Barbara Lambert, Wanda
In my previous life, as an academic researcher on 18th-century British literature, I sometimes joked that it was convenient that my writers weren't still productive and evolving: dead men tell no tales (although forensics says differently and there's always something else to learn about someone), so none of my authors were going to "well, actually" my reading of their work.
Now that I mostly teach and read more contemporary work, I've gotten over that particular anxiety. I'm still anxious when I'm critiquing writers' work, but people can disagree with each other, and critics/reviewers don't have any right to defensiveness when (structurally speaking) writers have no choice but to be exposed through their work.
Reading Barbara Lambert's allusive, tight novella Wanda brought back all this to me. Although I meant to read Wanda in 2021 when it first came out, life intervened, so I didn't, and then Barbara Lambert passed away that very same year (on my birthday, as it happens).
Nobody* reads long reviews closely, so let's get a capsule review out of the way. In merely 130 pages, and honestly it's only as long as that because its editors have used white space between its paragraphs and sections generously (and to excellent effect), in Wanda Barbara Lambert implies from a few weeks in a little girl's summer the whole life of a woman who has lived the next 80 years, even while telling us nothing whatever about those succeeding decades.
The Okanagan before Pearl Harbor; racial and national prejudice; children's perceptions of sexuality; the role of art in the world; the relation between art and labour: I don't care whether you want to think about these things or not, but if you reward yourself by choosing to read Wanda, that's what you'll get, and your world will open up.
The character whose inner life we experience in Wanda, unexpectedly for me, isn't the titular Wanda at all, but Eva. The novel opens with Eva and her granddaughter pausing to look at a portrait that Eva's mother had painted of her 80 years before, hanging on the living-room wall of the log house where Eva seems to have lived virtually her entire life. Eva speaks elliptically of the picture to her granddaughter, of the secrets it carries and the fraught moment during which is was painted, and Sammie probes gently for more, but (as is sometimes the case with grandparents after dinner) Eva drifts off to sleep in her chair.
The remaining 125 pages belong to the 5- or 6-year-old Eva, and to the first days of friendship and communion with her unpredictable, indomitable, complicated new friend Wanda before (as the novella's first page promises) "the incident," "the occurrence" (p9, p11). This painting was done by Eva's mother a week after this incident to which the novel inexorably builds, depicting a girl with "her secrets and hurts... [who] will never, quite, be able to tell the truth" (p12).
Eva and her German family are living outside Penticton in the early days of World War 2, mostly isolated in the usual way of farm folk but additionally so given not just the long-standing prejudice of settler Canadians for different settler Canadians but also the wartime context of German aggression in Europe. Into this life, somehow, into the home of the WW1 veteran across the road, drops Wanda, representing among other things a form of Britishness unlike any Eva has seen before.
And I don't think I know of a character in fiction who's a precise parallel to either Eva or Wanda. Eva is richly, powerfully imagined; these pages are all we get, because fiction, but I'd give anything to know more about her life in those 80 off-page years. Wanda is no less strikingly evoked or individual, but there's no hint at what happens to her after these few weeks; if anything the mystery's more intense with her. Lambert's restraint about these girls' futures is so impressive.
Not quite eight when she appears as a refugee both from the war and from UK family drama, Wanda has seen much more than she should have. This begins with her mother's story of being seduced into pregnancy at 16 and being repeatedly sent away (to her grandmother, to service in the city, and finally to an uncle in British Columbia), and with her mother's schemes to make up for everything that has been done to her.
Eva struggles with Wanda's accent, so different from the stuffy Englishness of the bank manager and his wife (the only English accent Eva has known), but it turns out that this new girl somehow already knows the Okanagan better than does Eva. She knows where to find clay they can use to make objects, where to find stray objects in the land, how to deal with animals, so she's clearly more than she seems: "like a figure in a folk tale," perhaps, as either young or old Eva puts it in describing their first meeting (p14).
The incident, that the book opens by naming without describing? Well.
Sexuality is a strange thing, in general obliquely dealt with by adults who don't know how to talk about it and would rather not, and the minds of children can fasten both on its strangeness and on the mysteries in adults' attitude toward it. Every adult woman in this novel is aware of what men can do to unwilling women, and in particular what many men do to very young girls, and they're fierce about defending each other. Let me reassure you, though, that that's not The Incident. I'm not sure I can say much more without spoilers, so let me say only that when a child's learning about themselves, sometimes that'll spark out into the world and change everything, irrevocably.
Wanda was Barbara Lambert's final book, and I think everyone involved must have been pleased that she got to see it in the world. When I visited my parents in Oliver this spring, I picked up a second copy of Wanda for myself at The Bookshop in Penticton, an autographed copy that gave me evidence of Lambert's own pride and pleasure. Normally I hide my purchase of books that authors have autographed and dedicated to their friends, but this time, I'll make an exception.
Clearly, Barbara Lambert was proud to share this book with her friends, and well should she have been. Its tale echoes longer than its own length says that it should, and I'll be thinking about Eva, Wanda, and their lives for a long time.
A brief note on reviews
As someone who writes reviews myself, I keep their difficulty in mind when reading others' comments. It's not anything like as difficult as writing a thing that deserves to be reviewed, of course, but I'm mindful of the labour, and I'm grateful to these other readers for sharing of themselves with us.
One insightful review of Wanda was written by Debra Lambert for Remembrance Day 2022, and posted on her site Canadian Writers Abroad. Among other things, Martens links Wanda to Lambert's novel Clare, and also discusses some of the novella's minutiae in more detail than I've done.
A brief but thoughtful comment on Wanda was written by Carin Makuz at her site Matilda Magtree, more particularly under its This Is Not a Review section: "An important story, quietly told in 140 pages." (Technically it's 131, because it starts on page 9, which is why I said 130 pages above!)
Now, I'm a big fan of The BC Review, which is indubitably one of the very best possible online sources of information about BC literature and literary culture. This time, though....
First, I was baffled by one element in David Stouck's very complimentary review of Wanda. This review gives away more than I would like, but I recognize that we're not all on the same page about how much a review can reasonably give away. The thing is, Stouck's review is wrong twice about ages. Sure, maybe it's a typo to write "eight years on" rather than "eighty" (quoted from the book's very first page), but the "sweet-natured boy of twelve" mentioned at the review's end was actually precisely the same age as Eva, so either five or six, and his "older brother" mentioned without age was in the book "maybe eight or nine" (p123). They're all still children, sure, but if Stouck's not getting the ages right, I worry that his ruminations about the book aren't grounded in the right soil, so to speak.
Second, Miranda Marini's review of Wanda (in a three-part piece including two other Fish Gotta Swim titles, namely Winter Wren by Theresa Kishkan and Tower by Frances Boyle) gives no hint whatever of the sexuality and sexual exploration that's so central to Eva's self-identity and to the novel's narrative. Marini's right to emphasize the surveillance culture and prejudice inflicted on German settlers in the Okanagan of this time, something that Harold Rhenisch has written movingly about, and she has interesting things to say about that important thread, but the silence about sexuality feels to me more like a deficit than a choice. Marini's a very good writer herself, as in this review/mini-memoir, so I wish I knew what she thought about this other thread.
Again, though: just read the book!
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* Hello, you who read long reviews to the end!
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