This week and next, the County hosts two authors, friends Sarah Henstra and Heidi Reimer. Both have new novels, and both just happen to be about women artists who struggle to create in worlds warped by ideologies that privilege men.

“We have adopted the title ‘Art Monsters’,” says Ms. Henstra, “because we think it’s really appropriate for the idea we’re trying to capture, that something disruptive happens when women make art.”

The selflessness expected of women in their traditional role, caretaker, is opposed to the “inherently really selfish enterprise of making art. It’s okay for men to go off on an artist’s residency or off to their studio for long hours. They’re not considered to be bad members of society or bad family members. But for women it’s more transgressive to take up that space and make those demands on the people around them.”

Ms. Henstra and Ms. Reimer, in the company of Sarah Selecky, will appear with DimeStories at Blizzmax Gallery in South Bay on June 22nd and Books & Company in Picton on the 27th.

Heidi Reimer (Photo: Jemman Photography)

The Mother Act

by Heidi Reimer

In Heidi Reimer’s The Mother Act, a charismatic and overbearing actress, Sadie Jones, has made her career as an aggressive, feminist voice against the male theatre establishment (i.e., Shakespeare), especially in her one-woman show, called The Mother Act, an autobiographical tirade against misogynist ideologies.

But Sadie has a daughter, Judith Linnen-Jones, who has grown up in the light of—and at the expense of— her mother’s public career. Her mother only appeared occasionally, on her own terms, when it suited her, leaving Judith desperate for more sustained attention.

Judith is herself an accomplished actor, though of a different stripe. Nurtured by her father’s theatrical Shakespeare company, she is inward, quietly empathetic, and noted for her “combination of toughness and fragility.”

This accomplished debut novel is a feminist version of Mommie Dearest. Part of its modern feminism is in the complexity of its viewpoints. The story is told in six “acts,” each touching down at different points in time, and alternating different first-person narrations from both daughter and mother. It is remarkable how this technique generates sympathy for the “monstrous” mother, Sadie. We see that she has come to her position honestly, even if her rigidity creates blind spots.

The double narration ultimately privileges Judith, who suggests that Sadie’s feminism may be an elaborate structure erected to contain—or justify—her narcissism. The plot is carried by the daughter’s need for her mother’s love and understanding. If the plot works toward reconciling mother and daughter, the novel asks, can motherhood and personhood be reconciled?

Along the way, the novel explores the intensities of the New York theatrical world, its demand for dedication and preparation, the stress of simultaneously being oneself and being a character, navigating interiority and publicity. This is an engaging, absorbing novel that manages to combine the high life and the inner life.

The Lost Tarot

by Sarah Henstra

Sarah Henstra’s fourth novel contains a mystery. In 2000, a young academic art historian, Theresa Bateman, is struggling to find full-time employment while working temporary jobs at the University of Toronto.

The “impostor syndrome” of a young woman academic in an adjunct position is well described. Henstra adeptly shows how the male-dominated corridors of power in the academy are not just old traditions, but actively managed and manipulated techniques. Theresa’s promising academic career is stalling out while she earns poverty wages teaching undergraduates, holding office hours, administering exams, and curating the art institute run by the major scholar in her field, Russell Horber.

The field of study is an enigmatic surrealist painter of the 1930s, Lark Ringold. The second narrative of the novel presents Ringold’s rise to notoriety as a member of an intense and doomed British cult led by a Svengali-styled priest of personality, Corvo Ringold, who also happens to be Lark’s uncle. This story opens when Lark and his twin sister, Penelope, are sent for by Corvo, who has seen the power of Lark’s paintings, and wishes to commission a set of 78 illustrations for a unique representation of the mysterious Tarot.

Both of these narratives feature powerful, dominating, and seductive male figures who manipulate women for their own advantage. Also in both, we gradually learn that the true source of power lies in female creativity.

The novel progresses by alternating between time periods, gradually revealing the fictions that have become the truth, and collapsing a multi-storeyed house of masculine cards. The now aged Penelope empowers Theresa to overcome her obsession with mastery to embrace mystery.

“I structured it to have the two stories converge, but not just converge into a sort of common plot,” says Ms. Henstra. “I was interested in the reciprocity, not only between the two characters but also between the two disciplines,” notes Ms. Henstra, who is an academic herself. “I’ve long been interested in the tension between these two dwelling spaces, academia and art.”

The alternating narratives also juxtapose prose styles. The scenes of the early period are told in a resonant poetic idiom, well suited to the world of a cult and hallucinogenic surrealism.

Channelled through the character of Penelope, the reader encounters intense descriptions of sensory experiences, especially the visual. The cult, set in rural England, is called “The Shown.” A revelatory “seeing” by its followers, the “perceptants,” is induced by a drug called “the Eyeopener.”

A technique called ekphrasis—the verbal description of fictional works of art—bridges the two narratives. The contemporary narrative, which tracks academic Theresa’s experience, is less poetic, more analytic. It attends to Theresa’s encounter with a familar, urban and intellectual world, which is engaging.

And, it turns out, the world with which we are familiar is not always what it seems. The Lost Tarot is a compelling read for the mystery in its plot as well as for its attention to women and creative practice.

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