Making Up the Gods

I got a copy of Making Up the Gods, by Marion Agnew, from a friend who urged me to read it; I enjoyed it, despite the fact that it’s a novel suffused with grief.

The first character we’re introduced to is Simone, an almost 70-year-old widow whose husband died five years before the novel starts, and who lives alone, populating her solitude by imagining the ghosts of her husband, mother, and grandfather and having entire conversations with the dead. Simone is lonely; perhaps it’s her solitude that has brought her to the point where she’s talking to ghosts.

Simone’s stepson, David, wants her to sell some of her extensive lakefront property, on the shore of Lake Superior in Canada. She wants to do something to help the survivors of a winter accident on a nearby icy road, where eleven people died and twelve others were injured.

This is one of those novels where we get the point of view of different characters in alternate chapters; the second character we meet is Martin, who has been hired by Simone’s stepson to get her to sell the lakefront property. Martin is trying to put his life back together after a struggle with alcoholism, and he thinks the money David is willing to pay will get him back on his feet. He doesn’t know that David is Simone’s stepson, however, until he is invited into her house and sees a photo of her family.

The third character is Chen, short for Chenoweth, who is 9 years old and has lost his father and half-brother in the accident. Chen’s mother has decided to go on a cruise she booked for their tenth wedding anniversary by herself, and she’s trying to find someone to leave him with. His grandfather is in the hospital, so she can’t leave him with grandparents, which was the original plan. She ends up asking Simone, who she knows from church. This is the point at which I was afraid I wouldn’t like the rest of the novel, because Chen’s mother seems unconcerned about the feelings of her child and I worried the novel was getting church-y (something I dislike in fiction because it is often used as shorthand to indicate that characters care about each other without any development to show why). But all this might have been because I was getting the story from a 9-year-old’s point of view: “Mum wants to leave me with that weird lady from church. Simone. Mum just spelled it for me. That Reverend guy said that lady would be good for me to stay with.”

I kept reading, and it got better. The chapter divisions changed from switching off between the three main characters to identifying the number of days Chen will stay with Simone, although we still get alternating points of view.

I identified with Simone, as many readers will, but in some very specific ways, like when she says to her mother’s ghost “how I wanted to be an ordinary kid in Missouri in the 60’s. Instead, I was your daughter.” Growing up in Missouri in the 60’s I had an extraordinary mother, although not embarrassing in the ways Simone’s mother was for her, and I remember wanting to seem ordinary to other children. I was rarely allowed to have the “it” piece that was in style, partly because my parents worked at a college and didn’t have a lot of money to spend on clothes, and partly because my mother didn’t want me to try to dress exactly like the other little girls. In retrospect, I think perhaps this is because I was bigger and taller and she didn’t want me lined up and compared, but it seemed like I always had to present myself differently when I just wanted to fit in with the other kids.

I was also annoyed with Simone in much the same way Chen is, because she often can’t or won’t explain her actions to him. When she tells him that the reason she goes to church is “because it’s full of people, like Rev. Phil, who try to do what they think is right,” I also think it’s a bullshit answer, as if churches are the only places you can find people interested in searching for an ethical code to live by.

But as Simone and Chen work harder to communicate what they think and how they feel to each other, they begin to talk about the things that help them cope, and the way they talk about this is in terms of “making up gods.” Simone starts to realize why she talks to ghosts, and Chen begins to be able to assert a little more control over what happens to him.

They each make progress, although they don’t resolve everything. Simone realizes that “conversations with Chen are about him, not me” and that’s the way it is with children. Chen learns how to “deal with bad things” on his own and decides that he doesn’t “like believing it’s gods making bets and sending good things or bad things, like in Job.”

The pleasure of this novel is in the characterizations; Simone and Chen think and act like real people and readers will care about what happens to them.