Kelly Baron
Nic Brewer, SUTURE
Toronto: Book*Hug Press, 2022. $20.00
Book*Hug Press describes Suture, the debut novel of Nic Brewer, as a cross between body horror, sapphic fiction, and literary fiction. The description stands to reason: the premise of the novel is a literal rendering of the metaphoric bleeding artist, needing to suffer for their work. Finn, before becoming a loving mother to Paige, is a critically acclaimed artist who learns as a teenager to remove her lungs and heart to paint; Grace, a dedicated reader-turned-writer, uses her blood to power her word processor; Eva, the most compelling of the three women, is a feminist filmmaker who removes her eyes to power her video camera. All three women have complicated lives and relationships, tracked in Brewer’s skilled narration: Finn’s mother struggles with her daughter’s life choices before Finn, and after becoming a mother, she struggles similarly with her own daughter; Grace finds herself unable to love Olu, her deeply patient and caring partner, choosing to move away from the city after she cheats on him; Eva pulls away from Dev as she begins to lose the colour in her sight.
But in recounting so much pain—Brewer’s narration details how to suture skin back onto Finn’s body, the blurriness of putting Eva’s eyes into a video camera that is not hers, Grace passing out from loss of blood—there is a deep, insistent focus on care. And that focus on care provides a necessary corrective, I’d like to argue, to much of the recent discourse regarding the trauma plot.
Parul Sehgal, in a late 2021 article for The New Yorker, argues against the prevalence of the trauma plot, suggesting that in our contemporary obsession with the traumatic moments of a character’s past, we reduce the characters to little more than the trauma they experience. As Sehgal writes: “[the] trauma plot flattens, distorts, reduces character to symptom, and, in turn, instructs and insists upon its moral authority.” Characterization diminishes, and the trauma drives the plot. She looks to a number of contemporary novels and television shows in developing this argument, including, among others, Hanya Yanagihara’s polarizing A Little Life (2015). Yanagihara’s novel focuses on male friendship, considering the lives of four friends as they progress from university to middle age, delving deeply into the life of Jude, an orphaned boy who endures such significant childhood trauma that he eventually kills himself. It is in her analysis of A Little Life that Sehgal is dismissive of the hope that accompanies the trauma plot through care. She opines, “There are newborns envious of the devotion [Jude] inspires,” suggesting that the care of his friends, partner, and adopted parents is “mystifying for the reader.”
When I reread Suture after Sehgal’s article went viral, it helped me to articulate why, as a PhD candidate studying intergenerational trauma, I found her argument to be so off-putting. Sehgal misses the point with much of contemporary trauma fiction: there is a near-dualistic rendering of both suffering and care in the novels she describes. In rendering trauma, authors also render care. To dismiss the trauma plot is to miss the care that accompanies it. And while it is possible to read Suture for its body horror, for its rendering of the experiences of artists as they portray trauma in their work, I prefer to read it for its moving depiction of care.
For that reason, it is Eva’s story that shines. But not for Eva herself—instead, for Dev, her loving and committed partner over multiple decades. As Eva achieves critical acclaim for her filmmaking, she pro- gressively loses the colour in her sight before becoming blind altogether. Eva struggles with her new disability in ways that are to be expected: she turns their life grey-scale, eschewing colour, before Dev begins to adjust her communication, filling the gaps in Eva’s sight. Worth quoting in full is the first such segment, when Dev vividly describes the colour- ing of a cake:
“The background is mostly this unbelievable plum colour, it’s so dark and rich, and those highlights are maroon and burgundy, then the flowers are all cream-coloured and lavender and amethyst. He created some of the flowers on top with chocolate and they’re those same light colours, but he also has real violets here, and real pansies here, then you can see the lavender sprigs here.” Eva watched her wife’s familiar hand trace the colours of the beautiful cake and felt the colours pour into her mind’s eye as she went (107).
The detail Dev includes in her description was reminiscent, to me, of my own changes in communication with my husband; he is not colour-blind, but he has a degenerative visual disease resulting in diminishing peripheral vision and night blindness. One day, he will be legally blind. Today is not that day, but his declining peripheral vision results sometimes in clumsiness; in frustration. My version of Dev’s description is preci- sion in explaining where something is in relation to him, warning when steps approach, guiding him at night when I know his vision is diminished. Seeing that care depicted in Suture through Dev’s descriptions was a stunning recognition both of disability and how love can adapt in meaningful ways. It is no surprise that the baker, after listening to Dev detail the colouring of the cake to Eva, refuses payment, telling Dev that her description was “too beautiful,” referring to it as a “gift” (108).
That sentiment, I think, is well-applied to Suture as a whole. It is, at times, too beautiful; it is, at times, a gift. It is impossible to read Brewer’s debut without feeling something, whether that be a reaction to the graphic scenes of body horror, or to the moving depiction of care. And that is, as Grace opines in an interview with a local high schooler near the end of the novel, the “kindest thing you can do for a person: make them feel” (177). Suture is a novel of feelings, one that moves between extremes to highlight the care that can sometimes be missed in the trauma of contemporary art. For that reason, it is a stunning debut.
KELLY BARON
is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto, where she studies intergenerational trauma and memory in contemporary Canadian women’s novels. She is the publisher of The Puritan and serves on their masthead as a reviews editor.