> Zed Book Club / Elaine McCluskey Creates an Oddball Cast for ‘The Gift Child,’ a Dysfunctional Family Saga
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Elaine McCluskey Creates an Oddball Cast for ‘The Gift Child,’ a Dysfunctional Family Saga
The Dartmouth author's new novel focuses on a middle-aged woman writing her memoir and grappling with an untruthful father and missing cousin / BY Kim Hughes / March 26th, 2024
For a novel that deals with orthodox themes of family dysfunction and the vagaries of memory and truth-telling, The Gift Child is unconventionally told. But then, author Elaine McCluskey has a deep well of unique things to draw from.
The seventh book of fiction from the award-winning 68-year-old novelist and former journalist follows Nova Scotia everywoman Harriett Swim. In midlife, with a heartbreaking divorce and a job as a newspaper photographer behind her, she is valiantly trying to navigate forward. The universe has other ideas.
Swim is attempting to construct a memoir amid a constellation of oddball characters: her itinerant, possibly shady, missing cousin Graham; her self-aggrandizing, truth-averse former broadcaster father Stan; and her ambiguously employed new beau Vincent, who may or may not be an American anthropology professor investigating the infamous 1967 Shag Harbour UFO incident.
Though ostensibly about Stan – a man with a complicated past – Swim’s book leads her toward self-discovery as she attempts to unravel the mystery of Graham’s disappearance near the tiny fictional fishing village of Pollock Passage, N.S. McCluskey’s galloping story, at once comic and slyly observational, is twisty and occasionally absurd – with red herrings and shaggy dog detours – but highly relatable. The Gift Child also teems with insights into the human condition and snappy turns of phrase. “Beautiful people are like that, aren’t they? … ” she writes. “They do not see you. They see your reaction to them. They see you falling under their spell; they see you toppling into something you have no business toppling into. And the harder you fall, the more wondrous they seem.”
McCluskey doesn’t write from an outline, and has only two rules: “The emotions have to be real and there has to be some visceral moments in my writing,” she says in an interview from her home in Dartmouth, N.S. “If I am just plodding along – if I don’t make somebody laugh or cry or take a sharp intake of breath every now and then – then I don’t think I’ve done my job.”
With The Gift Child, it’s a particular achievement, given the narrative hurdles McCluskey dropped in her path, but cleared. The first was inspiring empathy for unlikable characters. The second, riskier gambit was referencing, then footnoting, actual people and events, from Slovak hockey player Zdeno Chára to Canadian spy Jeffrey Delisle, without yanking readers out of the story.
“For the most part, I felt it wasn’t a distraction,” she says, allowing “there is quite a bit of me in Harriett. We both have a skeptical, sardonic view of the world. I’d like to think we’re both relatively nice people trying to figure ourselves out.”
She also wrestled with how unlikable to make Stan. “I hoped that unveiling his secret would create a bit of sympathy for him, soften his rough edges a bit. But I did have fun with him. He can be quite funny, often unintentionally with some of his observations and comments, many of which are quite frankly foolish.”
Further testament to her ability to craft persuasive fiction, McCluskey describes her own father, Tom McCluskey, as the antithesis of the mildly loathsome Stan. “He was the sweetest man who ever lived,” she says of the acclaimed former boxer from P.E.I. who was undefeated in 35 amateur and professional bouts he fought throughout the Maritimes and New England between 1937 and 1948. “When we grew up, we had a punching bag in the basement and smelling salts in the medicine cabinet,” she laughs.
The senior McCluskey, who died in 2012 at 87, coached two younger siblings in boxing while another brother was a boxing historian, and their father was also a boxer. (All of them have passed on, now.) “Plus, my dad trained [one-time heavyweight champion] Trevor Berbick for a number of years,” McCluskey says. “He went on to defeat Muhammad Ali, which not many boxers could claim. And before he died, my father taught a friend named Bridget Stevens to box. She has turned into this fabulous boxing trainer who runs Tribal Boxing Club in Dartmouth.”
“I’ve been steeped in boxing all my life and met a lot of curious characters, so it pops up in my work,” she says. “My first novel Going Fast was a boxing novel and, truth be told, my dad was the main character.”
Indeed, astute readers of The Gift Child will find boxing represented via a peripheral character seen air-sparring as he jogs. Such shades of realism in McCluskey’s work perhaps stem from her journalistic background at the Canadian Press in Halifax, CBC-TV and the Halifax Chronicle-Herald.
With The Gift Child, McCluskey says “the only fixed theme I really started out with was Harriett trying to figure out what was wrong with the family.” Other themes surfaced as she was writing, “like betrayal, fairness, or lack of it. Those things started to come together, and I went with that.
“I don’t strive for my writing to be completely lateral or conventional. I like it to be a bit uneven and bumpy because I want it to mirror life.”
As for how she will define success with The Gift Child, McCluskey hopes “some of the writing will stop people in their tracks. Everybody grew up in a family and that’s a big theme in the book, so perhaps people will make some connections with their lives and families.”