Review by Bonnie ZoBell

 

echolocation

The women in Myfanwy Collins’ breath-taking debut novel haven’t had an easy time of it. In Echolocation, published by Engine Books, the beautiful and haunting Geneva loses an arm when a saw kicks back and cuts through her forearm. She lives only because of her tenacity; despite the gushing blood, despite being in shock, she ties a tourniquet with her teeth, rushes to the truck, and drives, at least until she runs out of gas. Then an unusual man riding his ATV, a mysterious man deftly characterized soon enough, discovers her on the road and gets her to a clinic. Geneva is forever flawed when the arm can’t be saved. Her husband Clint feels so bad that he couldn’t prevent the accident that he goes to the town undertaker and buys a top-of-the-line baby casket for the arm, “white, silver-handled, with pink silk interior.” They proceed to have a graveside service led by Father O’Connor. And, yes, with her stunning use of language and her literary prowess with the grotesque, Myfanwy should definitely be compared to Flannery.

As girls, Geneva and Cheri’s life together is as intertwined and mostly fun-loving as sisters. They’re raised by Auntie Marie in a “border town state in upstate New York, seven miles from Canada.” The area is home for adults waiting to die and youngsters waiting to leave. “Auntie Marie owned a store-cum-gas station.” When Geneva marries Clint, all Cheri can say is, “He’s a pig,” and immediately the girls stop being so congenial. Cheri gets herself out of Dodge and goes on with her life, such as it is, sleeping with drunkards and generally not taking care of herself.

Auntie Marie is dying, so the girls are returning home to the only mother figure they’ve ever known, though Marie is neither Geneva’s nor Cheri’s birth mother. Geneva was a foster child placed with Auntie Marie, a foster child whose parents seemingly forgot to come back and get her. Cheri’s mother, Renee, left her baby girl with Auntie Marie and ran off with her newest boyfriend at the time to Florida. When Renee doesn’t come back, Auntie suggests it’ll be good for Cheri to stay on so she can finish her school year. When the years continue to creep by and Cheri’s mother still doesn’t return and no one mentions a thing about it, Cheri figures she’ll be staying on permanently.

It is a testament to Myfanwy Collins’ well-known lyricism, the depth of her characters and plot, that she is able so artfully to bring together these lives, the past, the present, and hints of the future of these three women who have been given so little to start out with in the way of love and intimacy.

And this isn’t even including the misfit men who work their way into this quirky tale. There’s the new man in one-armed Geneva’s life that so idealizes her he’ll kill. Cheri’s mother Renee turns up out of nowhere with her newest new man in her life, one so chilling and violent you can’t stop reading because you want to find out whether what he ends up doing is not irreversible.

Can these women live in the same house together again? Will Auntie Marie make it? What happens when yet another baby girl without parents arrives at the house with a strange new mother figure?

Lucky you, if you haven’t read this book yet! What a beautiful story you have ahead of you!

Find out where you can buy Myfanwy Collins’ disquieting and soulful new novel on her website—here.