A Jest of God

By Margaret Laurence

Published by New Canadian Library

1966
240 pages

ISBN: 9780735236035

Summary by Darcia Hasey

The main character of this novel is Rachel Cameron. She is also the narrator and it is told in the first person present tense with much of the novel being an inner monologue.

Rachel feels trapped in her small-town life having also grown up in this town called Manawaka. She is restless and lonely.

Rachel lives with her mother May who is ageing rapidly, has a heart condition, and demands much care. Rachel would like to move and desperately wants to be free of her reputation as a nice, good girl and daughter always doing the right thing. Margaret Atwood in her afterword describes Rachel as being in “a prison which includes filial devotion, self-sacrifice, concern for appearances according to St. Paul, a sense of duty, a desire to avoid hurting others and a need to be loved”.

So Rachel begins to take risks, pursue passions, make mistakes, have successes and failures. In other words, she is trying to break from these socially imposed constraints. It’s like growing up, which is exactly what happens to Rachel over a two-month summer period. But in this case it’s moving from a prolonged adolescence to mature adulthood.

Among other things happening in her life, Rachel meets Nick Kazlik. She falls in love. They have an affair. She is serious but he is not. He eventually leaves.

As her mother deteriorates, Rachel becomes more paranoid about her own health and ageing. She doesn’t want to have only lived and died in Manawaka. So she ends up finding the courage to accept the risk of leaving, accept whatever the unknown future holds, and accept responsibility to herself not her mother.

The Ukrainian Connection by Uliana Pasicznyk

The man who enters Rachel’s life during the summer depicted in this novel is Nick Kazlik, whose grandparents arrived in Canada as young people from a part of Ukraine called Galicia. A couple of years older than Rachel, Nick grew up in Manawaka, too, and Rachel remembers him going to her high school. Rachel also has a pleasant childhood recollection of Nick’s father, Nestor, the local milkman who sometimes gave her a ride in his milk truck, as a sociable and jovial person who made her laugh.

Nick, now a high school teacher in Winnipeg, with a university degree like the one Rachel wanted but couldn’t pursue, has come back for the summer to tend to his parents. But Nick’s relationship with his father is contentious. Nick has no affinity to the Ukrainian language and history that are of great importance to his father, nor to the dairy farm that Nestor so wants Nick to take over. He regards his father as an embarrassing and oblivious buffoon, now also an aging one. Rachel realizes how Nick feels, but is puzzled by it. She knows that her mother disdains the low-class Ukrainian “Galicians” and “Bohunks” who live in Manawaka amidst the descendants of the Scottish immigrants who arrived earlier and form her own ethnic group. But Rachel herself does not share that view: instead, she is curious about the culture to which Nick and his parents belong, and why Nick feels about it as he does.

What Rachel does not realize is that the cultural tugs-of-war between Nick and his father have given rise to wounds and demons in the man she loves as powerful as the tensions and stunted coping mechanisms formed since her own childhood in relation to her mother and long-deceased father.