He is alone. She is alone. They meet each other. They eat meals together. They are nervous. They laugh. They enjoy romance. They begin to trust. They fall in love… And it usually stops there; the typical two-become-one love story endemic to our popular discourse. In his novel, Isobel and Emile, Alan Reed upends the old narrative to create “a story about what comes after a love story.” His sparse prose tugs the reader into two lives forced apart. It fills the pages with an immediacy and irresistible beauty that never flags. In a relentless rhythm of staccato sentences, Reed’s novel plumbs the depth of malaise that radical self-reinvention may create. At once moving and strange, it presents not the heroes of a love story, but the casualties.
Isobel is a young woman left behind in a small town where she clings to the vestiges of her terminated love affair with Emile, a pseudo-artist who builds puppets and films them. She sleeps above a grocery store in Emile’s old room and struggles to start again: “I spent the night sitting on your bed. Your bed. I spent the night drinking it all in, so that I will remember everything.” Emile moves in with an old friend in an unnamed big city where he struggles to express something with his puppets: “The film ends. The theatre is dark…His hands are trembling slightly. He does not want his hands to be trembling. He tries to hold them still.” Reed leads the reader through the twists and turns of the characters’ reinvention, as they struggle to fill the void once filled by the One’s embrace.
Reed manages to convey all this in short, declarative sentences. There are no grandiose epithets of suffering and remorse. The heartbreak is subtle yet deeply felt. Taken individually, the thousands of minute actions Reed describes may appear mundane, but as they collect and merge, their aggregate effect creates a story with immense emotional depth. The characters’ pain sneaks up on you and gets under your skin.
A style as unapologetically modernist as Reed’s also has its downfalls. For readers accustomed to a more conventional narrative voice, his style might feel pretentious. Meaning is always implied and never concretely defined. Short, paratactic sentences like the ones that comprise this book tend to suggest figurative significance, and after several pages of them, the reader is left grasping for their vague symbolism. Also, without the flourish of traditional characterization, the protagonists feel, well, wooden. But in a novel centered on a puppeteer, woodeness makes a strange sense and begins to take on an importance of its own. The novel is best when the reader lets the prose wash over him. The style takes over, and reading it becomes hugely enjoyable.
Although I wouldn’t recommend it as an easy beach-read, Isobel and Emile is a truly unique, compelling, and engrossing book that lingers in the reader’s mind long after the final pages. Reed brings into glaring focus the implications inherent in the love stories on which we so often rely to give our relationships meaning. In doing so, he helps us understand what “being together” can really mean.
Justin Scherer is a writer, critic, and translator based in Montreal.
