Finding Ground review of Joan Barfoot – Anne Enright celebrates the famous feminist novel | Fiction

TThere are many books on women’s flight: books about women who leave not only their husbands but also the children they have produced. In the real world, men are the ones who run away most often; the father’s connection to family life is seen as insufficient, while motherhood is respected as a natural state. This means that mothers who are “not-mothers” alone are doing something impossible: the connection between a woman and her child is not only emotional, but also creative. Joan Barfoot understands the inner meaning of a mother’s responsibility: “He created these other people and their importance to him,” says Abra, the abandoned mother of Gaining Ground, “and now he has to fulfill them.”

Abra neglects to meet her children or their needs. This book is intense and thoughtful about the business of separation, which is also the business of being one person and not being divided.

Finding Ground came out in Canada in 1978, under the title Abra, before it was published in the UK under its current title by Women’s Press in 1980. This was around the time Barfoot’s fellow Canadian Alice Munro began to write about her prostitutes, refugees, whose instinct to seek freedom resonated very well with the feminism of the day. Abra did not leave the family because she wanted another man, however, she does not return to her children, like Leda The Lost Daughter of Elena Ferrante he says, after spending years trying to regain what was lost. Abra is close to Cathy Sweeney’s latest protagonist Brokenwho doesn’t have a single answer to the question of whether he left his old life behind: In Japan, Sweeney wrote, “So many people are missing that there are words to tell them— Johatsu. It means people who have problems. “

These books cannot completely refute the question of whether the bolting woman is a monster or a human victim. Gaining Ground was written before each of them and, in the past, Barfoot was wise enough to reject the points of contention: Abra never questioned the morals of being its true owner.

The book begins with the arrival of a girl at Abra’s house in the forest, nine years after she left her old life. Abra feels her presence as a pressure, a hope, but she can’t remember who the girl is, or who she herself was. Then, the famous moment – with his 18-year-old daughter, Katie: “I know him now, and it closes me to him.”

Katie’s arrival prompts Abra to remember her lovely, controlled home in Toronto; his marriage, in which there is sometimes “a late movie and making love on the couch with popcorn”; and his two children. His first child, a son, inspired a terrible sense of impact: “I didn’t even want to talk about him, even though he was very busy in my thoughts, because I somehow thought that talking about him took him away, separated him, gave a piece of him to someone else.” Her second child was seen as a miracle: “he was a baby, beautiful, and he was mine and Stephen’s and we created him, but it seemed natural now”.

The story may be about women’s conflict, depression, loss of meaning, but it always deals with the concepts of truth and compromise. Abra’s life doesn’t feel “real”. Barfoot offers 16 types of isolation without retracing his steps or saying the same thing twice. The construction of Abra’s departure has more and more modern effects, but he manages to keep it human, or within humanity, and we are sure, when Abra sees the cabin for the first time, that this is his “home”.

He didn’t bring any watches or a mirror, and he’s having a hard time not talking to other people. On his first day digging in the vegetable garden his hair bothers him and he cuts it off, blind. Abra grows food, collects firewood and survives in the Canadian winter. He only thinks about what is in front of him. Descriptions of work, nature and changing seasons bring to mind the self-confidence of Annie Dillard or Thoreau, who write a successful spiritual tradition. Abra’s revelation is not about God’s infinite majesty, however, but about a kind of inadequacy. He wants to live a life where he can gradually lose “my name, my memory, the letters I used, and all my words”, in order to reach a happy place.

When Katie arrives from a world where “there’s intent and anger everywhere”, Abra tries to share what she’s discovered about “emptiness”. She thinks about how she saw her husband and asks herself, “Did I make him?” His answer is that he discovered everyone: “I made it easy for them.” Then I did something about what I made, I acted as if what I made was real.

It’s hard to find an ending to a book that’s trying to be empty, so it’s very important to her that Barfoot is able to convincingly confirm Katie’s journey. Gaining Ground is a slow burn of a book and Barfoot’s introduction and direction remains interesting, nearly half a century on. It’s nice to see this book putting the book back in the middle of things, where it belongs.