[.ca] Careless (ISBN 1596922761)

"People live with all manner of holes in their lives":
An eight-year-old girl tries to make sense of the unexpected death of her younger brother; a struggling artist strives to venerate the bodies of the dead in his work; an ageing wife of a well-known Danish furniture designer laments the loss of her husband; and a middle-aged woman grieves the murder of her only daughter, taken from her so suddenly and without warning. It all starts off like any other day at the sports oval, in the shade of the Moreton Bay, the straight white goalposts, and the tall spreading gums. Perfect weather for a children's picnic, but when an angry father in a dark blue Nissan Patrol pulls into the shade at the edge of the oval and demands his twin boys, events go horribly wrong and everyone is run down. Riley, Pearl's young brother is also killed. Their mother Lily, unable to cope is set adrift, powerless to understand what has happened even as she sees the chaos around her, the police cars and ambulances, the "people's unchoreographed movements," the bodies on stretchers under white sheets, the bodies of those children. In the end there are "six children dead and two women, and the one child, Pearl, who had escaped." As Pearl and Lily try to heal their grief, the narrative turns to the young and handsome sculptor Adam Logan who with his with his "Bonds T-shirts and his slim hips" who has in recent months gained notoriety with his illuminated death cast of a young girl who had died of a heroin overdose three days after her sixteenth birthday. This "portrait" of Kathy is at once controversial and also cathartic, the installation bringing Adam an unforeseen measure of success. When the authorities decide to commemorate a memorial to the dead children, Adam realizes that this will be a unique opportunity to broaden his artistic horizons. The vulnerable Lily ends up falls for Adam, swept away by his sexy charms even though Adam proves to be a rather self-interested character. The affair starts something inside him, something that will perhaps deliver him to new possibilities. Even so, Adam tries to be here for Lily's grief, for its inspiration, all the sadness the whole bad experience, feeling its shape, its limits, its volume and texture and mass. When he offers to use Riley's ashes in his exhibition, Lily is all to willing, but Pearl is shaken, even as she confesses the idea to her Gus, her therapist whom she has been seeing for three months, ever since that terrible day at the oval. But there are two other characters that orbit the lives of Lily, Pearl and Adam. The middle-aged Anna visits Lily to try to help her through her grief even as she shows Lily photos of the Memorial for the Unrecovered, for her daughter who was murdered and dumped at sea. Anna can't seem to rise about her anguish and sorrow as she frantically tries to talk to her dead child. Meanwhile, the aging Sonia befriends Adam who works in the workshop at the back of her stylish house. A native of Denmark, who came to Australia with her husband Pieter in the early seventies, Sonia, the innocent bereaved wife, imagines her life over the years with Pieter, until he had a deadly heart attack. Now she spends her days in a type of willing seclusion, wondering the isles of Ikea while pondering the influence of her husband's life work. Willing to face the truth, these characters face their grief head-on, Lily hides behind her affair with the egotistical Adam, all to willing to hand over Riley's ashes to him. Pearl, continues to focus on the memories of Riley and he persists as a powerful force in her life, just as much as when he was alive. Anna's hurt heaves, pronged and bulky inside her. She cannot live her life exacting penance from others for her own grief, yet there's a place inside her that remains black and barren. As these people continue to connect with each other, often in surprising ways, author Deborah Robertson writes with a sort of delicate and detached irony, even as she tries to give heart to what truly makes a person grieve. Contrasting the different ways we assemble our personalities from the fragments we perceive about others, the author also explores the nature of memorials and how they influence how we mourn and how we ultimately cope with death. Mike Leonard February 08.