Dianne Warren (1) (1950–)

Cool Water by Dianne Warren is an ode to Saskatchewan and the hearty folks who live there. At first glance, the reader might think Saskatchewanians are slightly off-centre and, while it's true that a few excentrics grace the fictional town of Juliet, the characteristics of the people who inhabit this novel are recognizable by most of us. In fact, they are us.

They are frustrated and overwhelmed; they are content and introspective; they are bullied and they bully; they are lonely and they are show more loved. The natural world works to stir up the residents of Juliet as a horse escapes a trailer, takes a considerable journey across Saskatchewan's sand dunes (who knew?), provokes jealous behaviour, and invites rodeo dreams.

The author creates a series of character vignettes and frames them within the beauty of Saskatchewan. show less

I loved Dianne Warren’s poignant first novel, Cool Water, which focused on an interconnected cast of characters, each with his own particular joys and private sorrows, living in a small prairie town. It won Canada’s Governor General’s Award for Fiction in 2010 and was certainly deserving. Warren’s sophomore novel, Liberty Street, was a more focused work, following a single, oddball character through several years of life. I wasn’t crazy about that book, but I like her new one, The show more Diamond House, even less. It, too, focuses on a female character, Estella Diamond, born 1924, but covers a longer period: eighty-five-plus years.

Since The Diamond House is a short novel, the reader gets only the highlights—if you can call them that—of a very ordinary life that revolves almost entirely around the main character’s family of origin. As a child, Estella is ambitious, telling her father she’d one day like to take charge of his successful brick-making factory, but her four older brothers will later band together to deprive of her of that opportunity. As a precocious five-year-old, she’s driven by curiosity to pry the lid off a homely, heavy tea pot—kept as a memento of a mysterious long-dead aunt—only to discover that it contains a trove of letters between her father, Oliver, and his lively and unconventional first wife, Salina, who died only a few months into the marriage.

Beatrice, Oliver’s second wife and his children’s mother, is a dull, domestic replacement, and Estella finds herself wishing she’d had Salina for a mother. Under Beatrice’s influence, Oliver and his offspring are shadows of what they might have been. Estella’s development is particularly limited. She assumes (as so many women of her generation did) the family care-taking role—first, nursing her soldier brother Jack when he returns to Canada after World War II, and, later, attending to her aging parents. She also takes care of a young man who is injured by a reckless driver. He becomes a lifelong friend. Academically talented, Estella gains employment as a high school math teacher, but family demands prevent her from accomplishing anything for herself. She’s unable to pursue a university degree as planned or advance professionally within the educational system. Her once open-minded father won’t even consider having her work as an accountant in the factory. Before the end of the novel, however, she’ll perform several acts of generosity that will make the lives of others better.

While Warren provides a convincing sketch of Estella as a girl and a sensitive portrait of her as an old woman, the middle section of the novel which focuses on Estella’s productive years does not make for compelling reading. Estella tries to shine in middle age: she leaves teaching, briefly gains a boyfriend, flies along the highway in a sporty white Ford Mustang, and wears a daring, Mondrian-inspired two-piece swimsuit. Inevitably, even in these small acts, she’s thwarted. She can’t escape the role she’s been cast in. To impress a girl, her nephew takes Estella’s sports car out for a spin, leaving it wrapped around a tree. Her boyfriend turns out to be an opportunist, interested only in her sizeable inheritance. As she herself observes, all along she was destined to become the Old Maid of the children’s card game. As for the rest of the Diamond clan, not one of them really comes to life on the page. The reader really has no one to root for.

In killing off Oliver’s first wife, the feisty Salina, the author pretty much guarantees the sinking of her story. The narrative with its somewhat anemic characters plods listlessly and superficially along, offering one lacklustre event after another—from the annual extended-family holiday at a northern lake to Oliver and Beatrice’s wedding anniversary, their funerals, and the eventual closure of the brick factory. What Warren’s goal was with this novel is not clear to me: To document the missed opportunities and wasted potential of the women of an earlier generation? To show that our real families are the ones we form out of friends and not the ones we’re born into? Maybe. Warren’s writing is competent, her story, such as it is, is steadily and methodically built brick by brick by brick. Solid enough, yes, but a bit tedious, somewhat cliché, and ultimately not very satisfying. show less

While on holiday in Ireland with Ian, her common-law partner of 20 years, 60-ish Frances Moon lets slip a profound and telling truth about herself: a secret so closely guarded and with origins so deep in the past that she’d believed she’d escaped it. Once it is out, however, the secret resonates painfully into the present. Back home in Saskatchewan, she and Ian fail to reconcile, and in order to deal with the ghosts that have never actually stopped plaguing her, Frances is compelled to show more pack up the life she’s spent forty years constructing and return to her home town of Elliot. In Elliot she takes up residence in the house that her uncle had built more than fifty years earlier, still the only house on Liberty Street, a failed development separated from the main part of town by the railway tracks, with the intention of finally sorting through the family belongings and mementos that fill the place. Warren devotes the bulk of her novel to flashbacks that depict in highly dramatic fashion the childhood and adolescence of Frances Mary Moon, an imaginative and curious child growing up on a dairy farm with her pragmatic father and idealistic mother. Central to the story is Frances’ relationship with her mother, Alice, who is determined that Frances better herself through education and escape from Elliot, where a dreary, demoralizing, back-breaking future as a farmer’s wife surely awaits. Frances is smart but wilful. She defies her mother at every turn and on many occasions does precisely the opposite of what her mother has asked her to do. Finally, on the cusp of adulthood, rebellious to the end, she makes a life-altering mistake that she spends the next forty years trying to put behind her. The story that Warren tells is vivid and wistful. Her characters are filled with regret over their rash actions, connections not made and words left unsaid. Often moving, it is also told with wry humour. Liberty Street is a more than worthy follow-up to Dianne Warren’s GG Award winning novel Cool Water and is sure to satisfy any reader looking for a full-blooded novel about human relationships and the past that haunts us all. show less

It's not often one picks up a book on a whim and comes out absolutely mesmerized. Yet, this is exactly what this book did for me: the incredible ability for Warren to pinpoint the details that make the characters come alive, the weaving of characters in and out of the book which gives it a movie-like quality it's so well staged, the poetry of the exotic and heroic in the most banal places - I was positively drawn by all the characters, their questions, their silences, their hopes. The pace show more is slow and can make the beginning a bit tough to master, but once the reader is drawn into the story, there is no pulling out. show less