- Beyond This Point
- McClelland & Stewart (2005)
- Bookstore Finder
In 27 years of living where the pavement ends, Holley Rubinsky has had ample time to study the people of the Kootenay Valley. Originally from L.A., she arrived among a flock of Quakers, draft dodgers and intellectuals sick of the Vietnam War, looking for a clean and peaceful place. In the intervening years, other seekers and escapees have joined the moral pioneers in this raw and remote corner of B.C. Or so it would seem, according to the motley crew converging there -- in an area Rubinsky has renamed Judith Lake Valley -- in her new book, Beyond This Point.
Published in February, Rubinsky's first novel recycles characters from her previous short-story collections At First I Hope for Rescue and Rapid Transits and Other Stories, and from the short story "The Assassin" published in Border Crossings. (She has won the Journey Prize and a National Magazine Award for short fiction.) The characters are generally neither good nor lucky: unfortunate traits and awful experiences abound. While this world is entirely fictional, Rubinsky does draw on true-life types and backdrops -- including New Age retreats and a recent smoky summer when B.C.'s entire Interior seemed aflame.
The valley is significant as a natural gathering place, but the real theme of this novel is people's inevitable arrival at a point -- some kind of tragedy, hopelessness or desperation -- beyond which they would ideally not go. All five main female characters -- and there are plenty more people fleshing out the community in this populous book -- share this state of mind, dealing with the necessity of going on. This sounds like a dire set-up, but Rubinsky's wry wit and dedication to showing emotional vicissitudes make for a read that ends up being closer to uplifting.
A quick review of the cast: Easterner Kathleen has been suddenly widowed, and chooses to visit old B.C. friends Davida and Boris, disrupting their marriage; Lenore, from Vancouver Island, realizes her husband has taken up with the secretary, and makes an impromptu visit to her brother Larry and sister-in-law Nan; ailing Mory is returning to her home turf with her odd young son, whose origins make everyone uncomfortable; ageing New Ager Lucinda, languishing at the Centre for Light Awareness, realizes that her charismatic healer-man Gabriel has sown his seed elsewhere; and local motel owner Bet worries for the future of her rebellious teenage daughter Bethany Jane.
Although Rubinsky is from Kaslo, a small village 10 hours' drive from Vancouver in which my sister lived for four years, I hadn't heard of her fictional portraits of that region. She dropped by my Kitsilano home one recent sunny Tuesday to talk about her longstanding ties to the Kootenay Valley, her non-judgmental attitude to dark goings-on (in fiction, at least), and why, once in a while, we must run away with our problems in order to solve them.
On ignoring all the signs:
I was driving around in my little camper in Arizona, and you would always see these signs: "No Children or Pets Beyond This Point," "No Horses Beyond This Point," "No Guns Beyond This Point," "No RVs/Campers Beyond This Point." I took photographs for a while of all these things. Of course, where it said "No RVs" I had to drive mine around to the other side to take pictures of it with the sign in front of it. When I was in Niagara Falls right after my second husband died -- this would be nine years ago -- I saw: "No Step Beyond This Point." And I thought, that's so perfect. Psychologically I thought it was a wonderful title and I've had it [in mind] ever since.
On worst possible scenarios:
It happens to young people, old people, middle-aged people. One time or another in your life, you come to a point where you just think, "I can't go one more step." Unfortunately, the human body does not automatically die at that point. Once you decide you're not going to shoot yourself in the head, you have to then carry on. I give realistic details: there's Lenore, she has an intestinal disturbance, she's playing solitaire, she realizes her husband has left her. What does she do next? She heads out. I like what she says in her opening, "There comes a point beyond which tolerating your own pity for yourself is not possible any longer." Some people will just stay stuck: they'll gnaw at themselves and chew away at their hearts. I admire the characters in this book -- they don't do that.
On autobiographical grief:
My husband died suddenly, and Kathleen has a similar experience in the book. So that material is very close. That's not to say that the material is autobiographical. But the aspect of the shock, and that sudden grief -- yes. I was trying to get at what you really feel like -- you, me, somebody else -- when there is that shock that just throws you into outer space. Kathleen's experience allows a reader to feel this going forward, going backward, turning left, turning right, hoping this, hoping that, feeling guilty because you didn't clean the dust bunnies in the closet. It's part of your psychology, your nature, trying to escape. It's a coping thing.
On parallels with Joan Didion:
Joan and I were both working on our books at the same time. Grief and sudden loss had not been explored as brilliantly as she's done it [in Didion's celebrated memoir The Year of Magical Thinking]. I called up Jennifer Lambert, who was helping me towards the end of my project, and I said, "I just read Joan Didion." And she said, "I'm reading that, and I'm going to send her a copy of your book, because the Kathleen section, the description, fictionalizes her experience." When you read [Joan's book] after you've read about Kathleen's behaviour, her craziness, her experimenting with her best friend's husband, [you will recognize] that this is what you do when you're completely out of your mind.
On letting go of judgment:
As a person, I'm immensely critical. It's one of my greatest character flaws. I'm judgmental; I have an opinion on everything. It's just such an endless fault I have: judge, judge, criticize. And yet when I go to writing, I don't feel that way. I couldn't live the way some of these characters live -- never have, never would. But that doesn't mean that there isn't some kind of understanding. There's no sense in judging a character because the reader won't feel empathetic, won't care. There's probably a number of "bad" characters in the book, but you don't come out of it feeling like anyone is evil, do you?
On heartbreaking girls:
Well, Mory is a child of abuse. And then she's just been on the road, looking after her baby. She's not a prostitute! She doesn't take money! She might use her body, you know, but it's to look after her child. I don't know why I'm so insistent on that. She's more likely to be staying in your cabin when you're not there, looking after things. You might not even know she was there. She might pick cherries over here and clean rooms over there. She's in a very rural, island environment [Lasqueti]; there's a lot of transient people moving across those islands, coming and going and getting by. That's how she's living until she's diagnosed with HIV, and then she realizes she has to get some help, for her boy. That's why she's coming home, and that's why Lenore finds her alongside the road.
On writing about a small town in a small town:
That town [in the book] has certain attributes of Kaslo, but it's kind of a cross. Smaller than Nelson, bigger than Kaslo, it's got a bridge, it's got an old town. If you try to be too real you're going to miss it. If you're trying for fiction, you're going to get the heart and essence of it. People say, "Oh, those people up the lake, you've got them!" If you were to try and do your actual valley, nobody would ever speak to you again. I've been living there a lot of years and it's a small place. Then people would say, "That's not right," and "That's not over there." Did you know that in Kaslo the store has sold over 70 books? There's, like, 1,000 people in the town. They like this book!
On New Agers and seductive healers:
I've been there, I've done it all! Are you kidding? It was a generational thing in the '70s, all along the West Coast. I went to all kinds of workshops, I've taken polarity, I've done reiki. I've done Upledger -- you know, that sort of cranio-sacral therapy. I can manipulate your spine, I can do energetics through my hands. I think of it as a form of first aid. Oh yeah, I have very good hands when they're needed. My attitude towards it has certainly changed from being that kind of seeker. The Centre for Light Awareness [in which many of the characters end up] is a composite. I stayed in a place much like it in Sedona, Arizona, but it could be in the Kootenays. And there are men like Gabriel who are very charismatic, who give workshops full of women. You know that!
On Kootenay isolation:
There's an environmental kind of purity. I want to say primitive, but it's not -- we have high-speed internet now. But it is a remote place. It's hard to get to and hard to get out of. It's a very long north-south valley. It's not the friendliest environment. Even the Kootenay Indians -- no one lived there. There are Indian groups that claim it -- they're buried there, they fished there, they may have hunted there and done some rituals. It's a place where you have to figure out what you are doing here, and what you are going to do there. The environment is constantly around you; I could drive from my house two miles and get totally lost. I could go walking in those mountains and never be found. You're aware of that huge vastness. It puts your problems in perspective.
On pyromaniac literary agents:
In April 2004, I was at the Kalachakra [for World Peace] that the Dalai Lama was doing in Toronto -- that's where I got this [shows me a red string tied around her wrist]. And [my literary agent] Denise Bukowski was quite brilliant during that time for me. We went to see Ellen [Seligman, fiction publisher at McClelland & Stewart], who loved some of the material and bought three long stories -- they weren't really finished. They worked through a lot of characters, and I thought, what if I tied this in with this? But the novel doesn't have that big fire at the end that, I have to tell you, Denise wanted. "You need a fire at the end, so everybody comes together and realizes what they all share!" And I'm, "Denise, I can't write that."
On officialdom and volunteerism:
It used to be that when we did have a fire, people were off to the Legion -- no, not the Legion -- the skating rink. People were sleeping in there, women from town were cooking in there. You can't do that anymore. They're more likely to fly in Subway sandwiches from Penticton. Nobody local cooks; you have to be certified, you have to take Fire Suppression 101. It's all kind of official in a way; it's not like a small town rallying. [Yet] this year I didn't go to Arizona as part of my winter. So the woodstove was kind of new to me as a full-time winter thing, and I had a chimney fire. That was exciting for the fire department -- all volunteer. They were thrilled, they came up the hill. Everything was fine, as it turned out. Somebody pointed out that it's quite an efficient way to clean a chimney.
Gudrun Will is the editor of the quarterly Vancouver Review, a nominee for this year's Western Magazine Awards.
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