“The Fire-Dwellers”, by Margaret Laurence

Laurence, Margaret. The Fire Dwellers. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1969. Print.

Sometime in September I realized that I had accidentally stopped reading fiction, and that I didn’t like not having a book by my bedside table to pick up at night.  (Non-fiction is no good for bedtime reading for me).  This was somewhere in my recommendations from LibraryThing, and I liked the idea of working my way through Laurence again.

I don’t know why I didn’t start at the beginning of her works, but perhaps I just took what was recommended.  In any case I think it’s quite possible that I had not read this book before.  Stacey MacAindra is a married mother of four in the 1960s, with a nice house and family and a hard-working husband.  Once I got used to the style of the book, where Laurence uses different formatting to interweave Stacey’s thoughts and flashbacks into the narration and conversation, I was drawn in to her life.  Once when I put the book down to turn out the light I commented to my husband that it was making me grateful for my life; Laurence so accurately and powerfully portrays the pain of the tiny, almost invisible hurts of a mid-century housewife.

Although there is drama on the periphery of the story, it’s not the focus.  What’s left unexplained didn’t bother me the way it does in other books; I think that’s Laurence’s genius.  The afterword of this edition, by Sylvia Fraser, is also excellent and worth reading.  Fraser quotes reviews of the book from when it came out (a particular unflattering one from a male CBC reviewer) and compares his predictions of the life of the book to its actual history.  Although it may have been denigrated by some for not having bigger or weightier subject matter, I agree with Fraser that the interior life of ordinary people is worthwhile material.