THE CROOKED HEART OF MERCY by Billie Livingston (Random House), 256 pages, $29.95 cloth. Rating: NNN
The key to Billie Livingston’s fiction is its potent emotional core. She always make sure you can empathize with her characters, who are often troubled souls searching for personal connection or, in the case of her newest book, reconnection.
When their two-year-old son dies, Ben and Maggie are both gutted. She can’t even think about returning to her job as a personal support worker for an elderly woman. He, after an attempted suicide, winds up in a psych ward, where he’s in such an intense dissociative state, he doesn’t believe he exists.
When Maggie’s induced to help out her brother Francis, a gay alcoholic priest, she has to decide whether to let him help her get on with her life, seek new work and maybe face Ben and their shared grief.
In chapters alternating between past and present, and between Ben and Maggie’s points of view, their backgrounds emerge. Ben, whose father is an angry drunk, his brother a self-absorbed petty criminal, never experienced real joy until he met Maggie. Her relationship with her brother has always been defined by Francis’s complicated relationship to his sexuality.
Livingston brings these emotional crises to life, never resorting to clichés. Ben’s skepticism about psychiatry, even as he’s suffering, is refreshing, as are his droll observations about the ward’s other residents. And when a possible new employer introduces Maggie to a psychic, the results are suitably harrowing.
Livingston’s written an out-and-out novel about healing, and that’s a problem. The resolution of Maggie’s fraught bond with Francis and developments in Maggie’s and Ben’s other relationships become a little too simple, and by novel’s end, Livingston’s abandoned ambiguity entirely.
But diving into the author’s emotional vortex is a powerful experience.
susanc@nowtoronto.com | @susangcole
