A big-assed tale

Keel Kissing Bottom tells a magical but disastrous story

by JULIET WATERS

Keel Kissing Bottom opens with narrator Mary Seeburg's mother describing the legendary 1917 Halifax explosion with disturbing enthusiasm. "My brothers and I sat... glancing nervously at each other while our mother flailed about depicting the various horrors reported on that day. The steep streets of Halifax were said to have been strewn with fragmented bodies. Frail clapboard houses were flattened in an instant. Sleeping residents were put to rest permanently."

But Mother Seeburg has her own twist on the tale. She claims that a shank from the accidental collision of a munitions ship and a relief vessel took a rocket-like trajectory over Halifax and landed on the roof of her grandmother's house. "We were chosen," explains Mary's increasingly demented mother, convinced that her family was the intended target of malevolent fate and Halifax just an unfortunate casualty along the way.

Elizabeth de Freitas is not the first writer to use an obsession with the Halifax explosion as a rich source of fiction. Howard Norman wrote a beautiful story about the quirky and dark nostalgia of a group of survivors in Kiss at the Hotel Joseph Conrad. Nor is she the first writer to deal with the horrifying world of children held hostage by an insane, disaster-haunted parent. Anyone who has read Barbara Gowdy's Falling Angels will be at once reminded of that same terrifying claustrophobic atmosphere. However, one will also find that de Freitas shares the magic ability to infuse her morbid narrative with a weirdly beautiful light, the same one that has been recently captured on film in Kissed, an adaptation of a Gowdy story.

But Mary has other problems besides an abusive and extremely neglectful mother. She's approaching adolescence and her ass is growing bigger every day. Soon she will be an easy target for her brothers' cruelty and will be shunned by a loveless seaside community. Mary's unconscious is its own polluted sea of trauma and it's hard to imagine her bottom half ever growing large enough to accommodate it.

To extinguish some of the shame and to submerge the fear created by her mother's catastrophic imagination, Mary escapes into underwater daydreams. The relentless abuse has created a fantasy life that alternates between quirky cynicism and a poignantly deluded naïveté. But her nightmares are pure poison. For a while her painful life is relieved by an adoring friendship with her golden girl cousin Sarah. But hormones win out as Sarah is drawn away into a world of high-school popularity that is entirely closed to Mary.

De Freitas weaves a wonderfully lurid fairy horror tale in the first third of her novel--and then disaster strikes. Or it might seem that way to committed Tom Robbins haters like myself. Maybe she couldn't withstand the pressure of probable comparisons with another heroine with a disproportionate body part. Or maybe, since her bio states that she's a compulsive traveller, she found herself in too many second-hand bookstores across the world where there was nothing to buy except Even Cowgirls Get the Blues.

But for whatever reason, she plots a cheap escape from all the expectations of awfulness she has set up in the first chapters. She mounts Mary on a huge-assed horse named JoeHow, and sends her on a sojourn from Nova Scotia to Toronto, a digression that explodes and dissipates all the subtle energy of the first part of her novel.

To be fair, some people don't share my aversion to Robbinsesque trippyness, and de Freitas's voice is compelling enough to follow almost anywhere. She does pick up the more interesting narrative threads she has dropped once Mary reaches Toronto to find Sarah a bloated princess turned whore, working as a mermaid in an aquatic strip joint. And the novel's ending cleverly maintains the courage of its weirdness. But by then she has to stretch her story too tightly to accommodate all the space that's been used up by the road trip. Nevertheless, this is a powerful first novel, and de Freitas is definitely a talent worth watching.

Keel Kissing Bottom by Elizabeth de Freitas, Random House, hc, 251 pp., $27.95