Book Review: Falling

Evidently, Anne Simpson has a thing for downward trajectory. As the judges noted when they gave her the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2004, “Images of falling recur in [her] poetry with disturbing frequency.” Similar tumbles occur throughout her new novel, which explores a series of small descents in her grief-torn characters’ lives.

Falling opens with a finely sketched set piece. Teenage Lisa crashes an atv on a beach and, pinned under it, drowns in mere inches of water. She is found a moment too late by her brother, Damian, who had been taking a nap. Tragic background established, the action resumes a year later as Damian and Ingrid, the children’s mother, travel to Niagara Falls to scatter Lisa’s ashes. They’re also there to see Roger, Ingrid’s brother, a now-blind former daredevil who’s been over the Falls twice himself, and Elvis, his retarded son, whose Shania Twain pillow and preternatural memory for birth data fail to give his character a much-needed third dimension. One night Elvis runs away, and Damian finds him in front of a tattoo parlour. Looking in from the street, Damian happens to see Jasmine, a pretty Saskatchewan drifter with whom he is immediately taken. After some light stalking, he meets her, woos her, and wrongs her, and things begin, well, falling apart.

For all the book’s issues, chief among them a sometimes-unsuccessful attempt to play the past off the present in constant counterpoint, it still works, largely because of Simpson’s poetic language and gift for metaphor. In her hands, a bird’s wings are “an open pair of scissors against the blue”; dead irises are flattened “like purple-brown cavalry fallen on the long grass”; and Bach’s English Suites sound “clear and concise, yet sprightly too, like a curled fiddlehead.”

Two-thirds of the way through the story, there’s a crystalline eight-page passage that hurtles across the country alongside Damian. In structure and style, the section is more prose poem than novel. It serves as a plot-advancing crutch, but also as a reminder that Falling’s best moments veer into verse.