Elaine McCluskey's The Gift Child

Reviewed by Marcie McCauley

(Goose Lane Editions, 2024)

“I’m telling you all this because it’s important,” announces the title story’s narrator in Elaine McCluskey’s debut collection The Watermelon Social; her new novel, The Gift Child, opens with a chapter called “Truth.” Twenty years have passed, and she’s published four collections of stories and three novels, and McCluskey still insists that readers pay attention.

The Gift Child’s narrator displays her humanity immediately, however, saying she’s “a mess of bad clothes and bad decisions and men I should never have trusted.” Harriet is everything to this novel, with her belief that “truth is complicated”: “Your truth. My truth. The best truth.” Straight off, readers see how McCluskey develops characters: simple language and complex ideas.

Her characterization spans the distance between understatement and hyperbole. In her debut, she introduces a man who “could be sold in an environmental store, underfed, uncoloured, placing no burden on the atmosphere.” In a story from Hello, Sweetheart, a woman approaches her wedding “like a hyena with a downed wildebeest, ravenous and fierce, ready to attack anyone who might come between her and her kill.” A woman from a story in Rafael Has Pretty Eyes succinctly expresses the common denominator: “There are underdogs, it seems, and then there are people whom society decides have no business reaching for greatness.”

McCluskey’s characters reach for greatness in unexpected ways and unexpected places. The Gift Child features her native Nova Scotia: Dartmouth—“four bus stops and one 911 call away” from the wholesome part of town; Cape Sable Island—where “you can taste the grit in the air” and “you can feel people digging down deep”; the ocean—“naked and throwing itself against the shoreline like it was smashed on moonshine”; and smaller places, too—“the frayed, faded towns…trying to hang on, to iron out the wrinkles and darn the holes.” Like Shag Harbour with its UFO Museum. Like Pollack Passage, with fog that “reduces your world to square metres” and “puts things in perspective.”

What’s clouding Harriet’s vision, when the novel opens, is Graham’s disappearance from Pollack Passage. Partly because her father’s life has become intertwined with Graham’s, and partly because she is personally haunted by absences, Harriet employs her investigative-journalist skills. “When you enter a town as a journalist,” she says, “you look for the telling details—the ones that make it look appealing or ugly, thriving or down on its luck.”

The fog intensifies with Harriet’s view of truth as “complicated”: she aims to have “an open mind” and relies on her notes and observations—not only her memory—but she’s also taking a creative writing class, where she’s discovered the concept of an unreliable narrator. “If you already have the story written in your head,” Harriet explains, “you see what you need to see: the community garden or the burnt-out loser cruiser.”

And she’s good at writing stories in her head. When she was young, her mother told a neighbour that “[w]hen Harriett makes up a story, she believes it”, and readers know she believes in a “best truth.” Readers must be vigilant in monitoring what can shape a story:

• Whether someone has experienced trauma. “Do you have a list you go through at night, and is there one person you pause at, and do you wonder what would have happened if they had been different and you had been different—if the stars had been aligned or the gods kinder?”
• Whether circumstances alter cases. “When you are with people who do not have the worry of money, the air is lighter. The house cleans itself. The bills pay themselves. […] Words are entitled to do what they please.”
• Whether betrayal figures more prominently than trust in one’s worldview: “The open lies are easier. You have, with luck, a chance of seeing through them.” 

While Harriet is probing into other people’s stories, she is also probing her own. Frequently, the questions she poses to others reflect her personal experiences. And, while she works to solve the mystery of someone else’s disappearance, she discovers some unasked questions in her own family. “And sometimes I think it was yesterday; sometimes I think it was forty years ago.”

This sounds chaotic because it is chaotic.  “When you grow up in chaos, all this makes me wonder, do you then seek chaos because that is what you know?” Readers share Harriet’s uncertainty, but particularly vivid story elements offer something like security. Minor characters, like Mackenzie, for instance, who’s described as “thick-waisted with the unnatural hairline of a Lego mini-figurine” and imagined as ending each day by “removing the orange hair accessory and climbing into a plastic Lego bed. Alone and earless.” (There are no minor McCluskey characters: there could be a work-in-progress starring Mackenzie.)
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Readers experience Harriet as having a heart that beats with journalistic integrity even while she’s “stuck on a sandbar of trouble”, so that trust in her steadily erodes even while she’s miraculously unearthing herself. At the end of the day, everything is upset (and Mackenzie remains earless), but McCluskey is writing a redemption story, showing her characters the kind of mercy that Harriet doesn’t yet understand that she needs—and that’s most important of all. 

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​Marcie McCauley's work has appeared in Room, Other Voices, Mslexia, Tears in the Fence and Orbis, and has been anthologized by Sumac Press. She writes about writing at marciemccauley.com and about reading at buriedinprint.com. A descendant of Irish and English settlers, she lives in the city currently called Toronto, which was built on the homelands of Indigenous peoples - Haudenosaunee, Anishnaabeg, Huron-Wendat and Mississaugas of New Credit - land still inhabited by their descendants.