Michelle Bailat-Jones

Michelle Bailat-Jones’ UNFURLED is an intricate and nuanced portrait of a young woman who has survived a troubled childhood at the hands of her mentally ill mother. Essentially the novel views questions through the lens of motherhood. Where does responsibility lie? When things go wrong, can extreme measures be well justified? Is forgiveness possible? What role does flawed memory play? What are the impacts on adult behavior? Bailat-Jones highlights these and other challenges of motherhood by bookending her novel with scenes of two troubled births. One where a dog reacts to the birth of her pups by eating them, and the other by a pregnant goat that goes into premature labor following trauma. Ella, as a veterinarian, attends at both of these births. These scenes serve as touchstones for her relationship with her own mother, Maggie. Maggie disappeared when Ella was 10 following an early childhood characterized by abuse and unpredictability. Since then, Ella has had no contact and believes Maggie may be dead.

As she copes with the untimely death of her nurturing father, John, Ella is forced to face two challenges: Maggie is alive and John has secretly maintained communication. Moreover Ella is now pregnant. She struggles to understand her father’s motivations for breaking her trust while she decides to abort her pregnancy out of fear of passing on genes for mental illness.

Bailat-Jones deftly manages this fascinating story by maintaining focus on Ella’s internal monologue. Both Maggie and John are indeed important but shadowy figures in the novel. They inhabit the story primarily though Ella’s memories. These include the realization that her father may have protected her from her mother while continuing a relationship on the sly. Likewise, Ella marginalizes her husband, Neil, by making a unilateral decision to abort her pregnancy. Neil serves the narrative mainly by arguing vehemently against the abortion. Bailat-Jones maintains tension throughout, finishing with a well-crafted ending that leaves Ella with a better understanding of her past and present.

She sets her novel in the Pacific Northwest taking advantage of the imagery of water, woods, and weather to evoke a strong sense of place. John is a ferryboat captain, fisherman, and skilled sailor. He has instilled his love of the sea in Ella. Maggie finds refuge in an isolated commune in the Oregon woods. And the rain holds a place of prominence in many scenes, most notably in a remarkable one involving the internment of John’s ashes in Puget Sound.

UNFURLED is a noteworthy achievement. It deserves a wide readership.… (mais)

Weather can have a big impact on people and their emotions. Sunny days make it easier to be happy. Grey, overcast days inspire lethargy and can feed depression. So the rising of a storm coupled with a terrible diagnosis would easily symbolize a growing grief and could certainly inspire denial and avoidance, a desire to run and hide from the coming trauma as do the characters in Michelle Bailat-Jones' lyrical short novel.

Alec Chester has lived in Japan for forty years, teaching English. As a South African in a small Japanese town, he is used to being the outsider, remaining one always, despite the fact that his wife, Kanae, is Japanese and their children are half Japanese. As the town, in the shadow of the Fog Island Mountains, braces for a coming typhoon, Alec is given a diagnosis of terminal cancer. His wife, suspecting the grim prognosis, doesn't meet Alec at the hospital for the diagnosis. Nor does she visit after his exploratory surgery. In fact, she is running and hiding from the truth of his condition, angry that despite his promise never to leave her that he will in fact die and do just that, and so she commits an act that she will want to undo almost from the moment of commission. When Alec leaves the hospital and goes missing, Kanae must acknowledge her feelings in the face of his disappearance and choose to either accept or reject the fear that he might have gone away to commit suicide. Opting to reject that possibility, now she too must head fearlessly into the teeth of the coming storm.

Narrated by an old and wise storyteller named Azami, who finds and heals wild animals, the novel is pitched in the stages of the impending storm, emotions echoing the violence and the fury, as well as the calm, of the coming weather. Azami has insights into the entire community although her focus is the emotional chaos of the Chester family, from Alec and Kanae, accepting the diagnosis in different ways, to oldest daughter Megumi, who refuses to tell anyone who the father of her young son is, to fragile, scared daughter Naomi, to son Ken'ichi, fact driven and soon to be a father himself. Alec is adrift in his own body, the rising storm outside mirroring the rising storm inside him. And rather than battening down the hatches, he and Kanae take separate emotional flights away from each other and what is to come before racing back towards the safe harbor of their shared past.

Bailat-Jones' writing is spare, gorgeous, and dreamy and the novel is stunning in its emotional impact. She has taken the natural world, in the symbol of the gathering typhoon and woven it throughout the narrative to great effect. And she has used the traditional Japanese mythological spirit of the kitsune, in the person of Azami, carefully and deliberately to tell this story as it must be told. The characters are fully rounded in their fears and the way they acknowledge or suppress their emotions. The story is both tragic and a triumph, all at once contemplative, brutal, and tender. There is a slow building tension to the narrative as the storm grows ever closer and as with an outsized storm, the aftermath for everyone is forever changed, washed clean, and immortalized in the remarkable tale so recently told. An elegant, graceful tale of grief, sorrow, and leaving, this is beautifully rendered and will stay with the reader long after the last page is turned.… (mais)