What happens to one marriage and two lives, when a freak automobile accident leaves one mate paralyzed from the waist down? That’s a highly simplistic summary of the question answered in the darkly comic novel Sitting Practice from acclaimed writer Caroline Adderson.
In Sitting Practice, readers meet newlyweds Ross and Iliana Alexander only three weeks after their extravagant wedding. The glorious affair is over, and married life has just begun when happy, extroverted Ross is driving home from a tennis match with his wife safely belted in to the passenger seat.
But just as Iliana removes her seatbelt to retrieve a wayward tennis ball from beneath Ross’s feet, a truck slams into the car. Shortly thereafter, Iliana falls into a coma and awakens as a paraplegic, unknowingly kicking off a very new, very confusing chapter in the couple’s burgeoning life together.
Ross lives burdened by guilt and unsure of how to react as he faces his future, which now involves a disabled spouse. He closes his business and moves his bride to the Vancouver Island town of Duncan where they open a café. Iliana learns to navigate life in a wheelchair by rolling around the kitchen, making use of its low counters that have been fitted to suit her. Her legs have lost the muscle tone of her athlete’s body, but her sex drive hasn’t dwindled.
Iliana is infused with a healthy erotic side—and when Ross remains afraid to touch her, she looks elsewhere. It’s this quality in Iliana that aids Adderson in avoiding any temptation to reduce Sitting Practice to a sappy, sentimental story. The author balances Iliana’s quiet strength with the transformation of Ross, who becomes a vegetarian and a Buddhist (the book’s title refers to both Ileana’s life in a wheelchair and Ross’s practice of meditation rituals).
Adderson—who was cited by Margaret Atwood as one of Canada’s most promising female writers—seems aware of the effect of both the body and the spirit in a relationship. She handles her subject matter poignantly, and readers will find themselves not only invested in the couple but also in the quirky entourage with which they surround themselves.
This includes Ross’s co-dependent twin sister Bonnie, who is jealous of Ileana, as well as Ross’s beloved nephew Bryce. Ross seems uncharacteristically endeared to the boy (who grows up in the book) and their relationship provides a healthy dose of humorous moments in the novel.
“When people would ask what I was working on and what it was about, as soon as I said, ‘spinal cord injury,’ there was just this great shudder and then all these thoughts about ‘Oh, this must be a terribly sad book,’” Adderson told the Vancouver Sun. “Which I don't think it is—at all. [Iliana's paralysis is] a sad part in the story, of course, but life goes on."
The character of Iliana is made all the more real by the fact that Adderson queried what she refers to as “really, really incredible woman” during research to help her understand what life in a wheelchair was really like. She talked to them for six months, researching a variety of elements in their lives, and the experience shaped her attitude and understanding of life with a disability. It also made passages such as this one so memorable and moving:
“When people looked at [Iliana] now, they saw the chair. What she feared was that she would be defined by the chair, that her every mood would be interpreted vis-à-vis the chair. If she was happy, it would be in spite of it. She would never again be a normal woman with a normal range of emotions responding to the normal ups and downs of life. After an hour, she wanted to go back home: not because of the chair. Because she was tired.”
Sitting Practice is a masterful look at emotion in the face of tragedy and a snapshot of the evolution of one fictional couple affected by such. Readers will find themselves fully invested in these achingly-real characters who make day-by-day, practical choices as well as mistakes. What happens to Ross and Iliana is unexpected and surprising; readers will feel sad to have reached the end of this book.
Sitting Practice was published in 2008 and is 336 pages long. Publisher: Trumpeter; ISBN: 1590305582.
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