James Grainger Reviews Wiebke von Carolsfeld’s Claremont

Wiebke von Carolsfeld. Claremont. Linda Leith Publishing. $21.95, 268 pp., ISBN: 978-1-77390-023-0

Like all good comic fiction, Wiebke von Carolsfeld’s Claremont does not rely on laughs to solicit the reader’s affection. The dialogue is crisp and witty, characters of wildly varying dispositions are forced into close quarters, and familial and erotic tensions are brought to a head and resolved. That Carolsfeld pulls this is off is all the more surprising given the novel’s opening chapters, which focus on the fallout of a brutal domestic tragedy. 

That tragedy is the murder of Mona, one of four adult siblings in the Michajelovich family, by her abusive husband, who then commits suicide, leaving the bodies to be found by their nine-year-old son, Tom.

In accordance with Mona’s will, Tom, who has been rendered mute by trauma, is placed in the care of Sonya, the oldest of the Michajelovich siblings. When Tom shows a preference for living with his aunt Rose and her teenage son in a ramshackle house in downtown Toronto (the Claremont Avenue of the title), long-simmering family tensions already heightened by Mona’s murder come to a head.

To describe a novel about the aftermath of a murder-suicide as comic may sound counterintuitive if not crass, but Carolsfeld’s intentions are not those of the tragedian. She is out to transform Tom’s orphaning as cathartic release of familial energies that ultimately brings harmony to a fractured family dynamic.

This is not to suggest that Carolsfeld trivializes the story’s core tragic elements—one of the novel’s key strengths is its complex, sympathetic portrayal of how trauma amplifies pre-existing weaknesses and conflicts both in individuals and the family structures they rely upon. Carolsfeld is more interested in the inherent resiliency of those individuals and families sabotaged by catastrophe. 

She builds upon this key theme through the earlier suicide of the Michajelovich matriarch, an event that gains an eerie resonance with Mona’s murder. For Sonya, whose mother’s suicide forced her to drop out of university to help raise her younger siblings, her sister’s murder feels, in her worst moments, like yet another imposition on her ongoing battle to escape her family.  

Even at the funeral, which Sonya was forced to organize largely on her own, she is cast as the unappreciated surrogate parent: “As per usual when things went wrong, her two younger siblings reverted right back to being scared little kids, waiting for Sonya to swoop in and set right what was all too wrong.”

The reader initially buys into Sonya’s version of the Michajelovich Family Romance, as Rose and Will, the youngest of the siblings and a perennial sponger off his family, live down to her low expectations. After Rose assumes care for Tom, the barely employable Will takes off on an extended trip to Korea, leaving Rose to look after two boys on her own. Soon things get so messy on Claremont that social services place Tom in foster care, forcing Rose to confront her passivity and immaturity.

The narrative point of view shifts between these multiple storylines until they eventually converge upon, if not a downright “happy” ending, then an emotionally satisfying resolution that underscores Carolsfeld’s humane vision. Central to that vision is the attainment, through much struggle, of responsible adulthood and its demands upon our time.   

Unfortunately, Carolsfeld’s vision, at least in this novel, has no use for the role of fatherhood or men in general. With the exception of a gay social worker, the men in Claremont are selfish, unreliable, and manipulative, if not downright abusive. Only Will achieves a modicum of his sisters’ maturity; the other adult male characters are hustled rather clumsily off stage (the ashes of Mona’s husband are actually flushed down a toilet). If Carolsfeld has a point to make about contemporary toxic masculinity, it’s not exactly a subtle one.

This is a rare off note in an otherwise genuinely moving novel that eschews sentimentality and melodrama in favour of a clear-eyed but compassionate exploration of human frailty.

James Grainger is the author of Harmless (McClelland & Stewart), a Globe and Mail and National Post Best Book of 2015, and The Long Slide (ECW Press), which won the ReLit Award for Short Fiction. He currently writes a column on horror fiction for the Toronto Star and has nearly completed two book-length projects he is loathe to speak of. He lives in Hamilton’s north end.