Consumption: A novel - Hardcover

Patterson, Kevin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385520743 ISBN 13: 9780385520744

Publisher: Nan A. Talese, 2007

Synopsis

In Rankin Inlet, a small town bordering the Arctic Ocean, the lives of the Inuit are gradually changing. The caribou and seals are no longer plentiful, and Western commerce has come to the community through a proposed diamond mine. Victoria Robertson wakes to a violent storm, her three children stirring in the dark. Her father, Emo, a legendary hunter who has come in off the land to work in a mine, checks to see if the family is all right. So does her Inuit lover, as Victoria’s British husband is away on business.

Thus the reader enters into the modern contradictions of the Arctic—walrus meat and convenience food, midnight sun and 24-hour satellite TV, dog teams and diamond mines—and into the heart of Victoria's internal exile. Born on the tundra in the 1950s, Victoria knows nothing but the nomadic life of the Inuit until, at the age of ten, she is diagnosed with tuberculosis and evacuated to a southern sanitarium. When she returns home six years later, she finds a radically different world, where the traditionally rootless tribes have uneasily congregated in small communities. And Victoria has become a stranger to her family and her culture.

Victoria compounds her marginalization by marrying a non-Inuit, Robertson, the manager of the town store. Over the years, as her children gravitate toward the pop culture of the mainland, and as her husband aggressively exploits the economic opportunities that the Arctic offers, Victoria feels torn between her family and her ancestors, between the communal life of the North and the material life of the “South.” Through Victoria, Kevin Patterson deftly exposes the costs and consequences of cultural assimilation, and the emotional toll that such significant lifestyle changes take on communities.

Spanning countries, generations, and cultures, Consumption is an epic novel of the Arctic, and a penetrating portrait of generational division and cultural dissonance.

About this title

About the Author

KEVIN PATTERSON is the author of the memoir The Water In Between, which was a New York Times Notable Book. Country of Cold, his short fiction collection, won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, as well as the inaugural City of Victoria Butler Book Prize. He lives on Saltspring Island, Canada.

Reviews

There is reason to pause at the beginning of Kevin Patterson's new novel. The epigraph, "For the sick, the poor, and the ashamed" makes one wonder what one is in for. Indeed, the story, which takes place over a 40-year period, deals with these conditions and more. And though the narrative swings gently back and forth between two main characters, Victoria and Dr. Balthazar, it is also the story of community, of cultures clashing in Canada's far north -- specifically, the small town of Rankin Inlet, close to the Arctic Ocean and on the western edge of Hudson Bay.

Victoria, a 10-year-old Inuit child, is diagnosed with tuberculosis and sent to a southern sanatorium, where she lives for many years. Treatment at the time consists of weekly injections of streptomycin and high doses of oral medication. The more radical treatment, thoracoplasty, is eventually performed and several of her ribs excised in order to collapse cavities of infection within her lungs. This is later described by Balthazar, her northern doctor, as "savage deforming surgery."

When Victoria finally returns to the north, an intelligent young woman with an "incandescent energy," she has become an outsider. The Inuit community has changed during her absence. Her parents, who had lived out on the land, fishing and hunting, are now in town, where her father has a job at a recently opened diamond mine. They worry that their daughter may be better suited to marry a white man than an Inuk, but "this was too painful an idea for either of them to utter aloud." Just as they fear, Victoria meets Robertson, a white man from the south, a Kablunauk, who manages the town store and eventually works for the owners of the new mine. He and Victoria will have several children together.

Balthazar, the town doctor, has been coming to the Arctic since his 20s, but he maintains a life in his old world and keeps an apartment in New York to which he returns every summer. His lack of confidence about his own skill as a physician is well-based, but he is a sympathetic character, beautifully drawn. He also loves from afar the unattainable Victoria. He delivers her children, albeit in a bungling manner, and their lives go on to intertwine in other ways.

One of Patterson's strengths as a writer is that he creates a wide cast of characters. Some never get to meet or interact with others, and yet each contributes to the overall complexity of this novel's theme. One of Victoria's daughters muses, a generation later and while watching Axl Rose in a Guns n' Roses performance, "As he put it, the choice becomes whether to consume oneself along with everything else." This is meant in the widest possible sense. A book that seems to be about tuberculosis (once known as consumption) becomes a book about isolation in its extremes -- whether in the south or north, about hardship and greed and secrecy and longing and love.

The pace of the storytelling is gently seductive and always informative. And woven into this are tantalizing chapters about different facets of medicine -- changing epidemiology that includes Type II diabetes, drug-resistant tuberculosis, obesity -- all told through the voice and writings of the isolated physician with too much time on his hands. He is lonely and often sad, but he is curious and astonished by discovery. He is also punishingly realistic, as revealed in his journals. "All my life I have equivocated, puzzled most of all about what it was I wanted," he writes. "I came to the Arctic for a summer. . . . But this is where I ended up spending my professional life. . . . I didn't actually choose the place until I had spent half my life there."

The spell of the novel is broken only when the outside narrator intrudes, stopping the story to explain what tundra is, or the igloo, or what it is like for the tuktu (caribou). These small bits of information could easily have been filtered through the eyes and minds of Balthazar and other characters. Even so, when he is in his stride, Patterson is capable of creating sentences such as these: "In hollows, the grasses rise to midankle and the tuktu proceed through it like mowers lined abreast. . . . By August, their bellies bulge and their necks appear like swollen wineskins appended to their trunks."

Because of his unique experience in the north, where he practiced as a physician, because of his elegant style and compassionate vision, Patterson has created a remarkably compelling novel. His insight into the human condition pulls us to the heart of events, even when the idea of these is "too painful . . . to utter aloud."

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Starred Review. In this powerful first novel, a beautiful Inuit woman spends her teen years in the 1960s in a Montreal TB sanitarium, learning French and mathematics from nuns. Upon returning to her Hudson Bay hamlet to live in a government-made dwelling, Victoria feels like a stranger living in a kind of internal exile and shudders at the taste of half-rotted walrus meat. After getting pregnant by a Kablunauk (Inuktitut for white person), she marries him. Husband Robertson's ambition rankles the community to begin with, and when he accepts work from a South African mining company that wants to dig for diamonds in the frozen tundra, things come to a boiling point. Keith Balthazar, a doctor who comes to the community from New York, tends to Victoria's children in illness and gets unexpectedly entwined in the family's life. In language that is always sharp and sometimes mesmerizing, Patterson, author of a story collection and the memoir The Water in Between, seamlessly works murder, sex and intrigue into the mix and offers a terrific cast that makes arctic life, and the ties of kin, palpable. He delivers a searingly visceral message about love, loss and dislocation. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One

Storms are sex. They exist alongside and are indifferent to words and description and dissection. It had been blizzarding for five days and Victoria had no words to describe her restlessness. Motion everywhere, even the floors vibrated, and such motion was impossible to ignore, just as it was impossible not to notice the squeaking walls, the relentless shuddering of the wind. Robertson was in Yellowknife, and she and the kids had been stuck in this rattling house for almost a week, the tundra trying to get inside, snow drifting higher than the windows, and everyone inside the house longing to be out.

It was morning, again, and she was awake and so were the kids, but they had all stayed in bed and listened to the walls shake. Nine, or something like that, and still perfectly black. She had been dreaming that she was having sex with Robertson. She was glad she had woken up. Even the unreal picture of it had left her feeling alarmed—though that eased as the image of the two of them, entwined, had faded. In another conscious moment she was able to blink the topic away and out of her thoughts. As it had been.

She could hear her girls, Marie and Justine, whispering to each other in their bedroom. She couldn’t tell what they were saying. She heard the word “potato.” Pauloosie, her son, her oldest child, was silent. She listened carefully and thought she could hear him turning in his bed. And then the wind wound up and just howled.

As a girl she had not been this restless, waiting out storms with her parents on the land in a little iglu, drinking sweet tea and lying on caribou skins. It had been more dangerous then but less frightening. Storms make an iglu feel more substantial somehow. This house, on the other hand, felt as if it were about to become airborne, and it would have if not for the bolts tethering it to its pilings. It had been made in Montreal, of particleboard and aluminum siding, before being shipped by barge to Hudson Bay, sagging from square with each surge of the sea. Where the door frame gapped away from the kitchen door, snow sprayed through in parabolas. These wee drifts persisted as long as the door stayed closed. After five days they seemed as permanent as furniture. The wind whistling under the house kept the kitchen floor nearly as cold as the stone beneath it.

That stone slid, in its turn, through the town, to the shore, and then under the ice of Hudson Bay, angling shallowly out into the sea basin like a knife slipping between skin and meat. And on top of that water was ice, a quarter million square miles of it, arid and flat and sucking in the frigid air from the High Arctic like a bellows—blowing it down through Rankin Inlet and into the rest of the unmindful continent. Chicago would be Rome but for this frozen ocean, not that its significance is known to anyone who doesn’t live alongside it.

Rankin Inlet, Repulse Bay, Baker Lake, Coral Harbour, Whale Cove: variations on the theme of shelter from the sea, each of these hamlets lies on the west coast of Hudson Bay, named by nineteenth–century whalers seeking safety. The smallest is a couple hundred people and the largest of these, Rankin Inlet, is two thousand, almost all Inuit, with a handful of southerners, Kablunauks, among them.

The people exist along this coast against a backdrop of a half million square miles of tundra, gently rolling treeless plains. In the summer, this land is boggy and moss–bound; in the winter, frozen and blasted lowlands, eskers of rock protruding through shallow snow. The Inuit lived here for ten thousand years, pulling their living from this meager forage until the 1960s, when they accreted in the little government towns built along the coast and left the tundra empty of human inhabitants for the first time since the glacial ice had melted.

Victoria and Robertson had been married a year when Robertson paid to have this house shipped here for his new family to live in. It was twice the size of the housing department shacks offered to the rest of the community; this benefit of marrying a Kablunauk had been remarked upon in Victoria’s presence since the house had floated its way to the bay at the edge of the town. The other young families were crowded into the back rooms of their relatives’ cramped houses, and privacy such as Victoria knew was considered an uncommon luxury.

Robertson was not from here, and so no toothless and snuff–spitting aunts had been assigned to their family. The drawbacks of marrying a Hudson’s Bay Company man had been explored by dozens of women in the town, but this single advantage held. She lay in her bed now and listened to her daughters squealing and whispering and calling out to each other. This was an intimacy, she thought, that could never be available to a family who shared their house with another. She was lucky, at least on that score. But then, she thought, there might be a different kind of intimacy available to the cousins and brothers who had grown up unencumbered by the rind of privacy.

She was thinking about that when the banging at the kitchen door began. Victoria thought the door had become unfastened, and she leapt out of bed to close it before it was torn from its hinges. When she got to the kitchen she turned on the lights and saw her father standing just inside the door. Drifted snow stretched out alongside him on the kitchen floor. His eyebrows and eyelashes were coated in ice, and his caribou parka shed granules of snow steadily as he stood there.

“Qanuipiit?” he asked.

“Qanawingietunga,” she replied. As good as could be expected, anyway. They were all bored, certainly, but the furnace was working and there was food. Which was rather a lot to express with a shrug and a single word, but sufficiently severe terrain makes for a pronounced economy of expression. Consequently, Inuktitut is the very language of economy.

“Ublumi anarahkto.”

A little windy? Her father’s understatement made her smile. Justine and Marie appeared in the kitchen, drawn by the sound of conversation, and when they saw their grandfather in his sealskin kamiks they paused behind their mother. Twelve and fourteen years old, they were nearly as tall as the old man and were not prepared to greet him while dressed in their pajamas. Pauloosie loomed up behind his younger sisters in a flannel shirt and jeans. The old man reached inside his jacket and pulled out a plastic grocery bag. He held it out to the boy. “Tuktu.” he said.

Pauloosie took the bag of caribou meat. “Koyenamee.”

“Igvalu.”

The steaks were frozen into pink and cartilaginous bricks. Pauloosie took the bag to the kitchen sink and peeled away the plastic. He began rinsing the meat off with cold water, picking away the bits of hair and tendon that stuck to it. Victoria and her father watched him. “How is Robertson?” Emo asked.

“He’s in Yellowknife again. Gets home next week.”

“Ee–mah.”

“He’s bidding on a contract.”

“He works so much.” The old man looked around the kitchen as he said this, as if scanning the house for evidence of the man’s absence.

“He does.” Victoria followed her father’s eyes around her kitchen defensively.

“Do you need anything here?”

“Not really.” Which was to say: nothing at all.

“I didn’t see the lights on.”

“There’s ice over the windows.”

“You should tell the girls to put some clothes on. It’s ten in the morning.”

“They will.”

Justine and Marie were down the hall and out of range before Victoria's backward glance even came close to them.

“Your mother wanted me to see how you were.”

“Why didn’t she phone?”

“It’s not working again.”

“Do you need money?”

“No. We just forgot.”

“I’m going to the bank when the storm lets up. I could take care of it.”

“If you want.”

“I will.”

“Do you need some fish?”

“We still have char left over from the fall.”

“Tagak shot a nanuq last week.”

“A good one?”

“Eleven feet.”

“That will get him two thousand dollars, anyway.”

Emo stood there a moment, studying his daughter. If Emo had been the man his own father–in–law was, he would have pushed Robertson off the floe edge and into the sea by now. He turned to the door and opened it.

“Ublukatiarak, attatatiak,” Pauloosie said.

"Igvalu, irnuktuq," Emo answered.

After her father was gone, Victoria cut up a pound of bacon and began frying it. Justine leaned over the kitchen table, opening her math book to do her long division. Marie sat closest to the stove with her Nancy Drew mystery: The Secret of the Old Clock. On the cover, a blond and dauntless Nancy peeked worriedly from behind a tree larger than anyone in the room had ever seen. Pauloosie laid the caribou meat on the counter and began cutting thin strips off it with his hunting knife and stuffing them into his mouth. After a few minutes of this, the bacon was finished and Victoria put a plate of it down in front of the girls.

The wind surged again and rose a half tone in register. Victoria looked out the window at the blowing snow. Pauloosie retreated to his room wordlessly. Her daughters read silently beside her. Storms like this make you appreciate a house. All you had to do was keep from losing your mind.


Chapter Two


When Victoria was ten years old, in the summer of 1962, she was brought on board the government ship C.D....

Edition details

• Publisher: Nan A. Talese
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0385520743
• ISBN 13: 9780385520744
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400