The Dead Man

THE DEAD MAN Nora Gold Toronto: Inanna Publications, 2016 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Nora Gold's The Dead Man is as impressive, as was her first novel, Fields of Exile, in its thought-provoking subject matter. In Fields, Gold focused on antisemitism in the academy. In The Dead Man, she ventures into the literary terrain of women and madness. Gold exploits the tropes of that most gendered genre, romance (in which the emotional angst of a female protagonist is given primacy, the socio-political world figures largely as the backdrop an intense and ever-anxious love affair, and a seemingly troubled but fascinating man--somewhat above her in station--is ultimately understood), write a horror story of an inability--or refusal--to overcome an obsession. Widowed, fiftyish Eve, a music therapist and composer, is the fraught protagonist, who, five years after being unceremoniously dumped by email, perpetually fluctuates between recognizing the gross flaws of her former lover, Jake, and denying their depth and magnitude, as she parses every moment of their past relationship in order determine if he ever really loved her. The tale presents a litany of her emotional excesses. In the first paragraph she's contemplating whether subject Jake her fortieth or so act of phone harassment. She subsequently recalls her distress, during the relationship, when his attention was temporarily focused on driving or chopping vegetables, rather than on her. She wanted to lose herself in him, like an infant with a parent (219). He remains the constant subject of her major musical compositions. Women's madness in the history of literary texts, be it a real psychic state or a label imposed on them, takes on a host of forms, but is frequently and robustly interpreted by feminist critics be a consequence of their desire for--or acts of--transgression against the dominant socio-sexual order. Simplistically stated, their circumstances have rendered them the victims of patriarchy or masculocentrism. But Gold demonstrates that Eve is largely a victim of her efforts positively buttress traditional social norms about masculinity, despite their detrimental effects, and even as she espouses a counter discourse. Specifically, at one point, Eve provides for Jake a definition of the recognizably liberal feminism which she ascribes: ... we believe that women deserve full equality--economically, legally, in every way. She notes the ways in which the dominant structure of the family benefit men, the need for its reorganization, and concludes, it's a matter of women having self-respect, and not undervaluing themselves. …

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