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Death & Other Inconveniences

Lesley Crewe

Nimbus, 280 pages, $24.95

In her 13th novel, “Death & Other Inconveniences,” Cape Breton author Lesley Crewe delivers a wicked look at death and its aftermath. A shockingly irreverent obituary opens Crewe’s tale, penned by Margo, widow of Dick. She writes of being “stunned and furious” after finding her husband of 10 years dead in his living room recliner. Dick, a butcher, was watching the Stanley Cup playoffs on TV when he choked on a ham sandwich. Screaming “like some hapless victim in an HBO murder special,” Margo “hightails it across the lawn” to her neighbour’s house, with the news. “Dead. Meat.”

This is death as slapstick comedy, with an unlikeable corpse and an airhead widow. (To be fair, Margo is also a fun and loving grandmother.) Mentally absent after her discovery, she turns over the details — like toning down that obit — to others, notably her accountant daughter Julia and her son Mike, a laid-back “computer genius.” Even her ex-husband Monty (who ended up preferring men) shares the family’s fondly patronizing view of Margo. Her kids agree that their indecisive mother “couldn’t order from a Wendy’s menu.”

Dyed hair and expertly applied makeup belie her age (62), but her tendency to avoid thinking, which she considers “upsetting and totally unnecessary,” doesn’t help her now. Funny how death focuses even the most scattered minds.

The comedy and the fury carry on at the wake. Margo, Julia and Dick’s bitter caricature of an ex-wife, Carole (“the grim weeper”), and distraught daughter Velma get into a shouting match in the ladies’ room. Mike’s biologist girlfriend, Olenka, steps in to take charge: “This is ridiculous. You’re behaving no better than a couple of honey bears who face their enemy, produce a rattle-roar, stand with their hair on end, emit stink bombs, and then charge.” When Carole and Velma ask who she is, she replies, “Animal control.”

Olenka, with her wealth of animal analogies, is an unusual girl, even among Crewe’s cast of quirky New Brunswickers. Margo’s 77-year-old brother, Hazen, for instance, now retired to the family farm where his sister Eunie cooks him breakfast on a wood stove — has acquired two donkeys, Fred and Ginger. A cosseted kook himself, Hazen nevertheless charges his little sister with “keeping her head in the clouds on purpose.” New to the family menagerie is Holly, a runaway teen rescued by Eunie and taken under the elderly siblings’ protection. Although she can sound like a foul-mouthed Anne of Green Gables, Holly dispenses sensible life lessons to Margo, along with some rather relaxing gummies.

Inconvenience, as it happens, is the least of it. A gambler as well as a glutton, Dick Sterling — the name carries a certain irony — has left massive, unmanageable debts. Without a house, Margo finds herself on the road, shuttling between her siblings and her kids, while battles rage over who gets Dick’s barbecue and Margo’s Christmas ornaments — even her skills as a grandmother and a donkey-watcher are questioned. The laughs, however, are fewer. Being broke in your 60s is no joke.

Turns out, the undercurrent, the true connecting thread, in Crewe’s book is not loss and certainly not grief, but life’s greatest challenge: growing up. Good-looking, perfectly groomed, Margo has long hidden behind a carapace of femininity, one that unfortunately attracts creeps.

And she is scarcely alone in her refusal to own her years or think for herself. Mike lives by himself, grad student style, with almost no furniture. Olenka, like a baby Orca whale, has never left her widowed mum, who longs for her to move out. They are a couple, but one suffering from arrested development.

In one of the novel’s most satisfying twists, reality comes for them, too. Nothing stays the same, seems to be Crewe’s message, for change is exactly what people need, even change that arrives with a dead man watching the Stanley Cup playoffs.