Cicada Summer

August 12, 2024
McKeen (Tear) delivers a moving tale of grief and the power of storytelling. Husha and her partner, Nellie, shelter in place during the Covid lockdown with Husha’s ailing grandfather, Arthur, at his remote cabin in Ontario. That summer, a swarm of cicadas emerge, and the sound of the insects adds to Husha’s turmoil as she grieves the recent death of her mother, who left behind an unpublished story collection. Interspersed with Husha’s narrative are her mother’s fantastical tales, including one about a woman on a deep-sea expedition who discovers a fish whose body is covered in eyeballs. The woman is mourning her daughter, and she starts morphing into the fish, growing eyes that allow her to see her dead child. In another story, a hole opens in the earth, threatening to swallow an entire family and their cottage. As Husha and the others read her mother’s stories aloud, she’s profoundly moved, and McKeen traces the contours of her quiet and sensitive nature in lyrical prose (“Husha doesn’t choose her name, but nevertheless she is silence, or at least a bidding to; she is stillness, immobility, blunt exhaustion contorting beyond its limits and procuring a quality of meditation”). The result is a fine addition to the growing body of pandemic fiction.

In remote Ontario, a trio under quarantine reflect on their lives. It's the summer of 2020 and Husha, a young woman who recently lost her mother, has hunkered down with her grandfather, Arthur, at his remote cabin. Quarantining with them is Husha's ex-but-apparently-now-on-again lover, Nellie. While the outdoors teem with cicadas, indoors, Husha, Arthur, and Nellie seem to lose themselves in quiet domesticity: Their days are dominated by cooking, bathing, grocery shopping. But Husha happens to have an eccentric little book of stories that her mother evidently wrote before she died, and the trio soon starts reading the stories together every evening. In one, a haunted house consumes a little girl. In another, a woman repeatedly miscarries. As the trio progress through the book, the boundaries between the stories and their own reality seem to fade. As one story asks, "What does it mean to be a haunted place, or to be a haunted person?[Loc 1465]...Is it to fail at holding your story in by its borders, if there are such things as borders?" [Loc 1473] McKeen writes with a competent and lyrical voice, holding the various levels of storytelling as one coherent whole. There is a loveliness to the silvery prose that propels the reader forward. But there is also something limited--and limiting--about her approach, which emphasizes experiments in narrative form over character development and basic emotion. The stories that make up Husha's mother's book read almost like responses to writing prompts, with all the attendant variations in perspective, tense, and rhetoric. One longs for something a little more, well, human. What happened between Husha and her mother? What is happening between Husha and Nellie? An emphasis on form over feeling lends this novel the air of a writing exercise.

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