- Between You & Me, by Joanna Horton. Ultimo Press, $34.99
Between You & Me is Joanna Horton's first novel, and it begins - like many classic tales - when "girl meets boy". But in this story the 'girl" is plural: Mari and Elisabeth are young women with "aggressively useless" degrees, wry takes on modern life, and complex vocabularies for emotional experience. The "boy", meanwhile, is singular. Handsome Jack, academic historian, is affluent and 40-something.
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Horton is a sociologist, and this modern story of female friendship and desire is suffused with a self-aware, sophisticated, hyper-articulate tone I associate with academia. And the careful way Horton delineates the worlds of the protagonists - worlds which consist mostly of the other protagonists and the content of their minds - made me think of constellations.
Looking at the Big Dipper, or another familiar constellation, what you see are stars, dotted on the night sky. The lines between the stars - bending the handle of the dipper, connecting Orion's shoulders - are imaginary; things you've seen in illustrations and which your mind now projects upwards. The result - at least for me - is that those lines are there, stretching across the gaps.
In this metaphor, Mari, Elisabeth, and Jack are stars. In Between You & Me Horton has drawn them - clear, real, sparkling - onto a blank sky. Between them, their relationships create a constellation. But like the lines in the sky, these relationships are projections, illusions - blink, and they're reconfigured. The reconfiguring is part of the point of the novel. The first section spans less than 12 months, the last five years - and in that time, everything and nothing has changed.
Seen from your backyard, the stars seem arranged on the same plane, on the surface of the sky. But to actually get from one star to another you must traverse not only the distance across the sky, but also the depth, travelling farther or nearer. Similarly, Jack, Mari, and Elisabeth might think they are coming together, moving apart, on the same flat page. Instead, more often than not, there are still several dimensions separating them. "You've always been a bit of a mystery to me," says one character to another. "Even when we were together, I usually had no idea what you were thinking." The listener is surprised. The reader, too, but it resonates with the feeling of reading this spare, evocative novel.
Its blurb uses words like "detonate", "fallout" and "immense power" - words which describe the novel as well as they describe the stars. The explosions are definitely there, but the distance leaves us with only beauty. Please forgive the extended metaphor. It's the language of this nuanced novel that did it - after all, the constellations are there even during the day. Just like that, Between You & Me lingers in my mind.
