Clara Callan

Categories: Rediscoveries , Staff Picks , Fiction

I was talking about Richard B. Wright's 2002 Clara Callan with someone yesterday and realized I have never blogged it.  It's a gorgeous book, an absolutely transporting work of fiction, so here you go:

The title character is the older of two sisters, small-town Canadian girls in the 1930s.  Clara is a schoolteacher, living alone now that her father has died and now that her sister, Nora, has gone off to New York to work in radio.  Her story and Nora's are told through the letters they exchange and through Clara's diary entries. 

Compared to Nora's bit of glamor, Clara's life is very uneventful.  She reads, plays the piano, and writes a little poetry, but she burns that because it doesn't come up to her standards.  She struggles quietly with a sudden disillusionment about her faith and (slightly less quietly) with the cranky coal-burning furnace her father used to tend.

But this isn't a tidy little book.  Something shattering happens to Clara that irrevocably changes her life. 

I won't tell you more of the plot.  But if you love a book where the characters seem absolutely real, you should try this.  The delicacy with which Wright portrays a reticent, intelligent woman coping alone with both everyday life and crisis is extraordinary.  Balancing two forms of narrative, letters and diary entries, he creates a marvelously subtle character study, so if you're a reader who likes to watch an author accomplish something difficult, you'll like this, too.

The book is also a wonderful time capsule of pre-war life both in provincial Canada and in bustling New York.  Nora's big city adventures are equally appealing. 

This is one to settle in with and read as slowly as possible.