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This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance!

Review

This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance!

With this novel, Jonathan Evison has tackled a character not many male authors would dare or care to take on. Harriet Chance, a 78-year-old recent widower living in Sequim, Washington, is surprised to discover a ticket for two for a cruise to Alaska. Her husband, Bernard, was not exactly a risk taker, she thinks. She doesn’t like to travel, and he knew that. But after his difficult death, she welcomes the chance to honor the memory of the man he was before dementia made him impossible to live with. She asks her best friend, Mildred, to go with her, but before they leave, Mildred begs off and gives her a letter to be read only after she boards the ship. 

Harriet is somewhat estranged from her wayward daughter, Caroline. They both know that the firstborn Skip is the apple of Harriet’s eye. Still, it is Caroline who drives her north to the embarkation point of the cruise and then shows up later on board. By this time, we have learned quite a bit about Harriet through short chapter-length flashbacks to different points throughout her life.

"Evison’s sly humor and eye for detail keep us turning the pages.... Amusing as it is at times, THIS IS YOUR LIFE, HARRIET CHANCE! is actually very ambitious, and it succeeds."

We know that she was once an ambitious young woman when “ambitious” and “woman” were non-sequiturs, the cherished daughter of a successful lawyer, and that her self-esteem is low. Bernard was a building superintendent at the law office where she copied memos and filed briefs, and older than her by 12 years, but part of Harriet longed for a Christmas hearth draped with stockings and a conventional life as a wife and mother. We know that she was a quiet child, fed by Karo syrup-sweetened baby bottles and then admonished by her mother for being tubby. We know that a younger lawyer named Charlie Fitzsimmons in her father’s firm took a strong (and suspicious) interest in her, even as a young girl.

We see her at age 19, at age one, at age 49, at age 38. Each chapter is dated, and Harriet’s age is given, to help the reader keep it all straight. “Yes, yes, we’re all over the place again, pinballing across the decades, slinging and bumping our way through the days of your life, seemingly at random.” These flashback chapters sneakily reveal more and more of what makes Harriet Harriet, a bit at a time, and they pose questions that keep us engaged in the story of this querulous, rather sad and ridiculous old lady on a cruise. There’s even a sweet and inventive subplot of Bernard in the afterlife being chastised by his superior for continuing to visit Harriet, while Harriet’s encounters with Bernard’s ghost have convinced her priest and her children that she’s losing it.

Evison’s sly humor and eye for detail keep us turning the pages. “The relative dryness of the banana belt, sheltered as it was by the rain shadow, had been the decisive selling point, when shortly after his retirement from Blum Bearing in ’88, Bernard made the mutual decision that they were leaving the city for the peninsula.” And yet, behind the slapstick scenes (a drunken Harriet wrestling with king crab legs on board the ship) and despite the hectoring tone of some of the flashback chapters, Evison’s genuine sympathy and admiration for Harriet show through. The story takes some dark turns towards the end. By then we are thoroughly hooked and moved.

Amusing as it is at times, THIS IS YOUR LIFE, HARRIET CHANCE! is actually very ambitious, and it succeeds.

Reviewed by Eileen Zimmerman Nicol on September 24, 2015

This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance!
by Jonathan Evison

  • Publication Date: May 31, 2016
  • Genres: Fiction
  • Paperback: 320 pages
  • Publisher: Algonquin Books
  • ISBN-10: 1616206012
  • ISBN-13: 9781616206017