Reproduction

This Giller shortlisted book opens with 23 sections, alternating between 19 year old Felicia Shaw from an undisclosed Caribbean island and Edgar Gross, an affluent, middle-aged German, heir to some vague family interest. They meet in a shared hospital room, tending to their respective mothers who are both near death.

The 23 sections represent the number of chromosome pairs found in DNA. From there the novel begins to reproduce. Part 2 jumps ahead a few years and we alternate between 4 voices times 4 to make 16 sections. Part 3 is comprised of 16x16 or 256(!) sections. The book can't keep up with this exponential growth and finally develops cancer. Super- and sub-script words insinuate themselves across the page, telling a familiar yet disjointed story. Explaining it seems altogether too much but I enjoyed the constraints Williams placed on the structure.

Williams has a poet's ear for language. He nails the privileged white guy apologist in the crosshairs of the #MeToo movement; the fast talking, big dreaming, bi-racial tween hustler working from the garage of his landlord's garage in Brampton; to the out-of-step, Portuguese, suburban, divorced dad that can't quite reconcile his long past glories with his present day indignities. Multiculturally, unapologetically Canadian.

Both slyly funny and casually devastating, it pokes at the idea of nature vs nurture, asking if we can ever hope to escape our own histories, and exploring both the family you're born into and the ones you make.

TL;DR - just watch the video review: https://youtu.be/7xQv7F8tiMQ