13th Canadian Challenge - 12th Review - Basic Black with Pearls

This slim novel, Basic Black with Pearls by Helen Weinzweig is quite difficult to review (and this is review #12, btw).  The novel was reissued on House of Anansi Press in 2015 and then was brought out by NYRB Classics in 2018, which is the edition I own.

Here is a CBC interview with Sarah Weinman, who wrote the afterword for the NYRB edition, where she discusses aspects of Weinzweig's life and how it fed into the novel.

To return to my review, I find it is, in fact, difficult to know what actually happens in the novel.  I wouldn't say that this novel is spoiler-proof, but it is so hard to know what is going on and what is the ground truth that who can say if the plot was SPOILED or not...

There is another postmodern novel I would put into dialog with Basic Black with Pearls, and that is Hotel Crystal by Olivier Rolin, which is quite experimental.*  Each entry begins with a physical description of a hotel room - discussion of the door, style and placement of the window, condition of the paint and/or wallpaper, and then finally an inventory of the artwork on the walls, the bed and the ubiquitous television.  Information about the author of these notes leaks through, particularly by the second half of each entry.  He is apparently a secret agent of sorts or an arms dealer and possibly also a famous author (under a nom de guerre).  The footnotes to many of the entries often link back to another entry, creating a bit of a web (not completely different from something Calvino or Cortazar might have attempted).  However, a little of this goes a long way, and I did find myself getting tired of the room descriptions about halfway through the book.

Fortunately, Basic Black with Pearls wasn't quite that obscure, but the narrator, Shirley, is engaged in a long-running affair with a secret agent, Coenraad (or at least that is what she maintains from the start of the novel).  Since he is a secret agent, he can't just call her up and tell her where they are meeting, as all of their phones and computers are bugged.  So instead, he will find ways to plant information in the local newspaper or leave a postcard with some clues that she needs to decipher, generally directing her to go to a different hotel than the one where she is actually staying.

Where things get very odd is that (again she claims but we the readers don't actually see) nearly all of the time she actually encounters Coenraad he is in deep disguise, actually getting enraged if she tries to break his cover.  Apparently, he is so convincing in his disguises that he can portray himself as different nationalities (and I believe different ethnicities and races as well, which brings up unpleasant recollections of blackface, which was in the news not so long ago). 

Given the radical uncertainty over what is actually going on, even Shirley wonders once in a while if she has slept with Coenraad or an unwitting (but generally willing) stranger.  She tries to reassure herself that Coenraad would always intervene at the last moment, if she inadvertently ran across the "wrong Coenraad."

There is some additional tension, on top of the espionage angle, in that she thinks there is pressure on Coenraad's end to break things off, and that is why they are meeting (likely for their final assignation) in Toronto, which is Shirley's hometown, despite their previous rule to never meet on anyone's home turf.  Shirley spends quite a bit of time wandering around downtown Toronto, and I believe she makes it as far as Kensington Market, looking for clues to Coenraad's whereabouts.  At one point, she seems to break into the wrong apartment (not a hotel at all) and has to be escorted out.  There is then a scene of her with her husband and children (who have been completely off-screen ciphers up until this point).  No question by this point I was wondering if the entire novel was the record of a major breakdown (either schizophrenia or some other form of psychosis) and whether Coenraad existed (doubtful) and if she had even left Toronto at any point in the past.  And that's basically how it ends.  It is definitely an interesting but very challenging book.  I will let it simmer for a while and then read it a second time to see how my reactions are different on a second reading, particularly if I will find all the games and mental puzzles between Shirley and Coenraad intriguing or just sad the second time around.


* Just to thoroughly confuse matters, I would definitely recommend the interested reader check out Rick Moody's Hotels of North America, where a somewhat obsessive reviewer gradually reveals his life story through a series of long-form reviews of hotels and motels on a rating site (that is inspired by but is clearly not Yelp or Yahoo).  It's quite droll and melancholy at the same time.  As I am well over my allotted limit for this review, I will point you to this review instead.