Sex and love and cloud-gazing: Marta Balcewicz’ debut novel ‘Big Shadow’

Authors depicting the inner revolutions of boredom run the danger of exposing readers to unbearable levels of monotony. Toronto writer Marta Balcewicz’s debut novel “Big Shadow” explores teenage apathy in detail, but avoids this all too common problem by infusing the book with charming doses of quaintness and naïveté.

Judy is an artistic and impressionable seventeen-year-old about to start her first semester at a post-secondary institution. Her only pastime during the summer of 1998 is monitoring the movement of clouds with her cousin Christopher and his imperious friend Alex. Alex believes they are on the cusp of witnessing some kind of metaphysical event in the sky called the “Big Shadow” — Alex does not say exactly what this will entail, though at one point the possibility of being transported to another planet is mentioned. Judy is freed from the poisonously frivolously uneventful activity of cloud-gazing after a chance meeting with 1970s New York City punk icon Maurice Blunt — a man thirty years her senior who affords her the ability to break away from her uninspired surroundings.

Blunt is visiting lecturer teaching a university seminar centred around his middling poetry career, but the class has attracted music aficionados who remember his time spent in the cult band the Sateelites. They meet when, while visiting her future campus one afternoon, Judy is caught in the rain and takes shelter in the same spot that Blunt is hiding. For reasons yet to be made clear, Blunt extends an invitation to Judy to audit the course; before long, their friendship takes on a romantic and sexual dimension.

Blunt begins cajoling Judy to sleep on his couch hundreds of miles away in New York, never once asking how an unemployed minor can raise funds for airfare (Judy steals the money). With cash in hand and this first moral transgression serving as a taste of independence and adulthood, Judy finds herself going to studio sessions and being asked to film the Sateelites’ planned reunion tour as a videographer; she becomes awkwardly positioned between disgust and enchantment as the middle-aged rocker showers her with unconditional affection.

“I understood there was a two-sidedness required of him and all somewhat-famous figures,” Judy muses with teenage sangfroid, “and that I should take it as a compliment that I was getting the real Maurice, while the world got … the dry pit of the fruit I was getting to savour.”

This sense of ownership over Maurice is an exercise in rebellion for Judy, who begins to imagine Maurice might be the Big Shadow she has been waiting for all along (he redefines the known limits of her life and rescues her from a humdrum existence, after all). The impropriety of her relationship is not evident to Judy at first, but Balcewicz writes about this dawning realization with a compassionate and subtle believability.

Judy’s uncertainty over the meaning of the word “commendable” during a conversation with Maurice is a moment of startling power, bringing both her callowness and the musician’s desire for her companionship into relief. “I wondered if I’d have to have sex with him one day,” she thinks to herself without a trace of irony, “if that was simply how adults behaved, and if so, whether sex always meant something important or if it could be only two bodies kissing in the faintest of ways, too faint to commit to memory even.”

The period just before adulthood is defined by a sense of fatefulness — the impression that life is finally about to get started. The ability to seize on this feeling is the advantage of youth, and acquires a kind of life-giving quality to those who no longer possess it. Judy and Maurice’s relationship is defined by this dynamic, and it is hardly surprising that the only possible outcomes of this imbalance are twinges of regret and the “stench of human decimation.”

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