I enjoyed this story of three women. Missy, at 21, is touring the U.S. as the only female member of a punk rock band. She is selfish, hedonistic, and determined to have the same sexual freedom as her male colleagues. Carola is Missy's mom. She left Missy when she was a teenager and is living in an ashram. She struggles to find her space, devoting herself to the care of others, both before and after leaving her husband and child behind. Ruth is Missy's grandmother. She fled Turkey as a refugee and lived a life with a cheating husband at a time when women had few options.

The story moves back and forth, primarily offering Missy's and Carola's perspectives. A little of Ruth's. I thought the characters were well drawn, and the contrast between women of different generations coming of age, and maturing over time made the story interesting for me. ( )

Missy is a punk rock cellist embracing the wild life of the concert tour. She is brash, sexually aggressive and demanding, and convinced that getting what she wants right now is all that matters. Carola, sometimes called Juniper, is Missy’s mom. She lives at an ashram now but had Missy when she was still at a commune called Sunflower. Carola almost never gets what she wants. She displaces her needs in order to satisfy those around her until the weight of that juxtaposition becomes intolerable. That’s when she walked out on Missy and the commune, when Missy was an adolescent. Carola still has issues but she is actively working through them seeking calm and, yes, still spends her days helping others. Ruth is Missy’s paternal grandmother. She’s spent much of her life at the mercy of historical forces and societal forces, but late in life she begins to find her agency, and, as if by accident, also love. The novel moves between these women chapter by chapter, though primarily focussed on Missy. We learn of their childhoods and follow Missy and Carola through nearly twenty years of their adult lives.

Whittall’s writing is direct and sometimes frank. But she rarely displays a subtle or nuanced understanding of her characters. Missy’s actions and opinions are, at best, childishly selfish. But they are also mercurial, showing absolute conviction in one direction at one point and in the other at another. Carola is more interesting and I would have loved to see the entire novel focussed on her. But she seems particularly opaque to Whittall even in those chapters ostensibly from her point of view. As such she functions here merely as a foil for action, someone Missy reacts to and against. Ruth’s story, by contrast, doesn’t really impact on that of the others so it is less clear why it is included.

The above doesn’t prevent sections of the novel being enjoyable. They just don’t seem to be connected to each other in a needful way. And so it comes across as having plenty of potential, not fully realized. However, certainly worth reading what Whittall writes next. ( )

In her new (fourth) novel, Canadian writer Zoe Whittall explores matters of female autonomy, self-actualization, sexuality/sexual identity, and motherhood. She presents the story from the first-person point of view of three related women: Melissa (“Missy”) Wood; her mother Carola; and Missy’s paternal grandmother, Ruth. The novel opens in 1997, but moves backwards and forwards in time. We’re introduced to the main character, twenty-one-year-old Missy first, as she goes from one women’s health clinic to the next, demanding a tubal ligation. She wants the same sexual freedom as the men in the indie band she’s about to tour the US with. Missy has a lover in almost every major city, she has no appetite for commitment to anyone but herself, and zero interest in becoming a mother. At every clinic, she’s rejected for the sterilization surgery because of her age. She could change her mind, say all the doctors.

In the subsequent chapters that concern her, we learn of her wildly hedonistic life on the road with the guys. These sections are full of graphic descriptions of sexual encounters and drug use, with a fair number of other sordid details to boot. Though I understood that Whittall was likely wanting to contrast attitudes of women who came of age at different times, I found little to like or interest me in Missy from the get-go and I liked the explicit sex scenes even less. These were possibly informed by the author’s generation’s exposure to online porn. I considered bailing on the novel, but persisted to see if Whittall would move on from that material when providing the perspectives of the older women. I was relieved and more interested in the book when she did. Still, that couldn’t ultimately redeem this novel for me.

The story itself seemed to have a certain potential: Missy grew up on a Vermont commune, an “intentional community” called Sunflower, founded by her mother, father, and another couple. When we get Missy’s mother’s perspective, we learn that Carola felt intense ambivalence about motherhood practically from the moment she conceived her daughter. Although she feared she’d made a serious error, she managed to suppress the anxiety, dutifully playing the role of mother for more than a decade. (She ferried her daughter and another girl on the commune to town for mainstream medical care, even having the children secretly vaccinated.) However, her sense of constriction and unease only grew over the years. When her child was about to enter grade eight, Carola left the commune without notice, ultimately landing at a New Hampshire ashram, determined to live a life of service that would help her “find herself” and provide expiation. Carola’s narrative explores not only the troubles at the ashram including a now almost cliché story of a guru who sexually exploits his followers but also the challenges of her own childhood and youth. Elderly Ruth’s story is one of displacement and marital unhappiness. Born to well-to-do British parents in Turkey, Ruth and her family fled Smyrna when war broke out in the early 1920s and the Anatolian city burned. In the 1950s, Ruth and her husband, Frank, ended up in Montreal, with Frank’s mistress installed just down the street.

For me Missy, who is clearly at the centre of this novel, is its weakest link. In the last third of the book, set over fifteen years after the earlier sections, Missy has undergone a major, inexplicable transformation. First of all, she has married. The reader is given no clue as to how this came about. But even more surprisingly, she’s moved from full rejection of motherhood to an almost irrational compulsion to reproduce in her late thirties. What does remain consistent is that she’ll have sex with anyone to make this happen—even an Uber driver. There’s a ton of gender ideology nonsense in this last bit, including a character met at a bar who uses the third person plural pronoun. I refuse to buy into the madness of crowds and the current delusional thinking and refer to any single person as “they” and “them”. This is the first book I’ve read that appears to expect me to do this. Whittall’s writing, which is initially hardly “spectacular” early on, is at least serviceable. At the end, it reads— at both the sentence and the content levels— like something thrown together by a teenager in a writers’ workshop.

I went into the book knowing nothing about Whittall, other than that she gained some celebrity in Canada at the time her third novel came out. I often go into a novel cold, knowing little about the plot and usually disregarding the blurbs. Sometimes, though, readers should pay attention to who writes those blurbs. I know I ought to have this time around. Seeing Torrey Peters’s glowing praise on the cover should have cinched it for me. The vulgar epigraphs and the dedication were further warnings that I failed to heed. I can’t imagine anyone thinking this was a good book. ( )

This story follow 3 women, joined by blood. Missy, the daughter, a rock star with a sad background, trying to come to turns with her sexuality, fame and abandonment. Trying to find her voice and self thru it all. Carola, the mom, a free spirit who is running from the demands of her free thinking life and motherly duties. Ruth (my favorite) the grandmother, ahead of her time in her thinking and dealing with an all too familiar scenario for a women in her time. This story is beautifully written, tackling some tough issues that women face. Not necessarily an easy read due to its subject matter, but I was captivated by these women. Keep an open mind reading this book. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. I look forward to reading this author again.

Thanks to Ms. Whittall, Ballantine Books and NetGalley for this ARC. Opinion is mine alone. ( )

The Spectacular, by Zoe Whittal, is the story of three women who struggle with the demands placed on women as mothers. The story begins with Missy, a cellist and rock band musician who is desperately seeing a tubal ligation before heading out on her first tour when she is twenty-two. She wants to be sexually free and free of the fear of pregnancy. The second woman is Carola, living at an ashram as it’s collapsing into a public sex scandal. She sees the daughter she left behind when she fled her marriage and commune on the cover of a music magazine. Then there is Ruth, Carola’s mother-in-law and Missy’s grandmother who at the age of 83 discovers what all the fuss is about with sex. She is diagnosed with cancer and wants to fight it on her own terms by returning to Turkey to die. Like Missy, all the women face the question of whether to have a child or have an abortion, even when it was illegal in Canada.

The story progresses like a beaded necklace, alternating the narrative between Missy and Nicola, first in the late 90s with a centerpiece, a lavalier of chapters about Ruth, and then another string of alternating chapters about Nicola and Missy in the present. It follows their journey as they find themselves and each other.

I enjoyed The Spectacular. I cared about the women, even though at times they seemed determined to ruin their lives. The underlying theme of what it means to be a woman in a world with certain expectation is fertile ground. Missy, Nicola, and Ruth are not your typical women, in fiction or reality, but their dilemmas are all too common. Clearly, these three generations of women struggle to liberate themselves from expectations, each in their own way.

These are deeply realized and individual characters. Perhaps that is why I sruggled a bit to keep reading at the beginning. Missy is just so determined to be as free as the men in the band, she is a jerk, reckless with other’s feelings, determined to reject intimacy, and heedless of the consequences. In a way, she acted like a stereotype. The Missy in the present is so much nicer. It might seem easy to judge Nicola at first, a mother leaving behind a six-year-old child, but Whittal deftly makes her decision understandable.

The Spectacular is the second book by Whittal I have read. She seems to be drawn to the deeply volatile issues of modern society and writes about them in ways that fill in the black and white political fault lines with all the shades of gray.

The Spectacular will be released on September 14th. I received an e-galley through NetGalley.

The Spectacular at Ballantine Books | Penguin Random House
Review of The Best Kind of People
Zoe Whittal author site

https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2021/08/21/9781524799410/ ( )