How to Be Alone
Heather Nolan
Goose Lane Press, 2023
Review by Marcie McCauley
Knowing that Heather Nolan is also a songwriter, one’s tempted to view the structure of their second book, How to Be Alone, like a lyric with two verses, one on either side of a chorus—two novellas with an “Interlude” between. Perhaps a ballad in a minor key, with talk of loneliness and things gone wrong: the first verse is Kaitlin and the second Lev’s—each coping with different permutations of loss, searching for answers.
When Kaitlin roams the streets in the first half, mourning the death of her friend Bea, she’s acutely aware of her loneliness. “When I first moved to Montréal,” she recalls, “nobody I knew in the city answered my calls and for a few months the only person I talked to was the cashier at PA, so I bought groceries one yam at a time.” In Kaitlin’s world, even a yam’s existence is a solitary one.
Not only is the supermarché specifically named, but Nolan establishes her Montréal setting meticulously, so Kaitlin runs for the gazebo in Parc Little Italy or sits on the ledge near the stone archway in Parc des Amériques. The second half of the book shifts from Boulevard Saint-Laurent to the “ever-changing story that is Rue Sainte-Catherine,” where Lev treks home across Sherbrooke and up Mountain Avenue with a new poster for his apartment, or he sits in his favourite reading room at McGill University, where the sun is “falling through a stained glass window” and leaving “blue-and-gold pools stretched across the parquet.”
The details in Nolan’s storytelling stand out because the prose is stark, and the narrator’s presence is thin. Kaitlin and Lev are so consumed by their grieving, personal and communal, that a specific detail—be it a “Smash the Patriarchy” mug or Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks in a special exhibit at the Musée des beaux-arts—can add credibility, create mood, and develop characterization.
With interior musings comprising the bulk of the narrative—quiet moments of reflection and unexpressed emotion—scenes take on peculiar prominences, “Me and Bea were walking up Saint-Laurent a few months after Leonard Cohen died and she pointed out his house and said we should drink a bottle of wine in front of it and so we did, we just drank a bottle of rosé on a bench in Parc Portugal staring at the house, and I left a pack of Du Mauriers on the step when we left. Okay it was one cigarette, but I think he would have appreciated the sentiment.”
Here, readers are invited to share a bench in Kaitlin’s memory, to hum along with a favourite Cohen lyric, to feel the nip of wine and tobacco in their noses and throats, to inhabit a shared moment of mourning before Bea herself dies. And, even though it’s not phrased as a question, the last sentence reflects the questioning tone that is emblematic of the book’s first half. “Can we confirm that childhood just fucks us all up why don’t we just get rid of childhood?”
Kaitlin appears to address readers directly because she doesn’t have anyone else to talk to right now. She’s self-aware enough to observe that she’d rather tell a good story than a true one, so readers understand that she could transform her memory of a single cigarette left as an offering into an entire pack. But there’s no sense that she’s exaggerating what Bea meant to her or how much she’s been impacted by an encounter with a co-worker in the wake of Bea’s death.
In the book’s second half, Lev is almost as lonely. He seems to have one close friend (who’s dealing with a break-up) and to have lost contact with his gay uncle, the one person in Lev’s life who represents something authentic but—simultaneously—he remains unattainable (and suffers from his own grief, having come of age in the 1980s, at the height of the AIDS epidemic).
“Sometimes I felt like a goldfish in a pet shop,” Lev says, “only able to grow as much as my container allowed. Always coming up against the glass, turning away so I didn’t have to look too closely.” Lev doesn’t imagine himself a guppy, with dozens of guppy friends; he doesn’t imagine himself an angel fish, with glittery flare. And in his imagined pet shop, there is only one fish.
The bulk of Lev’s interrogations take the form of statements that he’s proving true or false to himself. But one question his friend poses is painfully salient: “You just have to be yourself. You have to know who you are and what you want and what you stand for. Tu veux quoi, Lev?” It’s not that Lev doesn’t know what he wants; it’s that he hasn’t yet accepted the answer; other people disapprove of his desires, and Lev’s identity is still taking shape.
Both Kaitlin and Lev are in the process of becoming different versions of themselves, defining themselves differently, partly in the wake of loss and partly in the presence of discovery. Novellas are more uncommon than their shorter and longer cousins, stories and novels; defining the form provokes opinions as varied as the respondents, but—as with novellas by William Maxwell and Mary Swan—one of the defining features is the emotional saturation. How to Be Alone can be read in a single sitting; readers can fully inhabit these characters’ emotional states, both narrowing and expanding—shifting. Other recent novels like Bryan Washington’s Family Meal and Pik-Shuen Fung’s Ghost Forest also invite their narrators’ grief to shape their novel structurally; a loved one’s absence contributes white space that insulates the slim narrative when grief overwhelms. Other Montréal-soaked books like Stéfanie Clermont’s The Music Game (translated by JC Sutcliffe) and Guillaume Morissette’s New Tab also feature young adults confronting loss and loneliness. And novels like Alex Ohlin’s Inside and Mikella Nicol’s Aphelia (translated by Lesley Trites) further explore the impact of violence and trauma on Montréalers.
What makes Nolan’s book so effective is the part, described as an interlude, between Kaitlin’s and Lev’s stories. It could be viewed as a chorus, but it could also be seen as a bridge. In fewer than ten pages, readers go underground to travel the subway—the city’s transit system that joins not only so many different neighbourhoods but also the lives of so many inhabitants.
This also connects to a thread that runs through both halves of the book, which situates the characters in relationship to those who matter most to them spatially. Kaitlin visits Bea’s grave and notes, “How are you the one that’s down there it should be me it should be me it should be me.” And when Lev is moving in, “Chloé was at the bottom of the twisted iron staircase. I was at the top…Chloé was bearing the brunt.” Who’s up, who’s down: the power dynamics in these stories are key, particularly how they are wielded against the narrators but also how they are managed and redistributed.
The metro system is the perfect setting for an epiphany: “There are too many narratives down here they all cross and blend they collaborate on uncertain terms and leave one party with all the royalties and the other puts down their briefcase and climbs up the windows and howls through the long dark tunnels.”
The rider in the interlude moves so quickly, “Red light coming now tiles long lane Expo orange curved lines McGill.” The perspective is insular and expert but also strange. Down there, the rules are different. “Cling to this pole slick with whatever is on their hands our hands we jostle around like kids at a maypole there is an intimacy. Is that wrong to say?”
The reader inhabits a between-space—neither up nor down—as though holding hands with each narrator. Between Kaitlin and Lev, the reader moves awkwardly but determinedly through solitary spaces, simultaneously feeling their sense of disconnection but embodying another kind of connection, through the web of story.
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Marcie McCauley reads, writes, and lives in Ontario on the homelands of Indigenous peoples–including the Anishnaabeg, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat–land still inhabited by their descendants. Her writing has been published in American, British, and Canadian magazines and journals, in print and online.