These novels cannot fully resist the question of whether the bolting mother is a monster or a victim of societal expectation. Gaining Ground was written before any of them and, already, Barfoot was wise enough to refuse the terms of the debate: Abra never questions the morality of becoming her true self.<\/p>\n
The novel begins with the arrival of a young woman at Abra\u2019s cabin in the woods, nine years after she drove away from her old life. Abra feels her presence as a pressure, an expectation, but can barely remember who the girl is, or who she herself used to be. Then, a moment of recognition \u2013 it is her 18-year-old daughter, Katie: \u201cI know her now, and it locks me to her.\u201d<\/p>\n
double quotation markBarfoot was wise enough to refuse the terms of the debate: Abra never questions the morality of becoming her true self<\/p>\n
Katie\u2019s arrival tips Abra into a recollection of her lovely, ordered home in Toronto; her marriage, in which there would sometimes be \u201clate movies and making love on the couch and popcorn\u201d; and her two children. Her first baby, a son, provoked a fierce sense of attachment: \u201cI didn\u2019t even want to talk about him, although he so completely occupied my mind, because I felt somehow that talking about him took him a distance away, made him separate, gave a piece of him to someone else.\u201d Her second child seemed less of a miracle: \u201cshe was a baby, beautiful, and she was mine and Stephen\u2019s and we had created her, but it seemed natural now\u201d.<\/p>\n
The story may be about maternal ambivalence, depression, the loss of meaning, but it always revolves around ideas of truth and pretence. Abra\u2019s life does not feel \u201creal\u201d. Barfoot delivers about 16 different kinds of dissociation without going over her own footprints or saying the same thing twice. The build to Abra\u2019s departure has a cumulative, relentless modernist effect, but she manages to keep it human, or within the human, and we are fully convinced, when Abra sees the cabin for the first time, that this is her \u201chome\u201d.<\/p>\n
She has brought no clocks and no mirror, and is at pains to avoid talking to other people. On her first day of digging a vegetable garden her hair proves bothersome and so she lops it off, blind. Abra works to grow food, gather wood and keep herself alive through the long Canadian winter. She thinks only about what is in front of her. The descriptions of work, the natural world and the changing seasons recall the self-reliance of Annie Dillard or Thoreau, who write in a transcendent spiritual tradition. Abra\u2019s revelation is not about God\u2019s infinite majesty, however, but about a kind of unbecoming. She wants to make a life in which she can slowly lose \u201cmy name, my memory, the labels I\u2019d used, and so my sense of all words\u201d, to arrive at a place of joy.<\/p>\n
When Katie arrives from a world where \u201cthere are motives and angers everywhere\u201d, Abra tries to share what she has discovered about \u201cblankness\u201d. She considers the way she once saw her husband and wonders, \u201cDid I make him up?\u201d The answer is that she invented everyone: \u201cI simplified them. And then I reacted to what I had made up, behaved as if what I had invented was real.\u201d<\/p>\n
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