“Leipciger’s syntax is capable of pivoting, pirouetting, detouring, and reversing through long novelistic hauls and absences.”
There is more than a hint of Alice Munro in Sarah Leipciger’s third novel, Moon Road. The emotional drive across Canada, the acutely observed details of Ontario that subtly gain traction, and the tensions between married and divorced couples find their way into Leipciger’s poignant fiction. Moon Road illuminates the heart’s wilderness, accidental wounds, and cracked mirrors along highway distances. Moreover, the Hanratty surname of the characters in this novel matches the fictional Ontario village of Hanratty in Munro’s short stories. If Munro’s “Moons of Jupiter” forms part of Moon Road, then Cormac McCarthy’s gothic American roads also creep into Leipciger’s landscapes.
Consider her introductory chapter, “Rain,” which establishes a lyrical mood of menacing mystery: “A woman, sleeping in a tree.” From these opening words, the interface between dream and reality creates a mythical, archetypal space for this tented young woman whose identity will be revealed gradually through the course of the novel. A series of negatives punctuate the narration: “Not like a lemur, nothing like that. She’s not suspended in the branches by her toes.” In her dream, she takes “wrong turn after wrong turn, destination blurring more and more.” Moon Road traces many wrong turns and blurred destinations. “The dream hands her a peach. She takes a bite. It’s rotten.” In this Canadian dream of Eden it starts to rain: “Not in the dream, it is actually raining.” The woman may not be suspended by her toes, but the novel suspends her in different ways.
The subject of “Rain” and other titled chapters interspersed through the main plot is Una, daughter of florist Kathleen and painter Yannick, who have been separated for many years. Indeed, Una (whose name appears most famously in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene where she represents innocence) is the unifying force and final word in the novel. She shelters inside an “awe-inspiring” red cedar: “All that remains is a hollowed trunk with a triangular opening just big enough for a person to crouch through.” This entire novel is triangulated, both in the family relationships and shared perspectives among parents and child, as well as the three parts of the novel – “The Party,” “The Road,” and “The Bones Place.” The sleeping friend in “Rain” may be Una’s shadow self, while the sound of the rain “like the clop of a spooked pony” further adds to the mystery. This opening chapter closes on a temporal note of 11:28 p.m., which appears towards the end of the novel as the last time Una is seen alive.
The title of the novel derives from a watercolour in a picture book that Una as a child shows Yannick: a yellow moon shining on a green-black sea. Una is too young to express the abstract thinking of that image – “That moon road.” That image is symbolic of her melancholic quest in life, the long road across Canada where she finds and loses herself. “Moon Road” is also the title of the final chapter in the book where Una disappears into the waters out west. She is on a jetty on Vancouver Island: “Our girl doesn’t know this but above her there is a CCTV camera” where she’s being recorded. Leipciger’s omniscient narrator is a panopticon scanning the Canadian scene through alternating lenses of Una, Kathleen, and Yannick. From time to time, Una roams in and out of the narrative frame. The picture is “jittery and surreal,” two adjectives that describe the overall mood of the novel. Homesick, she is wrapped in the dark – “The reassuring moon. The tumble and roll of the ocean.”
The moon pulls her towards her home in Ontario after such a long absence. “The moon lights an empty, shivering road on the water, but outside that the water is black.” Moon, water, and mood merge: “The pull of a strong tide, this moon and its reflection on the water.” Leipciger’s demonstrative pronouns swim through the narrative, while the clock measures the tide of Una’s fate until 11:28 p.m. when she hears a sound amidst the gathering shadows. “The movement looks to her like an animal. Now it looks like a shadow again.” The moon acts like a magnet for her body with its injured leg. “She eyes the road of light to the moon itself, its circumference vibrating like sound.” There is a synaesthetic quality to this lunar attraction. “A high spring tide, notable for the treacherous conditions it stirs up, receives the unexpected load with indifference, carrying on its back our girl, floundering in moonlight.” Primal, archetypal, synaesthetic.
This mysterious disappearance has been prepared for well in advance by shifting spatial and temporal frames, as well as the perspectives of Una’s divorced parents. When we first meet Kathleen, we are thrust into her past from a remote present near the ferry in British Columbia. “Many years ago, Kathleen was told by a woman examining the mulchy tea leaves scattered in her empty cup that she would always be left by the people she loved.” Left by husband and daughter, Kathleen is the “one who stays behind.” Waiting to meet Yannick, her ex-husband whom she hasn’t seen in nineteen years, Kathleen takes Una’s tooth (“a shard of enamel”) from her hidden drawer and buries it in a jam jar under the phlox in her garden. Una’s tooth is a reminder of her own cracked molar (“like an open book”) and a connective tissue to Una’s bone at the novel’s end. Moon Road flows from Kathleen’s “Many years ago” to “Years later, many” in “The Bone” chapter with its remnant of Una’s tibia.
The second chapter shifts from Kathleen to Yannick who waits for her in the town’s coffee shop where he attempts to solve a crossword puzzle: “Six down. Damp fog hides nothing. A cryptic clue and not a difficult one but he just can’t see the answer.” The answer is “moist,” which in turn embeds “mist” in the novel that exposes a hidden, encrypted world of Canadian and cosmic moisture.
“A Good Mother” returns to Una who is referred to initially as “our girl” before changing to “this woman” – the lives of girls and women being interchangeable. Within the forest’s moist ecosystem, the good mother is surprisingly a mosquito that feeds upon Una. Amidst the smoky morning mist, the chapter shared by Una and mosquito becomes a kind of parable: “A few metres above her head, silent, perched within a deep fissure in the rough bark of a hemlock: a mosquito.” This parasite searches “for the blood meal that will provide protein to her developing eggs. She’s a good mother.” The insect serves as a foil for Kathleen who has only one child, and Yannick who has fathered several children with different wives. The allegorical import drifts through the woods and onto Una’s neck: “She’s a skilled mosquito, this one, deft with her proboscis, which she now slips into the woman’s skin (with, it could be said, a lover’s touch).” Largely absent in Una’s life, the lover’s touch goes unnoticed, “not yet aware that she’s been stalked and hunted.” Where mother mosquito succeeds, her victim falls short: “She will try to build a cairn of smooth, flat stones, but they will insistently slip off one another and she’ll give up.” In their forested fable, Una and mother mosquito long for home.
After their lengthy separation the lover’s touch casts a spell on Kathleen and Yannick during their cross-country trek in search of Una. “Part One” ends with their decision to drive out west together. Yannick’s last wife, Leigh, leaves him after more than twenty years together. “Yannick has always been the one to do the leaving. And now he cannot see the road ahead without her.” The roads are topographical and existential, taken and not taken, where U-turns remain a distinct possibility. The final words of “Part One” provide textual direction: “A U-turn like that, you don’t ask.” Even Leipciger’s syntax is capable of pivoting, pirouetting, detouring, and reversing through long novelistic hauls and absences.
Just as there is a reunion between Kathleen and Yannick, so the elements of road, water, and moon fuse at the back of the ferry. “Hang around the rear end of a big boat like that and stare at the wake, that white-water highway, and what’s inside a person’s head and what’s inside his heart will inevitably tumble overboard and disappear beneath the foam.” Narrator and character stare down the depths and in the destructive element immerse. “Watch the wake long enough and a pattern will be revealed, repeating without end, the water parting down the middle and folding back into itself.” Moon Road converges and diverges, parting and patterning the Bible’s cadences – “And then it rains. And then it is night.”
In their hotel room, Yannick takes out a Bible and turns it over in his hands. In their dialogue near the end, they discuss the cryptic puzzle, and Yannick sees “the puzzle of a girl.” His daughter, Una, and Kathleen as well. Kathleen returns home to her cosmos and phlox – “A flower with two faces, this one.” She digs up the glass jar with Una’s tooth in it. The final bone attests to the buoyancy of Una’s spirit, which comes up for air even as it is carried through the ocean’s current. And the triangular family comes full circle.
About the Author
Hailing from Toronto, Ontario, Sarah Leipciger lives in London, U.K., with her three children. She is Associate Lecturer in Creative Writing at Birkbeck University and also teaches at City Lit. Her short fiction has been shortlisted for the Asham Award, the Fish Prize, and the Bridport Prize. She is the author of the critically acclaimed The Mountain Can Wait (2015) and Coming Up for Air (2020). Moon Road is her third novel.
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.
Book Details
Publisher : Penguin Random House Canada (May 16 2024)
Language : English
ISBN-10 : 0857526537
ISBN-13 : 978-0857526533