What’s in a novel?
A Contrary review by Cynthia Newberry Martin


An Equal Stillness
Francesca Kay
Orion Publishing Group
2009
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In the 1921 New York Times article “What is a Novel, Anyhow,” Henry Kitchell Webster writes “A novel is defined in the Concise Oxford Dictionary as a fictitious prose narrative of sufficient length to fill one or more volumes.” Kate Walbert calls her book, Our Kind, “a novel in stories.” Some refer to the Pulitzer prizewinning Olive Kitteridge as a novel in stories, although it calls itself merely “fiction.” Collections of letters can be a novel; Natalia Ginzburg’s The City and the House comes to mind. In an unusual and brilliant manner Francesca Kay’s An Equal Stillness is also a novel. 
After her death, those closest to the artist encourage the narrator, who identifies himself or herself as a poet, to write the life of the artist. In the opening pages, the narrator/poet speaks to the reader: 
If her painting is important—and the consensus is that she was one of the most important artists of the last century—then so is her experience, and that is what justifies this biography.
There’s a page break and a new beginning:
Jennet Selina Mallow was born on 11 November 1924 at the rectory of Litton Kirkdale in the upper valley of the river Aire. 
An Equal Stillness is a novel not because of its form, which is that of a biography, but because of its subject, who is fictional. 
The biographical form as novel, in a bootstrapping kind of way, allows for the pronouncements on a life and a career that shore up the authenticity of the life. Kay references Henri Matisse and Peggy Guggenheim, interviews given, and prizes won, as well as detailed descriptions of the paintings themselves. The voice of the narrator/poet/biographer is that of historian/critic/friend looking back on the career of a major painter. Several times I found myself wanting to google Jennet Mallow. In a biography, there is far more telling than showing, which again serves to underscore the authenticity of the life, but there will also be dramatization the poet tells us, “And when I invented what she might have thought, I did it, unlike a stranger, with honesty and love.”
Very quickly Jennet Mallow is 21, an art student in London. At first the narrative jumps between then and her childhood. Similarities of moments in time seemingly cause these breaks in narrative. Here is the most breathtaking example: 
She [Jennet’s mother] wondered if memories of colour could be carried in the blood. A startle of green hummingbird’s wing, the yellow allamanda.
The startle of a wing. Jennet was defining each herl of the dead bird’s feathers…
After approximately twenty pages, the narrative moves forward chronologically.
Jennet Mallow sees the world in shapes and colors: “ultramarine blue deep, Byzantine blue, cobalt cerulean,” “the vertical white lines of the houses by Hyde Park, the flat grey ribbons of the streets.” But in the year and a half after her first child is born, she hardly paints at all. 
She thought in pictures then, saw them swim behind her eyes, felt them take shape beneath her fingers, felt the longing in her fingers for paints and brush, for the chance to bring these pictures out for other eyes to see. The need to paint became a hunger in her, like the need for love.
Jennet Mallow was a woman born in 1924. She became the wife of an artist with a penchant for drink and late nights and then the mother of four children. She cooked; she cleaned; “…and then there are the other things; please would you send your child to school dressed either as a duckling or a rabbit.” And one of her children was not well.
Vanessa needed hours spent in coaxing her to talk, to eat, to co-ordinate the movements of her fingers. Hours of patience and attentiveness that Jennet did not have. Instead she had a fierce desire for time alone, and space. Time to transform the thoughts and images that flickered in her mind to distract her from the everyday into significance on canvas; space to breathe and move and be absorbed into unlimited light and colour.
Jennet Mallow painted when she could. And “…her art was the yield of lived experience.” 
In the last pages the poet reveals his identity. His words have painted a picture of Jennet Mallow’s life, and from his words we imagine her death. 
For that one moment, time suspended, the length of a single held breath, like the spaces between brush strokes, like the sea and land in balance at slack water, in an equal stillness, life and death. 
Francesca Kay won the 2009 Orange Award for New Writers with her novel, An Equal Stillness. 



Cynthia Newberry Martin is a writer who lives in Columbus Georgia. Visit her blog, Catching Days.

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