Keep
For the central trio in Jenny Haysom’s astute and appealing novel Keep, held and released secrets and possessions threaten to disrupt the course of life.
Harriet, a poet in her eighties, is slipping into dementia. Her son insists that it’s time for her to leave her overstuffed Ottawa house and move into a nursing home. Despite her resistance, he hires a real estate agent to prepare the property for sale. Eleanor and Jacob, brought in to clear the home and stage it for photographs, deal with relationship complications of their own.
Midlife changes and money shortages force difficult decisions on Eleanor, her English professor husband, and their three daughters. And Eleanor worries about becoming invisible as she ages: “If this last chapter of her life had a theme, it would be erasure.” When Eleanor’s middle child gets her first period and Eleanor has a pregnancy scare, the archetypal divisions between maiden, mother, and crone are blurred.
Meanwhile, Jacob is a gay architecture student whose partner, Yves, is cheating on him. With nowhere else to go, he shelters at Harriet’s. The job prompts him and Eleanor to ponder what is worth salvaging. The more they sift through the old woman’s belongings—including a trove of poems that she wrote after her daughter’s death but never published—the more they both determine to shed what’s holding them back.
The novel contrasts hoarding and generosity, remembering and letting go. It also raises the moral issue of preservation versus progress via the possibility of Harriet’s home being torn down to build a condominium complex. Underneath that is a deeper question of ownership, represented by the graffiti “You are all on traditional unceded Algonquin territory.”
Keep is a compassionate novel in which three people learn that history and memory are “fluent and fallible.”
Reviewed by
Rebecca Foster
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the publisher for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
