- - Published by The Link, January 13 2009
http://www.thelinknewspaper.ca/articles/727 - -
Checkout Girl visits Ontario in the 1970s
The year is 1970, and the times they are a changing, as Bob Dylan said. And, for better or for worse, as the local industry struggles to keep its head above water, Varnum, Ontario is trying to adjust to the changing pace of the modern world.
University professors now buy LSD, middle-aged housewives have become hardcore feminists, and yet pregnant women still have to find a way to go to Montreal to get abortions.
The Checkout Girl is a realist novel, punchy and tender, where nothing is black or white, where disenchantment and pugnacity meet and mix. It is about acknowledging raw pleasures such as eating too many candies or spinning on a skating rink with a child in one’s arms. It also deals with the silent hopes and unbearable longing of the youth for something hard to define, something new, something different.
Kathy Rausch has just come back to her native province after an unsatisfying commune experience in Vancouver. The 20-year-old checkout girl has no goals, no ambition… Except for an impossible dream. She wants to make her living on the ice, and not as a figure skater, but like Bobby Orr, her idol, the kid from Varnum who is now playing for the Boston Bruins.
Skating like a man has never helped any woman Kathy knows find a job before, but there has to be a way to get a future on the ice, and Kathy waits for it to be revealed to her. How would she keep faith in herself if she gave up her dream? How would she stand sharing her room with a boa constrictor in the basement of a drug dealer’s house, deal with her caring mother's concerns or bear the prevailing sexual pressure?
Skating is central to Kathy’s life—it helps her connect with her autistic younger sister. Skating is her way to let the steam out and just feeling her skates slide and grind on the ice gives her back a sense of humour. It is also a tribute to her father, a hockey fan, who died when she was a child. It can even be a cure against the most traumatic events of life.
Susan Zettell has already written about hockey and industrial Ontario in her short story collections. With The Checkout Girl, her first novel, she offers an uncompromising portrait of the beginning of the 1970s and paints stroke by stroke the crudeness, disillusions and small conquests of daily life.
