Kidd Schools us in Animal Husbandry, Theology, Reproduction
Hannah Stephenson
Missing the Ark, Catherine Kidd’s novelappears to be the offspring of a biology textbook and family scrapbook. Kidd spins the story through Agnes Underhill, a biology student who realizes that she “doesn’t have much clue what [she looks] like anymore” after the birth of her daughter, Rose. Agnes and Rose move in with Agnes’s seductive mother who puts Mrs. Robinson to shame. Living with her daughter and mother, as both a daughter and a mother, forces Agnes to examine her relationships through the blurry lens of memory.
Agnes confronts painful and amusing memories of her father, a poet and probable schizophrenic who disappeared on her 11th birthday. She also studies her relationship with Rose’s father, Noah (whom Agnes calls her Buffalo man). The aptly-named Noah is a taxidermist and surrogate father to a chimp. When Agnes learns of her pregnancy, she leaves Noah’s home and the waterbed that they call “the Ark.”
Catherine Kidd is best known as a spoken word artist and her ability to stretch words, to impregnate them with new meanings makes her prose sparkle. Kidd imbues Agnes with the power to experiment with language and the world around her. Set in Vancouver, and sprinkled with epigraphs from the Bible, children’s books, and taxidermy handbooks, Missing the Ark feels realistic and the narrative is never forced. In one passage, Kidd gives voice to the central problem of the novel beautifully: “[I]n a story about a person called I there is no one to watch the watcher, and no one to take her picture…a blind spot, the centre of a lie. A relative truth.” |
