![]() ![]() “I tend to wander.” Instead, in grade 11 Robinson started writing, a medium that could encompass her containment-resistant thinking. Oral storytelling wasn’t her forte, though. Growing up in a community rooted in oral tradition meant everyone told stories, and many of the stories Robinson heard around the family table were about the transforming trickster Wee’git. But there’s more than one reality.”Ī member of the Haisla and Heiltsuk First Nations, Robinson once again makes her home in Kitamaat Village, population 700, on BC’s central coast. We assume our reality is the only reality. I assumed everyone knew what grease was! Across North America, we all have the same blind spots. ![]() ![]() “When I left Kitimaat,” she tells me by phone, “I assumed everyone knew who the Haisla were, that we make the best grease. In a description of magic early in the novel, she reminds us that “our reality is shaped by our limitations.” You have to be harder.”īut how can you know how to be when you aren’t sure who you are? How do you untangle all of what makes you who you are in the first place? How do you determine what is real and what isn’t? Not small questions for someone who had been hoping he could finish grade ten “before all this shit blew up.” Yet the coming apart is where Robinson shows us Jared’s learning happens, and she seems to take delight in blowing up the limitations of his knowledge and perspective. He must choose how to be in the face of his addicted and gun-toting mother’s mantra, which is part warning and part command: “The world is hard. This young man, who says things like “good gravy” and cries over his dying dog, has to define himself. It follows Jared, a 16-year-old living in his mother’s basement, who has to navigate shifting mysteries within and without as the world he thought he knew turns into something he doesn’t know at all.ĭealing with more than just the typical teenage escapades with booze, drugs, sex, and fickle social circles, Jared’s world of domestic dysfunction teeters between extremes of tenderness and violence. The story takes place in Kitimat, 10 kilometres north of Kitimaat Village, where Robinson spent her own youth. But that seems to be part of Robinson’s point, as she explores simultaneity and the opportunities that come when you have to face it. For in this book, the seemingly normal and the magical inhabit the same space. Like the reader, Jared has a lot of learning to do. As a small child, his maternal grandmother called him Wee’git-“Trickster”-and told him: “You still smell like lightning.” While she’d treat his cousins to fudge and caramel apples, for his birthday she gave Jared a jar of blood and animals’ teeth. ![]() ON THE OPENING PAGE of Eden Robinson’s new novel Son of a Trickster (Knopf, February 2017), we learn that Jared is different. However, Jared is deeply hurt when he discovers that his father is getting disability checks but has been accepting money from Jared anyway, causing Jared to completely cut himself off from Phil.A coming-of-age story invites us to step out of the comfortable. This illustrates how Jared and his dad have reversed roles-Jared takes on the role of a parent, while his dad needs to be cared for much like a child does. As such, Jared files his father’s disability insurance papers and starts to sell cookies with marijuana in them in order to help his father pay the rent. Maggie refuses to let Jared talk to Phil or any of his family members, but Jared knows that his dad is struggling. Due to his addiction and infidelity, Maggie wins sole custody of Jared in the divorce, and Phil moves out to live with Shirley. He quickly becomes addicted to pain killers, and during his physical therapy sessions, he falls in love with another woman named Shirley. But after Phil breaks his back at work and then loses his job, he begins to spiral. During Jared’s childhood, Phil is honest and good-natured, often trying to balance out Maggie’s volatility. Phil is Jared’s dad, Maggie’s ex-husband, and Nana Sophia’s son. ![]()
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