Molly O Paperback – Import, 5 January 2019

This book is an enthralling, dream-like portrait of one weird little eastern Ontario family of auctioneers with a dead father (very recent) and mother (long ago) ...and a missing sister who seems at times to have existed and other times, well you have to wonder. There is a dash of Robertson Davies here and John Irving there in the characters. This is in the sense that the hero (or the protagonist) is not always heroic, but imperfect and somewhat damaged and strange. The older brother is one uptight dude who can't stand being back in his family home without fearing that he will relapse to a very bad place. The younger brother (our hero, perhaps) is a more than a little messed up by his sister's disappearance. (This makes him an excellent university film studies prof, by the way.) We see the world, mainly through his eyes with his unwavering belief that Sis will be home any minute... like Linus waiting for the Great Pumpkin. And Molly O... well, she sits there right between her brothers as a bone of contention whether she is in the room or not. She could be the real hero of this book having left her indelible mark on her brothers' lives and on the world via a series of art house erotica directed by a now dead American artiste eccentric (another one!) from just across the Saint Lawrence Seaway. And that, is just the beginning of the story... before the guru, the clingy girlfriend, her teenage son and the most classic of progressive rockers of the 1970s wind their way into the story.