Spadework
Encyclopedia
Spadework is a novel
by Canadian
writer Timothy Findley
set in the theater world of Stratford
, Ontario
. It was first published in Canada by HarperCollins Publishers in 2001.
. The novel is told by a third-person narrator
, who selectively changes from the point of view
of one character to another, but it is Jane Kincaid, a property
maker for the Stratford Shakespeare Festival
, whose perspective dominates throughout. Jane Kincaid is an immigrant from the United States
, more specifically from a quintessentially southern town somewhere in Louisiana
, aptly called Plantation. She left the United States to begin a new life as an artist, in essence, to escape her family (which nonetheless provides her with a modest but stable income from an inheritance)—she even shed her birth-name Aura Lee Terry when she met her husband Griffin, an up-and-coming young Shakespearean actor. The two lead an entirely ordinary, reasonably happy suburban existence, with a seven-year-old son (Will), a dog (Rudyard) and a housekeeper/nanny (Mercy Bowman).
But even in the beginning, the neat threads of this ordinary life begin to unravel around the attractive and ambitious young theater talent Griffin. His personal beauty and desirability lead Jane to suspect that other women, specifically Griffin's stage partner Zoë Walker, 21 and herself a stunning figure, may be after him.
Much of what follows in some way hinges upon Griffin's personal attractiveness, although many other things happen that also put pressure on Jane's youthful obliviousness to the world's cruelty and proclivity to cause pain even in the moments of greatest happiness. Troy Preston, an old high-school boyfriend, serves as harbinger of this pain: he shows up out of the blue, having pilfered his talents and lost his promise, and sexually assaults Jane, ejaculating on her dress and face. A few hours later Jane hears that he has died in a car accident. While this episode haunts her throughout the narrative, she never speaks about it to anyone, not even her psychiatrist. The town is also menaced by a rape-murderer, who kills two women before he kills himself with an overdose of drugs. Furthermore, Jane receives a strangely aloof letter from her mother telling her that her sister Loretta has committed suicide.
Failed communication between people intensely close to each other is at the core of the quotidian tragedies that unfold in this novel. A telephone line cut by the spade of an over-eager gardener serves as the physical manifestation or symbol for this failure to connect. This cut telephone line (which seems as anachronistic as the letter from the mother in an age of email, short messages and mobile phones) prevents two crucial phone calls: one from Griffin to his director Jonathan Crawford and one from Jesse Quinlan to his nephew Luke, the gardener who cut the phone line and his anchor in life. Jesse seeks help and when he fails to reach Luke in that crucial moment, he descends further into drugs and becomes a stranger to himself, a rapist and murderer. Griffin was to give Jonathan an answer to his ultimatum either to begin a sexual affair with him or to lose his chances for the desired break-through in his acting career. Soon after, Griffin is informed that he will not get the coveted lead roles in the next season, which devastates him and leads him to agree to another meeting with Jonathan. Finally, Griffin gives in to his ambition and Jonathan's advances which are somehow more sophisticated, as the narrator points out, than the usual sleazy proposals to enter stardom through the gate of sexual favors. Jonathan, who thinks of himself as "a sculptor of talent" (128) genuinely desires Griffin and there is an element of pedagogical eros in their relationship; the older man sincerely believes that Griffin will grow as a man and as an actor if he submits to his power: "I want to teach you how to accept the fact of being desired" (139). Griffin does submit and he does leave his family – without explanation. Jane is the last to find out that Griffin's affair is not with a younger woman but with an older man.
Jane develops her own overpowering desires that are quite independent from Griffin's escapades: when the telephone repairman, Milos Saworski, a polish immigrant with limited command of English, enters her house, she is completely overwhelmed by what she experiences as his unearthly beauty. When Griffin leaves, her pursuit of the "angel-man" becomes more determined and she becomes a living contradiction to Jonathan's assessment of women as sexually mostly passive and incapable of such aggressive pursuit. She asks Milos, himself married and a young father of a dying infant, to model for her in the nude, a proposal which he accepts with knowing innocence and an entirely masculine submission that mirrors the scene between Jonathan and Griffin. Jane's gaze upon Milos' beauty exactly parallels Jonathan's desire for Griffin.
While sexual desires unravel families and love relationships in this novel, it is the love between fathers and sons that disrupts these momentarily beautiful but cruel and ultimately destructive desires. Griffin's precocious son Will is estranged from both of his parents; Milos' baby eventually dies because of his father's inaction (his wife has kept the newborn baby out of the reach of doctors for religious reasons); Jonathan's son, twenty one and full of promise, is killed by revolutionaries in Peru. The news of this murder is brought by Jonathan's former wife in person and it leads him to see that the affair with him is just as wrong for Griffin as his own marriage had been for himself; he releases Griffin and sends him back to his family.
A few months later, in April, the novel comes back to Jane, Griffin and Will, a happy family unit watching a procession of Swans released from their winter domicile indoors. With the help of her mother's money, Jane has bought the house and made it the home she desired. The novel has come full circle to the peacefulness of the beginning, but this renewed peacefulness seems less precarious because it has been tempered by essential conflict and near break-up. The novel thus ends on a surprisingly hopeful note with a vision of spring and new life.
;
Griffin Kincaid, her husband; an actor just turned 30;
Will Kincaid, seven years old, their son;
Jonathan Crawford, director;
Zoë Walker, an actress, 21;
Nigel Dexter, actor, Griffin's friend;
Mercy Bowman, Will's babysitter.
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
by Canadian
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
writer Timothy Findley
Timothy Findley
Timothy Irving Frederick Findley, OC, O.Ont was a Canadian novelist and playwright. He was also informally known by the nickname Tiff or Tiffy, an acronym of his initials.-Biography:...
set in the theater world of Stratford
Stratford, Ontario
Stratford is a city on the Avon River in Perth County in southwestern Ontario, Canada with a population of 32,000.When the area was first settled by Europeans in 1832, the townsite and the river were named after Stratford-upon-Avon, England. It is the seat of Perth County. Stratford was...
, Ontario
Ontario
Ontario is a province of Canada, located in east-central Canada. It is Canada's most populous province and second largest in total area. It is home to the nation's most populous city, Toronto, and the nation's capital, Ottawa....
. It was first published in Canada by HarperCollins Publishers in 2001.
Plot introduction
Compared to Findley's other work, Spadework takes a lighter, more straightforward turn — which does not mean it is simple-minded. The complexity lies in the everyday drama of human relationships, enhanced by the intensity of the theater atmosphere and the ambition of young actors at a crossroads that may lead to a brilliant career or mediocre success. A cut telephone wire points to failed communication and sets off a series of events that irreversibly shape the lives of the principal characters. These events force the protagonists to re-examine their sexuality and their loyalties at the face of temptation.Plot summary
The novel centers on the story of a few summer months in 1998 in Stratford, Ontario against the backdrop of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandalLewinsky scandal
The Lewinsky scandal was a political sex scandal emerging in 1998 from a sexual relationship between United States President Bill Clinton and a 25-year-old White House intern, Monica Lewinsky. The news of this extra-marital affair and the resulting investigation eventually led to the impeachment of...
. The novel is told by a third-person narrator
Narrator
A narrator is, within any story , the fictional or non-fictional, personal or impersonal entity who tells the story to the audience. When the narrator is also a character within the story, he or she is sometimes known as the viewpoint character. The narrator is one of three entities responsible for...
, who selectively changes from the point of view
Point of view (literature)
The narrative mode is the set of methods the author of a literary, theatrical, cinematic, or musical story uses to convey the plot to the audience. Narration, the process of presenting the narrative, occurs because of the narrative mode...
of one character to another, but it is Jane Kincaid, a property
Property
Property is any physical or intangible entity that is owned by a person or jointly by a group of people or a legal entity like a corporation...
maker for the Stratford Shakespeare Festival
Stratford Festival of Canada
The Stratford Shakespeare Festival is an internationally recognized annual celebration of theatre running from April to November in the Canadian city of Stratford, Ontario...
, whose perspective dominates throughout. Jane Kincaid is an immigrant from the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
, more specifically from a quintessentially southern town somewhere in Louisiana
Louisiana
Louisiana is a state located in the southern region of the United States of America. Its capital is Baton Rouge and largest city is New Orleans. Louisiana is the only state in the U.S. with political subdivisions termed parishes, which are local governments equivalent to counties...
, aptly called Plantation. She left the United States to begin a new life as an artist, in essence, to escape her family (which nonetheless provides her with a modest but stable income from an inheritance)—she even shed her birth-name Aura Lee Terry when she met her husband Griffin, an up-and-coming young Shakespearean actor. The two lead an entirely ordinary, reasonably happy suburban existence, with a seven-year-old son (Will), a dog (Rudyard) and a housekeeper/nanny (Mercy Bowman).
But even in the beginning, the neat threads of this ordinary life begin to unravel around the attractive and ambitious young theater talent Griffin. His personal beauty and desirability lead Jane to suspect that other women, specifically Griffin's stage partner Zoë Walker, 21 and herself a stunning figure, may be after him.
Much of what follows in some way hinges upon Griffin's personal attractiveness, although many other things happen that also put pressure on Jane's youthful obliviousness to the world's cruelty and proclivity to cause pain even in the moments of greatest happiness. Troy Preston, an old high-school boyfriend, serves as harbinger of this pain: he shows up out of the blue, having pilfered his talents and lost his promise, and sexually assaults Jane, ejaculating on her dress and face. A few hours later Jane hears that he has died in a car accident. While this episode haunts her throughout the narrative, she never speaks about it to anyone, not even her psychiatrist. The town is also menaced by a rape-murderer, who kills two women before he kills himself with an overdose of drugs. Furthermore, Jane receives a strangely aloof letter from her mother telling her that her sister Loretta has committed suicide.
Failed communication between people intensely close to each other is at the core of the quotidian tragedies that unfold in this novel. A telephone line cut by the spade of an over-eager gardener serves as the physical manifestation or symbol for this failure to connect. This cut telephone line (which seems as anachronistic as the letter from the mother in an age of email, short messages and mobile phones) prevents two crucial phone calls: one from Griffin to his director Jonathan Crawford and one from Jesse Quinlan to his nephew Luke, the gardener who cut the phone line and his anchor in life. Jesse seeks help and when he fails to reach Luke in that crucial moment, he descends further into drugs and becomes a stranger to himself, a rapist and murderer. Griffin was to give Jonathan an answer to his ultimatum either to begin a sexual affair with him or to lose his chances for the desired break-through in his acting career. Soon after, Griffin is informed that he will not get the coveted lead roles in the next season, which devastates him and leads him to agree to another meeting with Jonathan. Finally, Griffin gives in to his ambition and Jonathan's advances which are somehow more sophisticated, as the narrator points out, than the usual sleazy proposals to enter stardom through the gate of sexual favors. Jonathan, who thinks of himself as "a sculptor of talent" (128) genuinely desires Griffin and there is an element of pedagogical eros in their relationship; the older man sincerely believes that Griffin will grow as a man and as an actor if he submits to his power: "I want to teach you how to accept the fact of being desired" (139). Griffin does submit and he does leave his family – without explanation. Jane is the last to find out that Griffin's affair is not with a younger woman but with an older man.
Jane develops her own overpowering desires that are quite independent from Griffin's escapades: when the telephone repairman, Milos Saworski, a polish immigrant with limited command of English, enters her house, she is completely overwhelmed by what she experiences as his unearthly beauty. When Griffin leaves, her pursuit of the "angel-man" becomes more determined and she becomes a living contradiction to Jonathan's assessment of women as sexually mostly passive and incapable of such aggressive pursuit. She asks Milos, himself married and a young father of a dying infant, to model for her in the nude, a proposal which he accepts with knowing innocence and an entirely masculine submission that mirrors the scene between Jonathan and Griffin. Jane's gaze upon Milos' beauty exactly parallels Jonathan's desire for Griffin.
While sexual desires unravel families and love relationships in this novel, it is the love between fathers and sons that disrupts these momentarily beautiful but cruel and ultimately destructive desires. Griffin's precocious son Will is estranged from both of his parents; Milos' baby eventually dies because of his father's inaction (his wife has kept the newborn baby out of the reach of doctors for religious reasons); Jonathan's son, twenty one and full of promise, is killed by revolutionaries in Peru. The news of this murder is brought by Jonathan's former wife in person and it leads him to see that the affair with him is just as wrong for Griffin as his own marriage had been for himself; he releases Griffin and sends him back to his family.
A few months later, in April, the novel comes back to Jane, Griffin and Will, a happy family unit watching a procession of Swans released from their winter domicile indoors. With the help of her mother's money, Jane has bought the house and made it the home she desired. The novel has come full circle to the peacefulness of the beginning, but this renewed peacefulness seems less precarious because it has been tempered by essential conflict and near break-up. The novel thus ends on a surprisingly hopeful note with a vision of spring and new life.
Characters
Jane Kincaid, property artist; her real name was Aura Lee Terry and she is originally from Plantation, Louisiana in the United StatesUnited States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
;
Griffin Kincaid, her husband; an actor just turned 30;
Will Kincaid, seven years old, their son;
Jonathan Crawford, director;
Zoë Walker, an actress, 21;
Nigel Dexter, actor, Griffin's friend;
Mercy Bowman, Will's babysitter.