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Marina Endicott
Good to a Fault A minor fender bender becomes the catalyst for a major life change when Clara Purdy accidentally rams into another car. Up until then, Clara’s quiet life has been spent living on in her parents’ home after their deaths and going out to work as an insurance investigator. Although no one is seriously injured in the accident, it is immediately apparent that there is something wrong with the mother, requiring her hospitalization. When Clara learns that the family has been living in their car, her sense of responsibility motivates her to invite them to move in with her. After the hapless father decamps with some of Clara’s belongings and her mother’s old car, Clara is left to care for the rest of the family. This opens up her life in ways she could never have imagined. This deeply moving story will leave you caring about all of these characters long after the last page has been turned. Reviews of Good to a Fault Good Samaritan finds herself with an instant family
Endicott explores the notion through one of the more endearing characters to appear in recent years on the Canadian literary landscape. Clara Purdy is fortyish, single (after a failed youthful marriage), an employee in a small Saskatoon insurance company. Although briefly independent, she returned home years before to care for her dying father, then nursed her mother to the grave. She finds herself alone in midlife, without apparent focus, confused and faintly repulsed by the need she sees everywhere she looks. All of this changes abruptly when Clara makes an ill-advised left turn and runs into a car overflowing with a family en route to Fort McMurray to find work. The parents, three children and grandmother have been living in their Dodge Dart, which Clara totals in the accident. No one is seriously injured except for the mother, Lorraine, who, it is discovered at the hospital, is suffering from advanced cancer. Clara knows what she has to do: She takes the homeless family into her house.
You can see where this is going, which isn't a bad thing. It gives the reader time to think about how far they might go in Clara's place. Doing homework with the kids, setting up music lessons, dental appointments, making Valentines, cuddling them in her bed, taking on a wounded lover who yearns for a family, too: Where exactly does she cross the line from being generous to taking possession of these people's lives, shaping them into a vision all her own? Endicott's background in theatre, as both actor and director, are evident in the brisk pacing of the novel, the complex unfolding of plot and character. The writing is undoubtedly assured, and though the subject is weighty, the prose is leavened with a gentle, loving humour. Anyone with kids, or anyone who has ever been to a grocery store, for that matter, will relish the scene of Clara's first trip food shopping with three treat-driven children and a kleptomaniac grandmother. If there is a fault to all this goodness, it is that the book ties up the various plotlines just a little too neatly. There is a pat feeling to the end, all the right foreshadows pencilled in so that the reader will envision what happens beyond the last page.
If an insurance agent causes a car accident, what’s her liability? At first blush, it sounds like a bad joke. Yet it’s this question of liability and damages – automotive, spiritual, and otherwise – that drives Marina Endicott’s warm and witty second novel. One day, disappointed, middle-aged Clara Purdy takes a dreamy turn in her car and ends up plowing into the lives of the Gage family. Two parents, three kids, and one cranky grandmother are heading from one no-luck town to the next when Clara totals their vehicle/home on a Saskatoon road. Everyone emerges alive and mostly unhurt, but no sooner are they all checked into the hospital than young mom Lorraine is diagnosed with late-stage lymphoma. Clara knows she is at fault in the accident, and, in a moment of guilt-saturated compassion, she offers to house the homeless family while Lorraine struggles in the hospital. Soon, the kids’ troubled dad skips town in his host’s car, and Clara’s low-impact, nine-to-five life in the suburbs is transformed into heady, noisy chaos. Childless and parentless, she is initially overwhelmed, but soon begins to welcome the messy intrusion into her quiet bungalow. With her stoic defences at an all-time low, love – for both her instant family and a poetry-loving Anglican priest – barges into Clara’s life. With abundant happiness and tragedy on hand, the story occasionally dips into sentimentality, and it’s more quiet and honest than thrilling or surprising. Nevertheless, Good to a Fault is utterly engaging. With a theatrical sensibility, Endicott, an established playwright and dramaturge, beautifully illuminates the interior lives and stunted interactions of her cast of struggling strangers – all of whom, it turns out, are perfect fits for the mysterious holes in one another’s lives.
Prizes and awards Shortlisted for the 2008 Giller Prize
About the author: Marina Endicott was born in Golden, BC, and grew up in Nova Scotia and Toronto. She worked as an actor and director before moving to London, England, where she began to write fiction. Since returning to Canada in 1984, she has worked as Dramaturge at the Saskatchewan Playwrights Centre and Associate Dramaturge at the Banff Centre’s Playwrights Colony. She now teaches creative writing at the University of Alberta. Marina’s first novel, Open Arms, was nominated for the Amazon/Books In Canada First Novel award in 2002 and serialized on CBC Radio’s Between the Covers. Her stories have been featured in Coming Attractions and shortlisted for both the Journey Prize and the Western Magazine Awards. She’s had three plays produced and her long poem, The Policeman’s Wife, some letters, was shortlisted for the CBC Literary Awards in 2006. She is currently at work on a novel about the Belle Auroras, a sister-trio vaudeville act touring the Canadian prairies in 1909, as well as series of YA novels called Time in Hand.
Canadian writer Marina Endicott's debut novel, Open Arms, is a story about the relationships between several generations of women in an artistic but troubled family. Bessie Smith Connolly, who narrates the story, was raised in Nova Scotia by her grandparents after her poet father Patrick abandoned her and her rock-singer mother Isabel, who subsequently lost custody of Bessie after being arrested on a drug charge. At seventeen, following a breakup with her boyfriend Daniel and the death of her beloved grandfather, Bessie goes to Saskatchewan to be with her mother. Isabel is now supporting herself by delivering newspapers and is living with Patrick's second wife, Katherine, and Irene, Bessie's half sister. Bessie and Irene then visit their father, who is staying on an island off the coast of British Columbia with his third wife, Doreen, who is pregnant with twins. About to become a mother herself, Bessie goes in search of Isabel, who has gone missing with her latest lover. She is accompanied by her grandmother, Elizabeth, an aristocratic woman who searches small-town motels and bars with her as they cross the badlands of Alberta. The trip ultimately provides Bessie with insight about her family and herself. Trevor Klassen interviewed the novelist for ffwd online and asked Endicott about her inspiration for the book. Emphasizing that she did not draw on her own family background, Endicott explained that while working with a group of writers and artists, she noticed that "they wanted a glamorous life and to have children. They expected their children to do all the adapting--and I was indignant for the children's sake." She went on to add, "I started the book from anger . . . but over the last two years of writing I became less self-righteous. People are mostly trying to do the best they can." Klassen wrote of the novel that "in the end, women tell the story of womanhood, which, asserts Endicott, isn't the airy-fairy crap of the worst of spirituality, but practical emotional and tangible guides to maturing and living well."
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