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From Amazon
Sandra Birdsell's award-winning novel The Chrome Suite tells the story of Amy Barber, who, after growing up in small-town Manitoba in the 1950s, flees to Winnipeg and an unsatisfying marriage before breaking out into a career as a successful screenwriter and filmmaker. However, Amy's career path is fraught with ennui and loss, and the latest tragedy to befall her only underlines her life's emptiness and fragility. There are certainly some fine passages in The Chrome Suite, and its early chapters are absorbing and well-constructed. The most striking turn has the main character struck by lightning: "And then I remember clearly how the air in front of me suddenly quivered.... I felt myself falling backwards, and in the final dim split-second of consciousness, I remember hearing voices." Unfortunately this epiphany comes at the beginning of the story, and the author doesn't really give the protagonist anywhere to go or do that can compare. The evocation of the '50s is mostly cartoon kitsch (hence the chrome kitchen suite of the title), and the plot and general ambience bear a remarkable resemblance to that of Margaret Laurence's The Diviners but without that novel's humanity. Amy Barber, a figure at once self-pitying and mean-spirited, cannot generate the empathy we feel for Morag in Laurence's epic tale. The Chrome Suite is an interesting read, but it stands as an artifact of the trendy nihilism of the early '90s rather than a great novel, and its author has mercifully moved on to better things (as in The Russländer). --Robyn Gillam
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