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(More customer reviews)Review is from Rebecca Wright, an American studying at the University of Toronto
Two women walk into "the splashy bedlam" of a public swimming pool area, then feel the steambath warmth of the chlorinated air come toward them "across the sloshed tiles, in that great booming hall of hygiene." The strawberries that Claire Vornof (the protagonist of Excessive Joy Injures the Heart) hulls are "too hard, white-knuckled at their tips", and her refrigerator is so old that it creaks like a saddle. As for one of her blouses, a pale-green shell made out of shot silk, it "looks as if it's been left out overnight in a frost."
I knew from the imagery in Elisabeth Harvor's Excessive Joy Injures the Heart that I was going to love its language, even though from the write-up on the book jacket I didn't think its story would interest me much. But as it turned out, I got hooked early on: the two central characters (Claire Vornoff and Declan Farrell) were polarized in a way that I found unusual and emotional. And by the time I'd reached the book's end, I had to conclude that Excessive Joy Injures the Heart--the title is from an acupuncture manual listing the effects of various emotions on different organs of the body--tells an incredibly electric and intelligent story, a story that also "dares to ask disquieting questions about the nature of attraction, about the responsibility for it, and the complicity necessary for two human bodies to hover, be lured, and to connect," as one of the review excerpts puts it. Even the book jacket (which was mostly pretty sappy) is absolutely right when it says that the novel is alert to the pathos of love's ambiguities.
The writing has a whole lot of momentum too, and is really original and memorable. Harvor is a writer who really seems to understand both tragedy and tenderness, but she can also be incredibly funny. There's a scene with a naturopath by the name of Mr. Spaulding that made me laugh out loud. And so did the scene describing Mitchell Kinkaid giving Claire a yoga lesson. I also really admire the way Harvor so honestly and viscerally evokes the sights and smells of the real world, as in the scene with Mitchell where Claire hasn't changed since she got home from her job (at a medical clinic) and is afraid she might be smelling a "little too sour and female. Or at the very least of a medical scent from the disinfectant at work." Or this: "The aroma of fried bananas and the crash of surfy music--surf, and some kind of tinkling, imitation Bach" that greets Claire and Tony O'Bois as they come into a vegetarian restaurant. And then there are all those other scenes that just took my breath away: a weirdly scary scene in which two men in black caps and black windbreakers skate with their black dogs on a neighborhood pond well after midnight; a scene in a theater where a theatre balcony is described as "vertigo country, and how like a precipice a theater balcony is (don't wear high heels, don't lose your balance)..."And one last thing to mention: The way that both the opening and final sentences of the novel begin with the word "Because." In fact, these "becauses" seem to symbolize the way all the questions that arise from all the human (but not necessarily wise) things that Claire Vornoff does could also be answered with that single word "Because". And so why should you read this deep and unforgettable novel? Because!
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