Book Review

By Derryll White

Whittall, Zoe (2007). Bottle Rocket Hearts.

Zoe Whittall is a young talent from Quebec’s Eastern Townships. She immersed herself in the urban cultural frenzy of Montreal as events started to sweep the city away. This novel, in the best Canadian manner, happens around the 1995 Quebec Referendum, when the Parti Quebecois came oh so close to winning a separation vote. And at the same time Montreal was experiencing explicit gender turmoil with Skinheads stomping gays.

My daughters have always given me a hard time for my devotion to reading young emerging Canadian female novelists. My defense is simply that they risk more, push the cultural boundaries and break new literary ground. So when I thought of the bottle rockets going up, the glittering arcs of sparks across the evening sky, I thought of my heart. I thought of love. I thought “Oh, this might be exciting!” The cleavage on the cover didn’t hurt either.

Right away the reader knows this is a different world, a different time, a different culture. The main character is Eve, a young writer, always a sign that things may not be as they seem at first glance. And they aren’t. The culture is queer. The setting is urban hip and poor and very alternative. The language is youthful, alive, not ponderous – full of images both reflective and subjective. Whittall throws herself into her book, her own bottle rocket searching for love and trailing myriad sparks of desire.

I am taken by her exuberance, by her lust for life. She magically takes me back to when I was 20 and 21, making deals with life, hanging on drunkenly while careening around corners, sex on motorcycles, debauchery. But with all the chaos Zoe Whittall protects a unique tenderness, a sweetness, a coming of age that allows Eve to transcend the sex, drugs and rock-and-roll.

This is a good first novel. It was named as one of the top 10 essential Canadian novels of the decade by CBC’s Canada Reads. It promises a lot more for the future.

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Excerpts from the novel:

OWNERSHIP – And no one ever really has each other. That’s the problem right. When you feel entitled to another person. That’s more dangerous than jumping out of a plane.

YOUTH – Whenever I feel like it I can jump back into the rotating skipping rope: my life. Living out of my knapsack is a strange comfort. The folds of canvas fabric are my own four walls. Kept and containing.

GENDER POLITICS – xxxx and I looked at each other with the strained effort of those who try desperately to match their political belief in polyamory with their emotional need to be warm at night. Sleeping soundly with the knowledge that you are someone’s every need and want fulfilled is a hard thing to give up…

JEALOUSY – Jealousy is too emotional a feeling to make sense of. Like trying to explain why you like the colour blue. You just do.

COMING OUT – “Rachel’s parents actually told her she was going to burn in hell. Her father once told her she wasn’t welcome in their home for an entire year. They’d finally got to the point where she could come home at Christmas and they would be nice to her, but she couldn’t mention anything about being gay.”

GRIEF – Grief givers you this incredible gift of being able to be an asshole without consequences.

– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them.  When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.

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