In Calamity's Wake: A Novel - Hardcover

Caple, Natalee

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1620401851 ISBN 13: 9781620401859

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA, 2013

Synopsis

Miette has no desire to meet the mother who abandoned her, a woman she knows only as an infamous soldier, drinker, and exhibition shooter: Martha Canary, made notorious as Calamity Jane. But Miette's beloved adoptive father makes a deathbed request that the two be reunited: “You have to do it. Promise me you will not change your mind. I know that you've heard sickening things and those things are all true, but I'm sure she wants to know you.”

Set in the Badlands of the North American West in the late 1800s, In Calamity's Wake tells the story of Miette's quest across a landscape occupied by strangers, ghosts, and animals. On her journey she meets an old lover of her father's, a man who claims to be her brother, an imposter she thinks is her mother, Negro minstrel Lew Spencer, a kind madam who is her mother's best friend, a wolf who longs to protect her, and many others.
Woven into Miette's story are the stories of Jane as told in legend, history books, dime store novels, and by the woman herself. When Miette and her mother finally meet, the many threads of these tales come together and Miette must decide whether to forgive the woman who had forsaken her for a life of danger and adventure.

About this title

About the Author

Natalee Caple launched her Canadian literary career in 1998 with her debut story collection The Heart Is Its Own Reason, which captured the attention of the New York Times Book Review and garnered high international praise. She is the author of one previous novel, The Plight of Happy People in an Ordinary World, as well as a collection of poetry entitled A More Tender Ocean and coeditor of The Notebook: Interviews and New Fiction from Contemporary Writers. Mackerel Sky is her American debut.

Reviews

On his deathbed, Miette promises her adoptive father that she will seek out her mother, the notorious western legend Calamity Jane. What follows is a dark and thrilling adventure through the American Badlands in the late 19th century, brought to life by exacting prose and a gallery of gothic characters (including a hag claiming to be Miette's dead father's love and a woman who begs Miette to find her children's bones at the bottom of a well). By turns cinematic in its rendering of landscape and heartbreaking in its rich depiction of its young heroine, poet and novelist Caple (Mackerel Sky) employs a full range of language and experimental narration to innervate the plot. Interspersed through Miette's story are minor characters' perspectives and larger-than-life portraits of Calamity Jane—rendered through colloquial tall tales, dime-novel hyperbole, and something close to genuine biography—that lend a fascinating tone to the book and blur the line between the historic woman and the myth she became. As Miette travels the wild country in search of her mother and herself, an early line in the story continually haunts her journey: One likes to believe in the goodness of people. But the people you meet on the road, well, sometimes the unseen cannot really see themselves. (Oct.)

Honoring the deathbed wish of the priest, her “father,” who raised her, young Miette goes in search of her mother, Martha Canary, aka Calamity Jane. Across the Badlands she encounters Indians, Negro minstrels, prostitutes, and, in delirium, the mystical presences of a hag and a noble wolf. Into Miette’s odyssey, Caple interjects lore about Calamity Jane in the form of poems and songs, as well as narrative, and she emerges as a drunk, a sharpshooter, a great show-woman, and even a sort of Florence Nightingale when she ministers to friends down with smallpox. There are some marvelous scenes: children serving food to a troupe of irregular Unionists, who will shortly destroy the place; or the madwoman who lures the half-starved Miette down a well to look for her long-dead children. Some scenes, such as the account of President McKinley’s assassination, don’t seem to belong. In ­Calamity’s Wake is beautifully written, reminiscent of Karen Fisher’s lyrical A Sudden Country, except for its lack of focus. The novel is likely to appeal to readers of women’s fiction or experimental novels. --John Mort

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1620401851
• ISBN 13: 9781620401859
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240