A Jest of God

A Jest of God is part of Margaret Laurence’s Manawaka cycle, a collection of stories exploring women’s experience and women’s voices. Rachel Cameron is in her 30s, working as a teacher in a small Manitoba town in the 1960s. She lives with her mother in the house she grew up in, now a flat above a funeral parlor. During the summer holiday she encounters Nick Kazlik, a former school classmate visiting his parents. The attraction is mutual; an affair inevitable. Rachel is a virgin, and while the affair awakens desires she never before experienced, she is also burdened with sole responsibility for preventing pregnancy in a town where the only source of gynecological advice is the doctor who has treated her since childhood. Meanwhile, show more Rachel’s mother resents her daughter’s new-found social life. She unsuccessfully attempts to guilt Rachel into staying home with her in the evenings, and then stays up until Rachel comes home in order to deliver a passive-aggressive soliloquy about being alone.

Margaret Laurence tells this story entirely through Rachel’s internal monologue, including imagined conversations with Nick and her mother where Rachel tries on different ways of handling situations. Rachel is portrayed as a strong figure, but one burdened with typical human anxieties and prone to self-doubt. Laurence uses Rachel’s voice to question conventional thinking about women, marriage, and sex. Rachel grapples with the affair and its impact on other parts of her life, but Laurence also shows how these experiences build Rachel's inner strength and allow her to break free from some of what binds her. show less

This is not the first time I've read Canadian writer Margaret Laurence's fine novel, A JEST OF GOD. But it's probably been at least twenty years since I last read it and it has lost nothing in the interim. Laurence's probing of the single life and the kind of "quiet desperation" Thoreau once wrote about will make you stop and reconsider those people you know who live alone, or with aging parents. School teacher Rachel Cameron is a character you don't forget, and may want to revisit from time to time, as I have. Because her secret, inner life - as demonstrated in her interior monologues and fantasies - are as important, if not more so, than her actual life, which seems pretty bleak. Thirty-four, Rachel lives with her hypochondriac whiny show more mother upstairs over the funeral parlor once operated by her late father, teaches second grade in a school presided over by a principal who is a secret sadist, and has a brief loveless affair one summer with a former resident of the town who is there to see his parents. The story is told in the first person and the reader is privy to Rachel's most private and intimate thoughts, and THIS is what makes this ordinary tale of loneliness and desperation so very EXTRAordinary.

As I was reading Laurence's book, a minor Canadian classic, I was rememinded of another more recent novel, also by a Canadian, Elizabeth Hay's ALONE IN THE CLASSROOM, which I enjoyed equally. And I wondered if Hay would count Laurence as an important influence in her own development as a writer. I must try to remember to ask her.

I should probably confess that I might never have read A JEST OF GOD had I not seen the scrupulously faithful film adaptation, RACHEL, RACHEL starring Joanne Woodward and directed by Paul Newman. It was - and still is - a small and perfect gem of film-making. I highly recommend both the book and the film adaptation. show less

Rachel Cameron is a shy, thirty-four-year-old school teacher, leading a life of stifling conventionality in the small Canadian town she grew up in. Years before she had made a brief escape to attend college, but returned to live with and care for her mother following her father’s death. They live in the flat above the funeral directors that her father had once owned. Mrs Cameron (like Hagar Shipley in The Stone Angel) is a wonderfully drawn character, a coyly manipulative terror she is overbearing and demanding. Rachel’s older sister Stacey escaped – married now, living in the city with four children, she very rarely visits.

Each year, Rachel silently directs her love toward one of the pupils in her class of seven-year olds (as the show more novel opens it is young James) although she goes to very great lengths to make sure no one guesses. Rachel is in part surprised to find herself teaching in the school where she was once a child – there is a definite feeling that she has not had the opportunity to move her life forward, stuck still in the landscape of her childhood.

“I remember myself skipping rope to that song when I was about the age of the little girls out there now. Twenty-seven years ago, which seems impossible, and myself seven, but the same brown brick building, only a new wing added and the place smartened up. It would certainly have surprised me then to know I’d end up here…”

Rachel’s one friend in the town, is Calla; a kind hearted fellow teacher who dresses oddly, calls Rachel child, and is a member of the Tabernacle church where worshippers have recently begun speaking in tongues. Calla exacts a promise from Rachel to attend a future meeting with her, and Rachel is torn between the knowledge of how excruciating she will find it – and not wanting to hurt Calla’s feelings. The evening, when it finally happens is even worse than Rachel had anticipated, affecting her powerfully and emotionally in a way she finds acutely embarrassing.

Rachel has a powerful inner life – she is sharp, intelligent and an astute observer of those around her, the children, the school principle, Calla and her mother.

“Nothing is clear now. Something must be the matter with my way of viewing things. I have no middle view. Either I fix on a detail and see it as though it were magnified – a leaf with all its veins perceived, the fine hairs on a man’s hands – or else the world recedes and becomes blurred, artificial, indefinite, an abstract painting of a world. The darkening sky is hugely blue, gashed with rose, blood, flame from the volcano or wound or flower of the lowering sun. The wavering green, the sea of grass, piercingly bright. Black tree trunks, contorted, arching over the river.”

There are moments when she isn’t as kind as he would like to be, dimly aware of being unkind toward Calla’s friendliness, she then feels guilty for her sharpness. However, Rachel is also vulnerable, caught still in the life of her childhood, ministering to her mother and living a life of quiet, conventionality. Deep down, Rachel harbours more than a little resentment for the life she is leading, making sandwiches and serving coffee at her mother’s bridge parties, accompanying her mother to church – where she would in fact rather not go at all. Inside, Rachel isn’t quite the quiet, dutiful small town spinster school teacher that she appears.

As Rachel says goodbye to her class of children for the summer holidays, another former child of the town returns. Nick Kazlik; the son of the town’s Ukrainian milkman, returns for the summer. Nick is a high school teacher in the city, to where he will soon return. The two embark upon a passionate relationship. Nick’s attitude to their relationship is much more casual than Rachel’s. Rachel is more like a gauche young school girl than a woman in her thirties – unpractised in the ways of love and sex. Nick visits the scenes of his childhood and adolescence with Rachel, haunted a little by the memory of his twin brother who died several years earlier. As Rachel grows in sexual confidence, she becomes more reliant on Nick, worrying when he doesn’t ring for several days, even imaging a future for the two of them.

A Jest of God is beautifully written, a sympathetic, tender novel which sees Rachel come to a new understanding about herself, and her standing with her difficult mother. A thoroughly beautiful novel, Margaret Laurence is someone I shall be reading much more of.

I have The Diviners tbr – which I believe is the fourth or fifth novel in the Manawaka sequence – though I assume it doesn’t matter in which order they are read. show less

This is the first book I've read by Margaret Laurence - and what a welcome discovery. Must find more.

The novel charts some grim, grey territory - an unmarried teacher in a small Manitoba town, painfully shy, socially awkward, repressed, no self confidence, a helpless victim of her widowed mother's tyrannyy. She stumbles into a 'summer romance' which inevitably ends unhappily, but she weathers romantic and health crises and at last gains some confidence and control of her life. She leaves the claustrophobia of small town Manawaka and relocates herself and her mother to Vancouver.

Laurence tells the whole story via the interior monlogue of the heroine and it's a triumph. This technique vividly conveys the young woman's anguish and show more confusion, then in the closing chapter it's a relief to see her opening up at last to new life and new possibilities. show less

I was raised in the US and had little introduction to Laurence except through the Diviners, which I remembered primarily because of the sperm stain on the woman's dress. (I led a sheltered life and was shocked about that). And when I read The Stone Angel, I was too young to appreciate the feelings therein. And, sorry to say, high school English ruined it for me.
This book I picked up because the woman in it is at a phase of her life I could identify with entirely. Rachel Cameron is trapped, totally trapped, in a life of service and guilt and concealment. It's so small town Ontario...Still, she finds rewards in her life, and eventually opens herself - only to experience additional challenges.
It's not a comfortable book. I feel so for show more Rachel. The scenes with her mother run right to my spine, as her mother passively-aggressively ruins her life. They are underwritten - not heavy handed at all, but the chills are there as her mother says "Don't be late, will you, dear?". Little tendrils of control.
I'm so glad I read this. It is beautiful, and written by a master. It's given me a new appreciation for Laurence after the high school destruction. I'm off to reread the others now. show less

Though some of the period details in A Jest Of God seem hopelessly dated, its endearing heroine transcends time and place. At 34, dutiful schoolteacher Rachel Cameron slowly and belatedly develops an awareness of her own power, sexuality and worth. Laurence skillfully explores this deeply personal journey that many women, and more than a few men, will recognise and enjoy.

Excruciating. This novel is narrated by repressed thirty-something schoolteacher Rachel, living in Manawaka with her ailing, manipulative mother. Rachel is the first-person "unreliable narrator" in similar vein to the narrator of Zoe Heller's Notes on a Scandal. Hopelessly shy and self-obsessed, Rachel is still a virgin, dreaming of love and cursing her mother's constant harping on "what other people will think", even though she herself is haunted by exactly the same concerns. When she meets Nick, it's clear to the reader, but unfortunately not to Rachel, what he's up to, and the outcome is inevitable. But Rachel does grow and learns by the end of the novel, and sets out on a new journey -- though I for one was not convinced she had show more really broken free from her old ways.

The novel was originally titled A Jest of God, and was filmed by Paul Newman as Rachel, Rachel (with Joanne Woodward in the title role). Surely Laurence must have been infuriated by the tacky cover and blurb of the (bookmooched) film tie-in paperback edition that I read. If I'd been reading it in public, I'd have felt obliged to wrap it in brown paper. "The powerful novel of a woman enmeshed in dangerous passion" it claims. "Rachel had waited a long time for love ... In the midst of a long hot summer she met Nick. He sensed her desperation -- and the sensuality that pulsed through her..." Aargh. This doesn't remotely reflect the subtlety and psychological anguish of the book. show less