from her bedroom window to her arms for wings. This flashback of shapes, dream sequences, and transfer of character traits form parts of chiselled chapters in This Is How We Love. The next chapter shifts abruptly to Xavier’s discovery of Trinity’s desperate state. He enters her gothic room: “The snake doorstop had a glass eye,” an ominous witness to events that follow where the devil is always in Moore’s details. He has seen Murph inject a needle in Trinity’s arm, “all of it reflected in the big black window that showed a spectacular view, all the lights of the city.” He also sees himself in the reflection, his image smaller, floating over her black hoodie. This shape shifting turns to Distortion, the aptly named St. John’s bar where a circle of empty dance floor forms around Trinity. Geometric features continue to Trinity’s stretched face and jaw moving to the side, “but it was circling” in a “vortex of emptiness.” In this cubist canvas, the “portal is a metaphor,” a visual entrance for distorted states of mind. Moore’s doors are thresholds of perception within a small community across a huge island.
The chandelier in their house is a multifocal prism, domestic panopticon and lighthouse, refracting and dispersing cubist light through its drop-crystals: “maybe more than five hundred crystal pieces, many-faceted, and it showered whoever was on the landing with a downfall of beneficent multi-hued sparkles of light … and the whole contraption jiggled and shivered.” Foucault’s focal point.
Consider the ambulance ride to the hospital when Xavier accompanies Trinity, and one of the medics is Colin Mercer whom he knew in high school. Past and present converge “in the liminal space between knowing you are one person but recognizing you might also be the other person.” Xavier is grateful for the familiarity of Colin’s face: “It came to him that Colin knew how to teleport them to the hospital without a lapse of time, just as he had moved over the basketball court.” Moore collapses time in her cubist canvas blurring past and present shapes and shades. “Just as he had risen off the gym floor into the air, suspended, and the ball suspended above him.” The novelist blends hyperrealism and cubism in her depiction of these scenes. Trinity’s room contains pennies with the light running over them; Violet Penney, Xavier’s girlfriend, is the opposite side of the coin. He wishes there was a way “to evaluate this strange loophole.” As they try to get Trinity out of the house into the ambulance, they “were actually stuck for an eternity while they figured out the math of it, the angle and geometry.” Figures in the ground struggle with eternity, geometry, and strange loopholes.
Moore’s narrative technique distorts time, place, sequence of events, and perspectives as she shifts from Xavier’s “brother” to Jules’s “out of the alders,” which returns to her son’s bike accident. “He would come flying out of the alders where the old railroad met the highway, Xavier, a tunnel of alder branches.” She captures Xavier’s speed in shapes and colours of lime-green or butter-cup yellow – a chaotic merger of character and landscape. The narrative switches abruptly from that past trauma to the present in the hospital room, but Moore creates a link between her son’s “vibrations and jolting bike” and the jolt to “the phone was vibrating.” These textual vibrations highlight hyperrealism, cubism, and trauma. “I couldn’t find it, the bloody purse I had was a sack and the phone was in the bottom, I could see the light of it. The phone had fallen between the pages of a book.” The light in the book is the hidden panopticon in This Is How We Love. Phone and book with its “spill of sand” flash back to Mexico when Joe and Jules enter a cave where the “light punched through.” Couples make love in this cave, “ripples … thrashing in the shadows.” Not simply a palace of pleasure, it is also a gothic cathedral, womb, and grave.
The final chapter, “the next wave,” returns to Jules who gets hit in the face with a wave, one of Virginia Woolf’s waves: “when I blinked one of my contact lenses was askew.” Blindsided again, she skews her vision into one long cubist sentence and stream of consciousness: “It was almost out of my eye, or it had slipped halfway off my iris or a film of water had come between the lens and my eye, and there were drops of water in my eyelashes that broke up the light into spots of violet and blue, spots floating close enough that I could have touched them with my hand, and the cliffs behind the beach became five cliffs wheeling slowly in circles, overlapping at the edges, and the boy on the dirt bike at the top of the cliff, in silhouette, was five distinct boys, each exactly the same, each hovering near the next, and all overlapping with each other…” Book cover, prism, and five-finger exercise converge in these spots of time and place. As Xavier washes up on the cliff of cross-eyed consciousness, Foucault’s panopticon disciplines Moore’s inverted telescope in Newfoundland’s lighthouse of fiction.
About the Author
LISA MOORE is the acclaimed author of the novels Caught, February, and Alligator; the story collections Open and Something for Everyone; and the young-adult novel Flannery. Her books have won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and CBC’s Canada Reads, been finalists for the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Moore is also the co-librettist, along with Laura Kaminsky, of the opera February, based on her novel of the same name. She lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland.
About the Reviewer
Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English (Université de Sherbrooke). He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published widely on Victorian, Canadian, and American-Jewish literature. He has published 250 essays and reviews in books and journals across Canada, the United States, and Europe.
Book Details
Publisher : House of Anansi Press
Publication date : Sept. 16 2025 (Paperback)
Language : English
Print length : 400 pages
ISBN-10 : 1487014031
ISBN-13 : 978-1487014032