We’ve all heard the phrase ‘this book will change your life’. We’re all familiar with the idea that a book can at least guide us on the first steps towards transformation, and there is a certain romantic appeal underlying the premise of the book as a catalytic force. The premise of Ben Schrank’s Love is a Canoe revolves around such a book – a seminal, albeit fictional relationship guide titled Marriage is a Canoe – as well as its readers, and the publishing industry’s attempts to ensure its timelessness. Exploring the terrain of publishing, reading, marriage and sentimental relationships, Love is a Canoe is a humorous and earnest story about how people seek romance in their lives, both real and imagined.
Marriage is a Canoe is a prolific go-to-guide for illuminating advice on maintaining a healthy marriage, based on the author Peter Herman’s observations of his own grandparents’ relationship. Its pages contain mawkish greeting-card-like insights such as ‘Compromise keeps your canoe steady. Compromise and you’ll never go in circles.’
The green yet ambitious editor Stella sees an opportune window to increase public interest in the book – and sales – with the contrivance of a competition in which the winners, a lucky couple, will have the privilege of an afternoon of Herman’s hospitality and wisdom.
Agreeing to the competition hoopla is one thing; however, events in Herman’s life, including his wife’s death, have left him ambivalent about his authorial license. Yet he’s also all too astutely aware that ‘the world loved the idea of a book full of answers to unanswerable questions’ and that Marriage is a Canoe belongs more to his readers than to him.
Emily Babson is one such reader. A pragmatist, a bit of a control freak, not so dreamy (as she herself believes), Emily has had a lifelong connection with Herman’s Canoe wisdom. As a child, she secured a safe house from her own parents’ discord by holing up in the bathroom and consuming his words. Now dealing with a snag in her own marriage, she enters the competition believing her hero might just have the answers to all her confusion and woes.
Love is a Canoe succeeds in melding its examination of two worlds: publishing and romantic relationships. And it does so because Schrank subtly conveys that both are a well-intentioned gamble with passion and promise at their foundation: promise in the sense of a vow taken, whether with partner or reader, as well as in potential. While some of Schrank’s well-crafted publishing jokes (he is the publisher of a Penguin imprint by day) may be lost on readers who are not part of the book business, his depiction of the industry’s romantic leanings makes this world more widely accessible. Stella’s thoughts on the leap of faith contained in her own ambition (‘you have to nurture your passion … You have to look the corporation right in its eye and be unafraid to make enormous mistakes. Because someday you will be so, so right.’) is one such clever illustration.
But Love is a Canoe is not all a happy love-in. It is about the risks and uncertainty of such pursuits, and the delusion of an idyllic one-size-fits-all approach. Schrank’s delineation of characters is the main strength of Love is a Canoe, and allows for such an exploration.
His characters are not wholly likeable but delightfully far from one sided. Human complexity is displayed in the way Herman’s ‘sentimentalism was tightly threaded through his cynicism. Like a barber pole’. Emily’s brand of love can be at once stoic and suffocating; and Stella’s passion can be both endearing and wilful. Schrank’s narrative implies that at every turn in reading and interpreting the written word, it is impossible to unearth definitive kernels of truth. Much like Herman’s finetuning of Marriage is a Canoe with various editions, one’s own interpretation of love and people often needs re-reading and adjusting to match evolving sensibilities that come following loss and other significant events.
Schrank doesn’t take to his subjects in an insufferably serious manner, either. Poignant insights into the fragility of the human condition are balanced out with tenderness, wit, and light cynicism, ensuring an elegantly easy read. There is, however, a slight momentum issue: it takes a tad too long for the separate narratives to converge, and the aftermath is dealt with a bit too quickly and neatly.
Such flaws aside, Love is a Canoe is a heartening tale of readjusting, of finding the right edge and balance when one plunges into a new relationship or a new project, and an engaging account of shaping one’s own story.
Rating: 3½ stars out of 5
Love is a Canoe
By Ben Schrank
Paperback, 352 pp, RRP $29.99
ISBN: 9781922079190
Text Publishing
