Review: So Many Beats of the Heart, Carrie Cox
Carrie Cox is a West Australian journalist and author of two nonfiction books, the Fremantle Press fiction debut Afternoons with Harvey Beam, about a washed-up talkback host, and an excellent essay in the recent collection Women of a Certain Rage, also from Fremantle Press.
Her second novel, this time from Affirm Press, is about Evie Shine, a marriage counsellor who retreats into the relative safe zone of university teaching after a shock abandonment by her own husband Hamish.
He betrayed not only Evie by disappearing, but their teenage son Angus, and the novel opens with these two, paralysed by loss and confusion and left alone together to get on as best they can.
Evie tries to rebuild. She makes new friends, including the hilarious Ronni, who forces her to fumble in the general direction of dating. But the continued absence of communication or explanation from Hamish, or indication of how they will settle their affairs, keeps her wounds open.
Evie rakes over the stories of couples she counselled in the past: searching for patterns, missed red flags, meanings to make, giving glimpses inside ordinary relationships and how they fail. These are fascinating and funny enough not to slow the story down, but I did find one – the perspective of one patient who later reappears in the form of a letter to Evie – had dialogue and writing a bit too lyrical to ring true as natural speech. It covered important thematic ground, but might have been better represented in narration.
But this was the only criticism I can find for this warm, sensitive and precise novel. Cox never sacrifices the complexity of the human heart for the sake of a tidy narrative, and allows Evie the introspection she needs, and yet she never allows the pace to flag. She manages to be relentlessly humorous and yet deeply sympathetic.
Our culture is awash with tales in which love stories end triumphantly at the altar. Cox rebels against this, examining marriages look like after ten years, the parenting of young adults, the terror of midlife dating.
A few highbrow literary fiction authors deal with the inner lives of women in and beyond middle age – Elizabeth Strout, Charlotte Wood and even Jonathan Franzen come to mind – but precious few are providing smart, accessible mainstream fiction in this vein. Cox tills fertile fictional soil here and deserves to rule the niche – she is one hell of a writer.
And given it’s Love to Read Local week, you can be assured that it’s a highly appropriate book to buy right now!