I STILL HAVE my first copy of A Jest of God. It is, in fact, the first edition, with a medium-sized format, not very good quality paper, an unprepossessing jacket, maroon background, formal green border, no illustration. I got it for Christmas in 1966, from my parents, who had learned with some apprehension that I wanted to be a writer, and had done their best by giving me a book by one of the few Canadian writers they (or anyone else) knew about at the time. I was a graduate student in English Literature at Harvard University. I read it in one sitting.
I had already read one other novel by Margaret Laurence, The Stone Angel, dropped into my hands by Jane Rule when I was living in Vancouver. It knocked me out, to put it mildly. So when I seized with eagerness on A Jest of God, it was in part to see if a hard act could be followed.
It could. But more of that shortly.
Four months later, I was notified by phone that I had won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry for my first book, The Circle Game, which had been published in the fall. At first I thought this announcement was an error, or a joke. When it turned out to be true, delight set in — I was very broke, and the money would go a long way — and then panic. My wardrobe at the time consisted of tweed skirts, dark-hued cardigans with woolly balls on them, and grey Hush Puppies, all appropriate for female graduate students but hardly suitable for the proposed formal dinner. What would I wear?
Worse, what would I say to Margaret Laurence, who had won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction that year for A Jest of God? I had studied the handsome, austere photograph of her on the inside jacket flap, and had decided that nobody except Simone de Beauvoir would have such power to reduce me to a quaking jelly. I was in awe of her talent, but also I was afraid of her hairdo. This was a serious person, who would make judgements: unfavourable ones, about me. One zap from that intellect and I would be squashed like a bug.
My two Harvard roommates took me in hand. They did not know what the Governor General’s Award was, but they did not want me to disgrace them. They went at me with big rollers and some hair-set and lent me a dress. I’d been adjusting to new contact lenses, and they were adamant about these: into my eyes they must go on the gala evening, no tortoise-shell horn-rims allowed.
The ceremony and then the dinner went on longer than I had expected, and at the end of the first course I began to weep. It was the lenses: I had not yet developed the knack of removing them without a mirror. The two gentlemen from Quebec who flanked me thought I was overcome with emotion, and were solicitous. I sat there in a frenzy of embarrassment, with the tears trickling from my eyes, wondering how soon I could decently make my escape. As soon as the presentation was concluded, I rushed to the washroom like Cinderella fleeing the ball.
Who should be in there but Margaret Laurence? She was in black and gold, but otherwise not at all as anticipated. Instead she was warm, friendly, and sympathetic. Also, she was more of a dithering nervous wreck than I was.
It was a moment worthy of Rachel Cameron, that avatar of social awkwardness and self-conscious embarrassment. Like Rachel, I had made an idiot of myself; like Rachel, too, I got my share of kindness from an unexpected source.
Much as I admire other books by Margaret Laurence, A Jest of God holds a special place for me. Possibly because, when I read it, I was at the right age to appreciate the craft that lay behind its apparent artlessness. A few years earlier and I might have preferred the more obviously artistic, the more overtly experimental. I might have rejected its simplicity of an apple in favour of something more baroque, or — let’s face it — more existential and French.
As it was, I found it an almost perfect book, in that it did what it set out to do, with no gaps and no excesses. Like a pool or a well, it covers a small area but goes down deep. I once heard a Norwegian writer describe the work of another author as “an egg of a book.” A Jest of God, too, is an egg of a book — plain, self-contained, elegant in form, holding within it the essentials of a life.
That life is Rachel Cameron’s, who shares with several of Laurence’s protagonists a Scottish last name and a biblical first name. Her namesake, however, is not the Rachel of the Jacob and Leah saga in Genesis, but that of Jeremiah 31:15: “Rachel weeping for her children refused to be comforted for her children, because they were not.” Like several of Margaret Laurence’s fictions, especially those concerned with the inhabitants of the town of Manawaka, Rachel’s story is told as first-person narration, and is the story of a woman trapped in a prison partly of her own making. But the prison here is smaller and more tightly locked than any of the others. Hagar of The Stone Angel gets to Vancouver, as does Stacey of The Fire-Dwellers; Morag Gunn of The Diviners travels even farther afield, to Toronto and also England. But apart from her trip to the hospital, we never see Rachel anywhere but in her hometown: her break for freedom at the end of the book exists mostly in the future tense. Rachel’s prison is so hard for her to get out of because it is made mostly from virtues gone sour: filial devotion, self-sacrifice, the concern for appearances advocated by St. Paul, a sense of duty, the desire to avoid hurting others, and the wish to be loved. It may be hard for us to remember, now, that Rachel is not some sort of aberration but merely the epitome of what nice girls were once educated to be. To go against such overwhelming social assumptions, to assert instead one’s self, as Rachel finally does, takes more than a little courage and a good deal of desperation. Desperation and courage are the two magnetic poles of this book, which begins with the first and arrives at the second.
The desperation is conveyed by the texture of the prose, the accuracy of the physical details. Rachel’s inner monologue is a little masterpiece in itself, rendered in a language by turns colloquial and flat as prairie speech, terse and ironic as jokes, self-mocking, charged with nervous irritability, and eloquent as psalms. Then there are the entirely believable, entirely minor, entirely horrifying domestic snippets from Rachel’s claustrophobic life with her sweetly nagging hypochondriac of a mother, who plays guilt like a violin: the awfulness of the bridge-night asparagus sandwiches, the rotting, monstrous rubber douche bag Rachel unearths during her feverish brush with sex. Any novelist writing this kind of realism has to get such details right or the whole illusion falls apart. In A Jest of God, Laurence does not put a foot wrong.
Oddly, for a novel about what used to be called a spinster, A Jest of God is structured almost entirely around children, and the flow of time and emotion in and around them; and thus around mothers and mothering, fathers and fathering, and the relationships, often interchangeable, between those who mother and are mothered, those who give and receive nurturing and comfort. Rachel’s false pregnancy is an ambiguous indication of the lesson she comes to learn: how to be a mother, to herself first of all, since true mothering has been denied her.
Rachel Cameron begins as a child, still stuck in the time of the little girls’ skipping chant she hears through her open classroom window, still playing dutiful daughter to a mother who treats her as if she is only half grown. At the age of thirty-four, she arrives at gawky adolescence, agonizing over her appearance and sexuality, going through a painful and unrequited crush. But she ends as an adult, having realized the childishness of her own mother and thus her inability to offer emotional safety, having accepted the risks inherent in being alive, having taken her true place in time: “Beside me sleeps my elderly child. . . . What will happen? What will happen. It may be that my children will always be temporary, never to be held. But so are everyone’s.”
Rereading A Jest of God yet again, I was cheered by how little it has dated. Some of the social customs and sexual constraints may have vanished, but the kinds of expectations placed on women, although in different costume, are still around — perfect physical beauty, total self-confidence, angelic and selfless nurturing of one variety or another. What Rachel can offer us now as readers is something we still need to know: how to acknowledge our own human and necessary limitations, our own foolishness. How to say both No, and Yes.