Out of Mind, David Bergen (Fredericton: Goose Lane Editions, 2021)
More than 10 years after the publication of The Matter with Morris (2010), David Bergen has revisited the characters from that slender novel to create a slender companion, Out of Mind. Taken together, the two novels offers us a single substantial portrait of middle-class life in the early 21st century. Out of Mind is not a Covid-19 novel (presumably Bergen had completed it immediately before the WHO declared Covid-19 a global pandemic); nevertheless, his novel touches on concerns—most notably our relative lack of control over the circumstances that most affect us—that daily prod us as we try our best to navigate the vicissitudes of life in our current public health crisis.
As the title of the earlier novel suggests, the focus there was upon Morris, Morris Schutt, a middle-aged Winnipeg-based journalist whose life was coming apart at the seams largely in response to the fact that his son had been killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan. This time around, Bergen directs his gaze at Lucille, the ex-wife psychiatrist who earns more than her ex-husband and despises him because he uses that fact to reverse the customary flow of settlement payments while making profligate expenditures (sports car, escort services) and thumbing his nose at her parsimony.
Morris does not appear in Out of Mind except as the addressee of a couple notes and the subject of some bitter memories. Instead, Bergen turns our attention to the relationship between Lucille and their youngest daughter, Libby. In response to a somewhat cryptic request for money, tampons, and underwear, Lucille flies to Thailand where her daughter has fallen in with a charismatic young man named Shane who has drawn a coterie of vulnerable young women around him. It is unsurprising that Libby has joined what is effectively a cult; she is, after all, the daughter who, in The Matter with Morris, took up with a much older professor. She appears to follow a well established pattern of behaviour.
Like most men his age, Shane’s motivations are transparent enough, but he rationalizes them with the same infuriating, self-serving, tautological nonsense we’ve grown accustomed to in this age of anti-vaxx white supremacist true believers. As a psychiatrist, Lucille has the analytic tools to pierce Shane’s made-up therapy-speak, but she’s not unaffected. She had been offered a squalid little room in their compound, but she realizes she can’t stay there and so checks into a squalid little room in a nearby motel. She has no idea what to do. She sits by the swimming pool, she drinks cheap wine, she bides her time.
Lucille invites Libby to join her at an island resort off the coast of Phuket. Libby agrees to come, but cautions that it will change nothing. What follows is something of a clinic on how to engage someone who has been manipulated by a cultic figure. Again, this appears transferable to our own odd times. The answer is: you don’t. You certainly don’t engage them on their own terms. The best you can do is be present to them. Demonstrate that you are aware of the sources of pain that drive their needs. Making yourself available to such a person can be extraordinarily difficult because it seems so ineffectual; modest shows of love seem pointless in the face of a demagogue’s overwhelming presence.
During their time near Phuket, Libby stays out most of the night, probably having sex with a young man who is clean but indifferent. Perhaps deliberately, Libby makes it obvious that Lucille is utterly powerless. Even the elements conspire to underscore the point. On the boat ride out to the resort, a squall comes up and nearly swamps the boat. Lucille has been fussing because the boat is too small for the number of passengers and is ill-equipped to handle the very emergency which comes to pass. The boat survives the ordeal, which affirms everyone else’s nonchalance. But to a middle-aged woman who has enjoyed a certain measure of lived experience, the promise of another day is not something to be assumed.
Bergen is almost Dickensian in the way he draws his principal character through a gauntlet of lessons. As if led by the ghost of powerlessness-yet-to-come, Lucille suffers a final and humbling demonstration of how little control she exerts over her own circumstances. She returns home from Thailand by way of France where she is to attend a wedding, but on the train from Paris she falls victim to a grift and her purse is stolen. She loses her ID, passport, cash, cellphone, credit cards. Although this scenario could entail a severe loss of dignity, it doesn’t get the best of Lucille. Dignity does not reside in a few personal items, but emerges from her response. As one would expect in a novel about power, Bergen resists the temptation to exercise authorial power and draw the narrative to a neat resolution. Instead, the final page leaves matters open ended. Even so, we suspect Lucille will be okay, her dignity more or less intact.