Highways and Dancehalls

The special appeal of this fictional journal of a young stripper on the road in British Columbia is not the easy-to-visualize details of a ""dancer's"" existence, although they are fascinating. What is most striking here is the very normalcy of the narrator's tone, a facsimile of ordinary life that is at once comforting and shocking. (Perhaps this comes from the fact that Canadian writer Atkinson herself worked as a stripper for some years.) Sarah, a 17-year-old high-school drop-out from a cultured Cambridge, Mass., family, drifts into the stripper's life when her brief job as a busgirl ends disastrously. As ""Tabitha,"" she negotiates the runways, the bars full of hungry men, the dressing rooms where the ""dancers"" share make-up tips and stories from their shattered lives, and the motel rooms and apartments where grass and coke numb the pain of too much reality. More from inertia than from any real motive, Sarah is bound to boyfriend Lloyd, who sells the drugs he grows and brutalizes her. Not surprisingly, Sarah's errancy can be traced to her parents' violent divorce and to the lingering certainty that she was somehow unworthy of her father, who moved to Israel and writes the kind of chatty letters meant to keep her at a distance. Even more fundamental is a serious intestinal disease that has eaten away at her self-esteem since childhood. Her anguished memories of painful treatment at the hands of callous and brutal doctors provide clues to her troubled psyche. Sarah's life is revealed in kaleidoscopic vignettes, alternating between matter-of-fact descriptions of her jobs and flashbacks to her stays in the hospital. Her peripatetic existence on an endless highway of bleak dance halls takes her across Canada, but her life doesn't alter fundamentally until she achieves a crowning moment of insight. Her story is not so much a teenage tragedy as a Portrait of the Artist as a Very Resilient Young Woman who must descend to the depths to find her footing. (May) FYI: Highways and Dancehalls was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award and the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award.